Alienation Quotes

1. "For me, heaven would be a lack of alienation. The whole time I was growing up, I felt comfort was inherently evil. I think that, for me, heaven isn't about couches and milk shakes and never having a troubling thought again."
Author: Alice Sebold

2. "Some days,' I say, 'I feel like I don't belong anywhere in that world. That world out there. 'I point to Grant. 'People walk down our street and people drive down it and people ride their bicycles down it and all of them, even the ones I know, could be from another planet. And I'm a visiting alien.'And aliens don't belong anywhere,' Adam finishes for me, 'except in their own little corners of the universe.'Right,' I say.~pgs 57-58 Hattie and Adam on alienation"
Author: Ann M. Martin

3. "In previous centuries, the Church was the great controller, dictating morality, stifling free expression and posing as conservator of all great art and music. Instead we have TV, doing just as good a job at dictating fashions, thoughts, attitudes, objectives as did the Church, using many of the same techniques but doing it so palatably that no one notices. Instead of ‘sins' to keep people in line, we have fears of being judged unacceptable by our peers (by not wearing the right shoes, not drinking the right kind of beer, or wearing the wrong kind of deodorant). Coupled with that fear is imposed insecurity concerning our own identities. All answers and solutions to these fears come through the television, and only through television. Only through exposure to TV can the new sins of alienation and ostracism be absolved."
Author: Anton Szandor LaVey

4. "Perverted quality; Moral perversion; The innate corruption of human nature due to original sin; Both the elect and the non-elect came into the world in a state of total d. and alienation from God, and can, of themselves do nothing but sin. J.H. Blunt."
Author: Arundhati Roy

5. "Feminist education — the feminist classroom — is and should be a place where there is a sense of struggle, where there is visible acknowledgment of the union of theory and practice, where we work together as teachers and students to overcome the estrangement and alienation that have become so much the norm in the contemporary university."
Author: Bell Hooks

6. "Clinton feels a profound alienation from the Washington culture here, and I happen to agree with him."
Author: Bob Woodward

7. "You can't put abandonment and alienation under arrest."
Author: Carrie P. Meek

8. "If God had perceived that our greatest need was economic, he would have sent an economist. If he had perceived that our greatest need was entertainment, he would have sent us a comedian or an artist. If God had perceived that our greatest need was political stability, he would have sent us a politician. If he had perceived that our greatest need was health, he would have sent us a doctor. But he perceived that our greatest need involved our sin, our alienation from him, our profound rebellion, our death; and he sent us a Savior."
Author: D.A. Carson

9. "Loving and being loved affirmed one's sense of self and conquered feelings of loneliness and alienation. It kept one sane."
Author: Daniel Klein

10. "But at times words can be a dangerous addition to music — they can pin it down. Words imply that the music is about what the words say, literally, and nothing more. If done poorly, they can destroy the pleasant ambiguity that constitutes much of the reason we love music. That ambiguity allows listeners to psychologically tailor a song to suit their needs, sensibilities, and situations, but words can limit that, too. There are plenty of beautiful tracks that I can't listen to because they've been "ruined" by bad words — my own and others. In Beyonce's song "Irreplaceable," she rhymes "minute" with "minute," and I cringe every time I hear it (partly because by that point I'm singing along). On my own song "Astronaut," I wrap up with the line "feel like I'm an astronaut," which seems like the dumbest metaphor for alienation ever. Ugh."
Author: David Byrne

11. "Sufferers of depression, who can elect to keep their feelings private, experience chronic, unremitting emotional alienation. Each moment spent "passing" as normal deepens the sense of disconnection generated by depression in the first instance. In this regard, depression stands as a nearly pure case of impression-management. For depressed individuals, the social requirement to "put on a happy face" requires subjugation of an especially intense inner experience. Yet, nearly unbelievably, many severely depressed people "pull off the act" for long periods of time. The price of the performance is to further exacerbate a life condition that already seems impossibly painful"
Author: David Karp

12. "But they made me realize more than I ever had the rarity of true originality, and also the sort of alienation it might involve."
Author: Elizabeth Bishop

13. "When you stop to think about it, so many films today where we don't have that kind of contact are films about alienation. About alienated feelings. We are much more alienated from our colleagues nowadays."
Author: Elmer Bernstein

14. "And to the degree that the individual maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe, he can come to experience a special kind of alienation from self and a special kind of wariness of others."
Author: Erving Goffman

15. "There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison; there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation."
Author: Eugene Ionesco

16. "Language is almost the most unique creation of humankind which defines itself; the alternative way of communication/comprehension/conception, yet overusing any invention, can cause Alienation."
Author: Fereidoon Yazdi

17. "In our natural state we dislike dealing with God alone. Through our natural alienation from God we shrink from Him, and from eternal realities. This cleaves to us more or less, even after our regeneration. Hence it is, that more or less, even as believers, we have the same shrinking from standing with God alone,--from depending upon Him alone,--from looking to Him alone:--and yet this is the very position in which we ought to be, if we wish our faith to be strengthened. The more I am in a position to be tried in faith with reference to my body, my family, my service for the Lord, my business, etc., the more shall I have opportunity of seeing God's help and deliverance."
Author: George Mueller

18. "The child (mis)recognizes itself as a whole entity for the first time. It sees an image of itself as a unified person, an image which promises for the child that it will soon achieve full co-ordination of its body. The incoherent ‘hommelette' sees an image of itself as an independent being and learns to identify with this image. This is when the ego (the sense of yourself as an individual) is formed. Thus, your sense of self is fundamentally bound up with an ‘exterior' image. Instead of simply coming from within, your identity is formed out of a situation in which you see yourself for the first time from the outside. For Lacan this means that alienation and division are built into your identity from the outset. The result in adult life is that you are in a constant but fruitless state of desire for some mythical inner unity and stability to match the unity and stability you thought you saw in your childhood reflection. We spend our lives trying (and failing) to make ourselves ‘whole'."
Author: Glenn Ward

19. "But in a society with no central motivation, so far adrift and puzzled with itself that its President feels called upon to appoint a Committee on National Goals, a sense of alienation is likely to be very popular--especially among people young enough to shrug off the guilt they're suppose to feel for deviating from a goal or purpose they never understood in the first place. Let the old people wallow in the shame of having failed. The laws they made to preserve a myth are no longer pertinent; the so called American Way begins to seem like a dike made of cheap cement, with many more leaks than the law has fingers to plug. America has been breeding mass anomie since the end of World War II. It is not a political thing, but the sense of new realities, or urgency, anger and sometimes desperation in a society where even the highest authorities seem to be grasping at straws."
Author: Hunter S. Thompson

20. "There are 500 reasons I write for children.... Children read books, not reviews. They don't give a hoot about the critics.... They don't read to free themselves of guilt, to quench their thirst for rebellion, or to get rid of alienation. They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff.... They don't expect their beloved writer to redeem humanity. Young as they are, they know that it is not in his power. Only the adults have such childish illusions."
Author: Isaac Bashevis Singer

21. "I must have seen the separation coming for weeks, but simply chose not to acknowledge it. However, there was no indifference. Just pure, fraught alienation. My idea is to live virtually unafraid. We're never told of forces equally unabashed. It's a concoction for thrills, sure, but it's also a formula for heartbreak. The kind of heartbreak that congeals around the flesh; slows a person down to the freezing point, and cheats them of the most significant civilities left in this world."
Author: Jason Daniel Chaplin

22. "Alienation produces eccentrics or revolutionary."
Author: Jenny Holzer

23. "I guess lyrically they're similar because they're talking about escaping the kind of misery that likes company. 'The Last One Alive,' for me, is very simple. It's just about alienation, really, that causes anger."
Author: Jon Crosby

24. "Marks of Identity is, among other things, the expression of the process of alienation in a contemporary intellectual with respect to his own country."
Author: Juan Goytisolo

25. "Young alienation, disappointment and heartache is all a part of the first real growing up that we do."
Author: Judd Nelson

26. "[the abject] is simply a frontier, a repulsive gift that the Other, having become alter ego, drops so that the "I" does not disappear in it but finds, in that sublime alienation, a forfeited existence."
Author: Julia Kristeva

27. "Black people should have recognition for themselves and their backgrounds and their relationships with other people in the world and thus lose some of their alienation. This museum has certainly stood for that in this town."
Author: Katherine Dunham

28. "A keener interest in trinkets of self-adornment than in people is a symptom of alienation."
Author: Kōbō Abe

29. "Never has God given waivers to family members, just because they had bad leaders. In Jonah's time, the entire family of Israel had become unacceptable, but never has any Israelite administration been without some injustice, intolerance and alienation from God--much less today's earthly family. Even during the celebrated reign of Solomon, Solomon was multiplying wives and horses--against God's written counsel. It has always been so.Regardless, Israel was one family. They were expected to stick together whether they were in exile, or at home living in abundance. No deserters, or pious arm-folders were allowed. As Jonah discovered, no quitters were allowed. (page vi)"
Author: Michael Ben Zehabe

30. "That anyone should need to write a book advising people to "eat food" could be taken as a measure of our alienation and confusion. Or we can choose to see it in a more positive light and count ourselves fortunate indeed that there is once again real food for us to eat."
Author: Michael Pollan

31. "Alienation, I suppose, can't be hackneyed because it will always exist."
Author: Mike Birbiglia

32. "Just as there was a first instant when someone rubbed two sticks together to make a spark, there was a first time joy was felt, and a first time for sadness. For a while, new feelings were being invented all the time. Desire was born early, as was regret. When stubbornness was felt for the first time, it started a chain reaction, creating the feeling of resentment on the one hand, and alienation and loneliness on the other. It might have been a certain counterclockwise movement of the hips that marked the birth of ecstasy; a bolt of lightening that caused the feeling of awe. Contrary to logic, the feeling of surprise wasn't born immediately. It only came after people had enough time to get used to things as they were. And when enough time had passed, and someone felt the first feeling of surprise, someone, somewhere else, felt the first pang of nostalgia."
Author: Nicole Krauss

33. "The historical experience of socialist countries has sadly demonstrated that collectivism does not do away with alienation but rather increases it, adding to it a lack of basic necessities and economic inefficiency."
Author: Pope John Paul II

34. "What we call ‘normal' is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience. It is radically estranged from the structure of being. The more one sees this, the more senseless it is to continue with generalized descriptions of supposedly specifically schizoid, schizophrenic, hysterical ‘mechanisms.' There are forms of alienation that are relatively strange to statistically ‘normal' forms of alienation. The ‘normally' alienated person, by reason of the fact that he acts more or less like everyone else, is taken to be sane. Other forms of alienation that are out of step with the prevailing state of alienation are those that are labeled by the ‘formal' majority as bad or mad."
Author: R.D. Laing

35. "The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man."
Author: R.D. Laing

36. "A lone walker is both present and detached, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation."
Author: Rebecca Solnit

37. "Any rainy summer morning, of course, has the seeds of gloomy alienation sown in. But a rainy summer morning far from home - when your personal clouds don't move but hang - can easily produce the feeling of the world as seen from the grave. This I know."
Author: Richard Ford

38. "Another cause for the increase in alienation and cynicism is a feeling that too many policy decisions that affect individuals have been taken out of any system that has accountability or that they can influence."
Author: Robert Teeter

39. "There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it."
Author: Roland Barthes

40. "I venture to say Kierkegaard meant that truth has lost its force with us and horrible pain and evil must teach it to us again, the eternal punishments of Hell will have to regain their reality before mankind turns serious once more. I do not see this. Let us set aside the fact that such convictions in the mouths of safe, comfortable people playing at crisis, alienation, apocalypse and desperation, make me sick. We must get it out of our heads that this is a doomed time, that we are waiting for the end, and th rest of it, mere junk from fashionable magazines. Things are grim enough without these shivery games. People frightening one another--a poor sort of moral exercise. But, to get to the main point, the advocacy and praise of suffering take us in the wrong direction and those of us who remain loyal to civilization must not go for it. You have to have the power to employ pain, to repent, to be illuminated, you must have the opportunity and even the time."
Author: Saul Bellow

41. "...it really struck me that, just as people might look at me and never imagine I'd worked as a prostitute, they must look at some of those girls and see only the alienation and disaffection that hides their on fears and hurt."
Author: Sophie Hayes

42. "Do not waste the moment of your life which comes together with death because you will bitterly regret the alienation of your own self."
Author: Sorin Cerin

43. "Anxiety, alienation, loneliness, emptiness, and meaninglessness are the fruits of living as an isolated subject admist a multitude of lifeless objects. Although our scope of involvement may extend to numerous and diverse fields of interest and concern, as long as the notion of having predominates, our being remains empty and superficial."
Author: Stephen Batchelor

44. "I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up."
Author: Susan Sontag

45. "And yet I understood the alienation of being around others who couldn't really see you or chose not to. I'd felt the self-loathing that came with being a fraud, protraying an image of what you wished you could be but weren't. I'd lived with the fear that people you loved might turn away from you if they ever got to know the true person hidden inside."
Author: Sylvia Day

46. "The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level? of alienation"
Author: Terence McKenna

47. "The identification with the victim affirms a radical separation from the perpetrator. The Treblinka guard who starts the engine, or the NKVD officer who pulls the trigger is not me, his is the person who kills someone like myself. Yet it is unclear whether this identification with the victim brings much knowledge, or whether this kind of alienation from the murderer is an ethical stance. It is not at all obvious that reducing history to morality plays makes anyone moral."
Author: Timothy Snyder

48. "I've got four lovely children, ten lovely grandchildren, and I left parliament to devote more time to politics, and I think that what is really going on in Britain is a growing sense of alienation. People don't feel anyone listens to them."
Author: Tony Benn

49. "I have always swung back and forth between alienation and relatedness. As a child, I would run away from the beatings, from the obscene words, and always knew that if I could run far enough, then any leaf, any insect, any bird, any breeze could bring me to my true home. I knew I did not belong among people. Whatever they hated about me was a human thing; the nonhuman world has always loved me. I can't remember when it was otherwise. But I have been emotionally crippled by this. There is nothing romantic about being young and angry, or even about turning that anger into art. I go through the motions of living in society, but never feel a part of it. When my family threw me away, every human on earth did likewise."
Author: Wendy Rose

50. "Possibly a man who hates the land should dwell on shore forever. Alienation and the long voyages at sea will compel him once again to dream of it, torment him with the absurdity of longing for something that he loathes."
Author: Yukio Mishima

Alienation Quotes Pictures