I lean back and tilt my head so all I see are the clouds in the sky. I’m looking back inside my head with my eyes wide open. I still don’t know where I’m going;...

I feel sorry for anyone who is in a place where he feels strange and stupid.

I also knew Dell was a good boy with bad friends. I was one of them, and I worried about leading him astray. But in those early years he made me feel cleaner, somehow; like...

To forget the whole world is easy; to make the whole world forget you is hard.

You and I share the same DNA.Is there anything more lonely than that?

He was disappointed in it all. He had developed into an alien. As the steam beer had tasted raw, so their companionship seemed raw to him. He was too far removed. Too many thousands of...

You want to know what’s wrong with the world?” Dad paused. “It’s this alienation that permeates every aspect of humanity.

Mostly, I could tell, I made him feel uncomfortable. He didn’t understand me, and he was sort of holding it against me. I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else,...

The high is what you crave, what you would kill for… and believe me, you will lie to yourself until it’s to late to stop.

…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...

falling” too, I am more concerned about the burdens of a non-custodial—the dilemma of parental alienation with absolute liability for financial support. If any ‘positive’ aspect could be extracted from the non-custodial lifestyle, it is...

The real question is: How sturdy and solid is the floor our civilization stands on? How many lives with no prospects, shattered and senseless, can it bear the weight of before it cracks somewhere or...

You don’t write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich. A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is...

Tess realized one of the great modern dating sadnesses: everyone is so used to the comforting glow of the computer screen that no one can go so far as to say “good morning” in public...

So… Dell had been a good boy with bad friends. I knew this – I used to be one of them. I’d always known Dell would disappear one day; he was too decent, too golden....

The reason we feel alienated is because the society is infantile, trivial, and stupid. So the cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation. I grapple with this because I’m a...

I want the world to recognize with me the open door of every consciousness

On top of the abuse and neglect, denial heaps more hurt upon the child by requiring the child to alienate herself from reality and her own experience. In troubled families, abuse and neglect are permitted;...

We are accustomed to think of ourselves as a great democratic body, linked by common ties of blood and language, united indissolubly by all the modes of communication which the ingenuity of man can possibly...

Le fou ce ne sera plus l’exilé, celui qu’on repousse dans les marges de nos villes, mais celui qu’on rend étranger à lui même en le culpabilisant d’être celui qu’il est.

Although the masters make the rules for the wise men and the fools got nothing, Ma, to live up to.

Thinking is a way of condemning oneself to solitude.

but as he plodded along a vague and almost hallucinatory pall hazed over his mind; he found himself at one point, with no notion of how it could be, a step from an almost certain...

Put a man in the wrong atmosphere and nothing will function as it should. He will seem unhealthy in every part. Put him back into his proper element and everything will blossom and look healthy....