Quotes about Alienation

Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.

Whenever I allow anything but tenderness and compassion to dictate my response to life--be it self-righteous anger, moralizing, defensiveness, the pressing need to change others...I am alienated from my true self. My identity as Abba's child [a child of God] becomes ambiguous, tentative and confused

I cannot touch the sacredness of others. If I am estranged from myself, I am likewise a stranger to others.

When the younger son was no longer considered a human being by the people around him, he felt the profundity of his isolation, the deepest loneliness one can experience. He was truly lost, and it was this complete lostness that brought him to his senses.

We love because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19). We find freedom as we are touched by that first love. For it is that love that will break us away from our alienation and separation. It is a love that can soothe our compulsions to hoard and pretend we can organize the future. It is a love that allows us to love others.

The "distant country" is the world in which everything considered holy at home is disregarded.

It sometimes happens and will sometimes happen again that I forget who I am and strut before my eyes, like a stranger.

If you were not strangers here, the dogs of the world would not bark at you.

There was nothing she could say to them--nothing would be heard or answered. What were the weapons, she thought, in a realm where reason was not a weapon any longer? It was a realm she could not enter.

Everybody who has ever been snubbed, you know that is very humiliating.

It was really dreadful to be different from other people...and yet rather wonderful, too, as if you were a being strayed from another star.

It was really dreadful to be so different from other people . . . and yet rather wonderful, too, as if you were a being strayed from another star. Hazel would not have been one of the common herd for anything . . . no matter what she suffered by reason of her differentness.