114 quotes found
“The book of Jonah becomes an embarrassing and public reading of your family business. (page iii)”
“The landscape of human emotion is ominously changing. The visceral sensation of loneliness and solitude is no longer as palpable and intellectually profound as it was a couple of decades ago becaus...”
“Life today has become a series of spectacles to be viewed, not actions to be lived.”
“The hardest part about being back in the human world was relearning emotion. Everything a wolf does has a practical, simple reason. There is no cold shoulder, no saying one thing when you mean some...”
“Without alienation, there can be no politics.”
“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 opened books...”
“I want the world to recognize with me the open door of every consciousness”
“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 all the shit wed gone th...”
“...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 hi...”
“I feel sorry for anyone who is in a place where he feels strange and stupid.”
“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, just like eve...”
“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 as essential to creative ...”
“I’m not sure how old I was when I first tried looking in the mirror and telling myself, with a shiver of pride and a warning prickle of something like fear, ‘I am the most powerful person in the wo...”
“We have to heal our wounded world. The chaos, despair, and senseless destruction we see today are a result of the alienation that people feel from each other and their environment.”
“We aren't human.""Yes. We. Are." His voice turns fierce. "I don't give a shit what the something-somethingth council of big important farts decreed, or how the geomests classify things, or any of t...”
“No one at the factory can remember how long we’ve worked here, or how old we are, yet our pace and productivity continues to increase. It seems as if neither the company nor our temporary superviso...”
“Mrs. Arnold," the doctor said, coming around the desk, "we're not going to help things any this way.""What is going to help?" Mrs. Arnold said. "Is everyone really crazy but me?""Mrs. Arnold," the ...”
“Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent--which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it. ...”
“I want to be two people at once. One runs away.”
“I look and I look...I must have come to the wrong planet.It's so strange here.”
