Alienation Quotes

“Rules are established to create order, but they contain the seeds of either sailing ahead or mutinying. Their stringiness may cause frustration or alienation and often creates tension between the stability they provide and our systematic urge to transcend them. ("When forgetting the rules of the game")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Unseeing, even when seen
unfeeling, even when felt,
to those scattered loves
and the abashment that meet the eyes,
I had tried to brush them off
and indeed, had wiped them away.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“The Storm Stranger by Stewart Stafford

Were I to shed forty coats,
Or forty layers of this skin,
I'd stay an intruder in myself,
At a crossroads in a storm.

Stranger in my own country,
Pariah to everything beloved,
Organ rejection by my own body,
A lantern wanderer in limbo.

All foul, cast out by my lamp,
Saving those mistreating me,
Traversing sanity's outer rings,
I turn my collar up and trudge on.

© 2024, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“A verdade tem o dom de enlouquecer. Talvez por isso tantos vivam na mentira.”
― Eliana Alves Cruz, O crime do cais do Valongo

“She felt the disorienting but familiar beginnings of the realization that she was unprepared to do something that was simple and obvious for everyone else, so obvious that no one would imagine they needed to explain it, so obvious that she would not be able to disguise what she didn't know once she started.”
― Kay Chronister, The Bog Wife

“I'm beginning not to understand anything!' Stavrogin said angrily. Why does everyone expect something from me that they don't expect from other people? Why should I endure something that no one else would endure, and seek out burdens that no one else can bear?”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons

“Judgements, criticisms, diagnoses, and interpretations of others are all alienated expressions of our needs. If someone says, 'You never understand me,' they are really telling us that their need to be understood is not being fulfilled”
― Marshall B. Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication 3Rd Ed (Marshall B. Rosenberg Phd) + Nonviolent Communication : Companion Workbook (Lucy Leu)

“Selling & Buying"
Everyone is up for sale,
because most are looking for nothing but
selling and buying …
They sell life to buy a wretched living!
You see them selling with no shame or dignity,
and whenever you encounter
a sign of kindness or a smile,
you soon discover that it is fake
and for marketing purposes only…
You see the sons of bitches
and their children and grandchildren
all busy selling real estate
cars
bodies and desires
fruit and vegetables
countries and agricultural lands
natural resources (after proxy revolutions)
clothes, shoes, and things – both fake and original –
cheap gifts and souvenirs in touristy cities
iPhones with ugly accessories
long and wide lists of all things, big or small,
that are supposed to make them
happier
trendier
more attractive
and more human…
And between one sale and another,
they rest and talk about values,
the Creator, ethics, religion,
what is prohibited and what’s allowed…
Between one sale and another buy,
you find them discussing dignity and freedom,
theorizing the meaning of life,
talking about politics and revolutions
nature and the environment
diseases and chronic illnesses
the latest technological advancements
about everything expect the fact that
all the misfortunes on this planet
are because they don’t hesitate to
sell anything and everything their hands can reach,
in exchange for one moment of superficiality!
You see those who chase after and master
the game of selling and buying
in perfect harmony with the latest trends and styles,
yet dwelling inside miserable bodies
whose soul and spirit have long departed with no return…
Oh, how fortunate are those who learned to adapt
with this game of selling and buying…

[Original poem published in Arabic on June 29, 2024 at ahewar.org]”
― Louis Yako

“No poder orientarse no es únicamente no reconocer lo que te rodea, no encontrar tu hogar; es no reconocerte a ti mismo, que tanto el mundo como tu propio yo te resulten extraños”
― Patrik Svensson, Un inmenso azul: El mar, el abismo y la curiosidad humana

“America"
Loans
Interest rates
Endless advertisements
Usury and deception
Countless heavy bodies filled with fear
Migrant, refugee, and illegal bodies
that came escaping America’s oppression in their own countries…
America
Depression, anxiety, and pain relief pills
A political, media, and institutional matrix of power
ran by one lobby…
Credit cards
Bankruptcy
Debts
Drugs
The homeless
Racism
Weapons
Strict security measures
Suffocating any attempt for any meaningful change
under the pretext of the homeland security…
America
Sanctions imposed on this country and that,
Internal psychological sanctions imposed
on a majority of the naïve who believe themselves to be free…
America
Tasteless fruit, vegetables, meats, eggs, and cheeses,
injected with hormones, sprayed with pesticides
and many other carcinogenic substances…
America
Houses that look beautiful from the outside,
inhabited by people who are mostly
lonely, going through psychological or nervous breakdowns,
or perhaps wrestling with depression or hysteria,
the luckiest of them are on daily pills to help them
adapt to the psychological and spiritual death
surrounding them from all sides…
America
Fruitless trees and scentless flowers,
as if as a punishment or a curse from heaven
upon those who stole the land from its native people,
after erasing most of them…
America
Bills
Sad letters in the mail,
mostly from companies and advertisers
wishing you a delightful day and great consumption,
encouraging you to solve your problems with more consumption,
and reminding you that you may die abruptly
of loneliness or the toxins that you consume,
and therefore, you must seriously consider
purchasing your casket and the plot
under which you will be buried…

[Original poem published in Arabic on August 27, 2024 at ahewar.org]”
― Louis Yako

“I come from some other place. It's not like a real place on Earth or something I could point to on a map, if I even had a map of this other place, which I don't. There's no map because the place isn't a place like something to be near or in or at. It's not somewhere or anywhere, but it's not nowhere either. There is no where about it.
I don't know what it is. But it certainly isn't this place, here on Earth, with all you silly people. I wish I knew what it was, not because I think it would be great to tell you about it; I just miss it so much.”
― Otessa Moshfegh

“So unfair: the people who hated me most were always the ones who were hard to hate back.”
― Megan Howell, Softie: Stories

“The rhythm and style of my existence, my loves and hatreds, my alienation and the possibility of my deliverance, the morning blossoming of my birth and the unfigurable horizon of my death, and everything that happens to me in the world must first be announced or prefigured in the elementary phenomena of my immanent life.”
― Jacob Rogozinski, The Ego and the Flesh: An Introduction to Egoanalysis

“Henceforth, when man is for once overcome by the horror of alienation and the world fills him with anxiety, he looks up...and sees a picture. Then he sees that the I is contained in the world, and that there really is no I, and thus the world cannot harm the I, and he calms down; or he sees that the world is contained in the I, and that there really is no world, and thus the world cannot harm the I, and he calms down. And when man is overcome again by the horror of alienation..., he looks up and sees a picture; and whichever he sees, it does not matter...he calms down. But the moment will come, and it is near, when man, overcome by horror, looks up and in a flash sees both pictures at once. And he is seized by a deeper horror.”
― Martin Buber, I and Thou

“The question is not whether Indian Muslims belong to India—the question is whether India, as a democracy, has the courage to honour its own founding principles.”
― Adeel Ahmed Khan

“A strong majority builds. A weak majority blames. A failing majority, drowning in its own inadequacy, turns to oppression—clinging to cruelty as a substitute for achievement, feeding on the suffering of its minorities to mask its own decay.”
― Adeel Ahmed Khan

“The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is a demand for their true happiness. The call to abandon illusions about their condition is the call to abandon a condition which requires illusions.”
― Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

“Why these daily wanderings through the streets? And all these human beings I encountered: how could they possibly help me? Each of them filled the universe with his or her person. I would trail humbly after them, expecting the unworkable miracle from the first person I bumped into. Then, in order to prove to myself that I was not merely this pitiful rag, this insubstantial object, I would force myself to hate them, well knowing that my hate was artificial, that it too had no existence, that I was turning it on like a lamp in a ruin that had stood deserted for hundreds of years, as though this light was all that was needed to establish the belief that it was lived-in. And I was incapable of retaining my hold even on hate. It gave me the slip, like all the rest, like everything around me. All I could do was roam the streets, an innocent in quest of a miracle.”
― Anna Langfus; Peter Wiles

“Why these daily wanderings through the streets? And all these human beings I encountered: how could they possibly help me? Each of them filled the universe with his or her person. I would trail humbly after them, expecting the unworkable miracle from the first person I bumped into. Then, in order to prove to myself that I was not merely this pitiful rag, this insubstantial object, I would force myself to hate them, well knowing that my hate was artificial, that it too had no existence, that I was turning it on like a lamp in a ruin that had stood deserted for hundreds of years, as though this light was all that was needed to establish the belief that it was lived-in. And I was incapable of retaining my hold even on hate. It gave me the slip, like all the rest, like everything around me. All I could do was roam the streets, an innocent in quest of a miracle.”
― Anna Langfus, The Lost Shore

“Very swiftly I calculated: forty-seven minus forty-four equals three; twenty-two plus three equals twenty-five. He was still facing me across the table. He smiled at me slowly, lazily. He had plenty of time. A lifetime. A lifetime throughout which his chest would go on and on rising and falling, throughout which he would be perfectly free to talk and smile and drink menthes à l’eau in the summer heat. I hated him. I hated him for being twenty-five and for throwing his young life in my face, like a provocation. The café reeled, the waiter, holding his tray high in the air, multiplied between me and the door, the door was fleeing, hiding, stealing along the walls ...

A voice behind me was thundering: ‘Waiter! Somebody was still clamouring for the waiter, and it was a
voice choking with anguish. In the shadowy room, expressionless faces were bobbing about with grotesque solemnity, as though suspended from invisible wires. The scream which I let out, and which I alone heard, died among the street noises. I stopped running. I walked, like everyone else. I drew breath. And a thought occurred to me, the thought shared by everyone else: ‘‘Isn’t it hot!”
― Anna Langfus, The Lost Shore

“Let's suppose you lived on the moon. Let's suppose you did all those absurd, vile things up there. From here, you know for certain that people up there will laugh at you and hold your name in contempt for a thousand years, eternally, over all the moon. But now you're here and you're looking at the moon from here. From here, what do you care about everything you perpetrated there, and that people up there will be holding you in contempt for a thousand years, isn't that true?”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons

“My body was a wax shell. A frozen thing. I could move, but I didn’t belong in it. I was watching myself collapse.”
― Jonathan Harnisch, Sex, Drugs, and Schizophrenia

“A Sweet Woman from a War-Torn Country”

In her exile, they often describe her as that ‘sweet woman from a war-torn country.’

They don’t know she loved smelling roses, picking spring wildflowers, and bringing them home after long walks.

They don’t know about the first kiss her lover stole during a church power outage on that Easter evening— before the generators came on.

They don’t know the long hours she spent under the ancient walnut tree in her village, waiting for her grandfather’s call to share freshly baked pita with ghee and honey.

They don’t know about her grandmother’s mixed grains, prepared each year before Easter fasting began.

In exile, they try to be kind, telling her she now lives in a ‘safe haven.’ They assume her silence comes from poor language skills or simple agreement with them.

They don’t know life’s shocks have silenced her forever. Now she presses her ear against the cold window glass of her apartment, listening to the wind’s mournful cry outside.

They remind her she’s among people who honor all values, beliefs, religions, and ethnicities— but she has learned it’s all too late.

She no longer needs assurances. Occasionally, all she asks for is a sincere hand on her shoulder or around her neck, to remind her that nothing lasts, that this too shall pass.

[Published on April 7, 2023 on CounterPunch.org]”
― Louis Yako

“Is it possible that Earth is my exile, and somewhere else in this vast universe is my home? That observable universe is my cage, and beyond it is where I actually originate, eliminating any kind of memory and time?”
― Sov8840

“Is it possible that Earth is my exile, and somewhere else in this vast universe is my home? That observable universe is my cage, and beyond it is where I actually originate?”
― Sov8840

“For many people, the expression “disconnecting from the world” essentially means disconnecting from society—for this is the only world they know.”
― Sov8840

“...The spaces they frequent construct atmospheres that mimic melancholy and discontent. Yet even these are culturally branded, bounded sanctuaries—designed to feel outsiderish without ever genuinely stepping outside. They exist to perform alienation, not to live it—to its edges. Because if they did, they would discover that the only true sanctuary is the one for those few who see sanctuary itself as a lie.”
― Sov8840

“Every kind of passion is being transformed into a form of industry. Every passion is monetized or at least expected to be. This can be observed in schools, shows, articles, conferences, films, advertisements, and even within the primitive instincts of humans: the relentless conversion of passion into profession, the monetization of personal emotions and thoughts. This message is constantly propagated, taught, and encouraged by all of these forces. More than that, it is what people dream of—because they all embody identities scripted by singular capitalist narratives. And this constitutes the greatest insult to one’s inner world.”
― Sov8840

“Ko se za nekaj dni odpravimo od doma
ob vrnitvi komaj prepoznamo vas
Namesto hiš najdemo majhne črne škatle
polne nenavadnih senc”
― Helena Zemljič, Bazen ki ga odnašajo robovi

“Objectivity does not mean detachment, it means respect; that is, the ability not to falsify things, persons, and oneself.”
― Erich Fromm, Man for Himself: An Inquiry Into the Psychology of Ethics