Estrangement Quotes

• When once estrangement has arisen between those who truly love each other, everything seems to widen the breach.

  Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  Love Each Other, Breach, Seems

  Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1869). “Run to Earth: A Novel”, p.156

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• All in all, punishment hardens and renders people more insensible; it concentrates; it increases the feeling of estrangement; it strengthens the power of resistance.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Punishment, People, Feelings

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• No one is willing to acknowledge a fault in himself when a more agreeable motive can be found for the estrangement of his acquaintances.

  Mark Twain

  Faults, Found, Motive

  Mark Twain, Charles Dudley Warner (1915). “The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-day”, p.143

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• There is not so agonizing a feeling in the whole catalogue of human suffering as the first conviction that the heart of the being whom we most tenderly love is estranged from us.

  Henry Bulwer, 1st Baron Dalling and Bulwer

  Heart, Love Is, Feelings

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• Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.

  Adrienne Rich

  Two, Giving, Energy

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• Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.

  Theodor Adorno

  Distance, People, Elimination

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.41, Verso

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• To pass from estrangement from God to be a son of God is the basic fact of conversion. That altered relationship with God gives you an altered relationship with yourself, with your brother man, with nature, with the universe.

  E. Stanley Jones

  Brother, Son, Men

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• There could have never been two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison, no countenances so beloved. Now they were as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted. It was a perpetual estrangement.

  Jane Austen

  Heart, Two, Feelings

  Jane Austen (2012). “The Complete Novels of Jane Austen, Volume 2: Emma, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion”, p.574, Modern Library

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• Genuine forgiveness is participation, reunion overcoming the powers of estrangement. . . We cannot love unless we have accepted forgiveness, and the deeper our experience of forgiveness is, the greater is our love.

  Paul Tillich

  Forgiveness, Acceptance, Our Love

  Paul Tillich (2005). “The New Being”, p.10, U of Nebraska Press

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• The surest sign of the estrangement of the opinions of two persons is when they both say something ironical to each other and neither of them feels the irony.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Two, Opinion, Irony

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2012). “Human, All-Too-Human: Parts One and Two”, p.160, Courier Corporation

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• Ask 10 people about their family relationships and at least five of them will report an estrangement.

  Amy Dickinson

  Women, People, Family Relationship

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• All separation, every kind of estrangement and alienation is false. All is one.

  Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

  Kind, Separation, Alienation

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• There could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison

  Jane Austen

  Heart, Two, Feelings

  Jane Austen (2005). “Jane Austen: 8 Books in 1”, p.509, Shoes & Ships & Sealing Wax

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• The surest sign that two people no longer speak the same language is that both say ironic things to one another but that neither senses the irony.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Two, People, Ironic

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• exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement.

  Edward Said

  Home, Sadness, Thinking

  Edward W. Said (2013). “Reflections On Exile: And Other Literary And Cultural Essays”, p.212, Granta Books

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• The last thing the consumer index wants men and women to do is to figure out how to love one another: The $1.5 trillion retail-sales industry depends on sexual estrangement between men and women, and is fueled by sexual dissatisfaction. Ads do not sell sex--that would be counterproductive, if it meant that heterosexual women and men turned to one another and were gratified. What they sell is sexual discontent.

  Naomi Wolf

  Sex, Men, Would Be

  Naomi Wolf (1990). “The Beauty Myth”, Vintage

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• A spiritual organization with a hierarchical structure can convey only the consciousness of estrangement, regardless of what teachings or deep inspirations are at its root.The structure itself reinforces the idea that some people are inherently more worthy than others.

  Starhawk

  Spiritual, Teaching, Inspiration

  Starhawk (2012). “Dreaming the Dark”, p.46, Beacon Press

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• Emotional, physical, and spiritual estrangement and ontological and religious doubt inform my personality, my thoughts, and my characters, which are, more often than not, masks for my own being and my being in the world - a world that frightens me insofar as I don't understand it.

  Norman Lock

  Spiritual, Religious, Character

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Now they were as strangers; nay worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted.

  Jane Austen

  Stranger, Unison

  Jane Austen (2005). “Jane Austen: 8 Books in 1”, p.509, Shoes & Ships & Sealing Wax

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• Culture has lead us to betray our own aboriginal spirit and wholeness, into an ever-worsening realm of synthetic, isolating, impoverishing estrangement. Which is not to say that there are no more everyday pleasures, without which we would loose our humanness. But as our plight deepens, we glimpse how much must be erased for our redemption.

  John Zerzan

  Everyday, Glimpse, Culture

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• Fishing should be a ceremony that reaffirms our place in the natural world and helps us resist further estrangement from our origins.

  Thomas McGuane

  Lakes, Sea, Fishing

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• The more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him.

  Guy Debord

  Desire, Acting, Needs

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• Magic is another word that makes people uneasy, so I use it deliberately, because words they are comfortable with, the words that sound acceptable, rational, scientific, and intellectually sound, are comfortable precisely because they are the language of estrangement.

  Starhawk

  People, Magic, Sound

  Starhawk (2012). “Dreaming the Dark”, p.39, Beacon Press

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• Refuse to think in terms of this or that. All pain needs investigation. The mind is nothing else but the self. Assumption obscures reality without destroying it. All separation, every kind of estrangement and alienation is false..Your being a person is due to the illusion of space and time.The mind creates time and space and takes its own creations for reality.

  Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

  Pain, Thinking, Reality

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• In the days of Ram Mohan Roy when English education was introduced in this country, the Mahomedans did not accept it... They did not accept English education and at the same time they were divorced from the culture which their fathers had advanced. The result was that whereas the Hindus got on in life, got into government employment, got many things which people value in life, the Mahomedans were left without it and gradually there came to be a sort of estrangement between the two nationalities at the time of the Swadeshi movement.

  Chittaranjan Das

  Country, Father, Government

  "Collected Works of Deshbandhu" by Manindra Dutta, 1917.

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