Paul Bowles Quotes

We live in a time where there's an alienation factor. There's a certain disconnection. We don't have any real sense of community anymore.

'Community,' that loaded word so beloved of politicians, is simply not a reality in most people's lives. It's normal for us to be cut off from each other.

You think I alienate myself from society? Of course I alienate myself from society. It’s the only way I know of not being constantly reminded of all the ways I’m alienated from society.

Alienation and loneliness plant the seeds for rebellion and consciousness.

Everyone is so obsessed with themselves nowadays that they have no time for me.

Not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries. Each man is for ever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.

The beauty of our system is that it isolates everybody. Each person is sitting alone in front of the tube, you know. It's very hard to have ideas or thoughts under those circumstances. You can't fight the world alone.

Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times. The dancers don't even look at one another. They are just a lot of isolated individuals jiggling in a kind of self-hypnosis and dancing with others only to remind themselves that we are not completely alone in this world.

Most people are on the world, not in it-- having no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them-- undiffused seporate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but seporate.

There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.

I think the degree of alienation and despair is more universal.

You can be around 100 people and be completely alone. People don't realize what it's really like.

I live like a Hottentot. I cannot exchange one sensible word with anyone.

Isolation is a dream killer.

I think fractures in your childhood make you observe the world more as an outsider. Possibly it pushes you outside.

In talking, shyness and timidity distort the very meaning of my words. I don't pretend to know anybody well. People are like shadows to me and I am like a shadow.

Our society is not a community, but merely a collection of isolated family units.

I think every teenager feels like a Martian in something, whether it's in their family, I think, or in their school. I think every teenager, every human being has a sense that they don't belong somewhere.

It is not hard to feel like an outsider. I think we have all felt like that at one time or another.

I don't worry anymore about where's the big hangout Tuesday night, Friday. Couldn't tell you and no one comes to me for advice anymore in those areas anymore, so real boring I would say.

We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness.

I have no friends.

I spent a lot of time feeling alienated and rejected.

I'm perpetually lonely.

I've been such an outsider my whole life.