Cynthia Voigt Quotes

I feel no bond with South Africa, which is curious, since South Africa is where I was born.

I don't associate myself with anything. I don't associate myself with where I'm from or where I am.

Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.

I don't recognize my former self. Like I'm on the outside looking in at my life. Who is that guy?

I'm used to living in a disassociated universe.

I even found it difficult to watch myself playing on TV because I couldn't identify with the person on the screen. I couldn't get to grips with it. It was as if it was all happening to someone else.

'Elizabeth' doesn't feel related to me at all.

I feel so detached from what I am on the outside. The person I am on the inside is very separate.

I find myself regarding existence as though from beyond the tomb, from another world; all is strange to me; I am, as it were, outside my own body and individuality; I am depersonalized, detached, cut adrift. Is this madness?

Pero yo ya no soy yo Ni mi casa es ya mi casa. But now I am no longer I, nor is my house any longer my house.

I don't really identify with America, I don't really feel like an American or part of the American experience, and I don't really feel like a member of the human race, to tell you the truth. I know I am, but I really don't. All the definitions are there, but I don't really feel a part of it. I think I have found a detached point of view, an ideal emotional detachment from the American experience and culture and the human experience and culture and human choices.

It was as though, in one moment, he had become a stranger. And I a stranger to myself.

Just wondering why I feel so all alone, why I'm a stranger in my own?

When one is a stranger to oneself, then one is estranged from others, too.

I am not at home in myself. I am my own stranger.

For ever, I shall be a stranger to myself.

My problem might be that even if I did go home, I wouldn’t belong there, among people who give without thinking and care without trying.

What would tomorrow bring? I wondered. Both hands on the wheel, I closed my eyes. I didn’t feel like I was in my own body; my body was just a lonely, temporary container I happened to be borrowing. What would become of me tomorrow I did not know.

I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence.

We are alienated, so alienated that the self must disguise itself as an extraterrestrial in order not to alarm us with the truly bizarre dimensions that it encompasses.

...there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction--every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and excitement at about a million miles an hour.

The individual in the ordinary circumstances of living may feel more unreal than real; in a literal sense, more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from the rest of the world, so that his identity and autonomy are always in question.... He may not possess an over-riding sense of personal consistency or cohesiveness. He may feel more insubstantial than substantial, and unable to assume that the stuff he is made of is genuine, good, valuable. And he may feel his self as partially divorced from his body.

I couldn't say who I am, I haven't the remotest notion of myself; I am someone without antecedents, without a history, without a country, and on that I insist!

You described the feeling you’d always had of being misplaced, of always standing to one side of yourself, of watching yourself in the world even as you were being in the world, and wondering if this was how everyone felt. That you always believed that other people had a clearer idea of what they were doing, and didn’t worry quite so much about why.