Donald Ray Pollock Quotes

Selfishness, narcissism, being uncomfortable in your own skin, not feeling connected to the world around you, feeling dislocated from family and youth, having a strange relationship with your childhood - all those things feel really true to me.

I've always felt myself to be an outsider. I've always felt awkward.

Being a kid, as all kids do, you feel out of place or like kind of a freak. You wake up feeling like your head got put onto someone else's body that day.

I was a very, I think, lonely kid, very introspective. I felt very much at odds with my environment and my culture... Probably a genetic flaw. I can't really explain it.

I liked myself better when I wasn't me.

My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.

I don't belong on this earth. I always feel out of place - like a visitor.

I felt like, 'How do I fit in?' But then I never fit in. The whole time, I've never fit in.

Is the modern social pattern of unending change and movement the cause of two modern diseases, insecurity and dissatisfaction? How lucky Thomas Hood was to be able to write, 'I remember, I remember the house where I was born.' I don't even know what mine looked like!

I have never felt out of place in my entire life. But I did at Yale.

I think it's true of a lot of teenagers that you're convinced that life is happening somewhere else.

I didn't fit in at school, and I didn't fit in at home, and I didn't know why. I was often lonely.

My motivation is, in part, a bit of angst that comes from feeling like I don't belong, that our generation doesn't belong.

I don't feel like I make sense in the world. I don't feel like I look right. I don't feel like I act right or do right. It's very frustrating to me that I just walk around with this all the time.

I never felt comfortable in my own skin, and I feel like I missed out on a lot of high school experiences because I was so worried about where I fit in because I was so confused.

As a little boy, I never felt comfortable with being human.

From the time I was little, I always felt like an outsider. I always felt nervous and uncomfortable with myself.

Tonight sucks. And look at me. Look at - look at stupid Buffy. Too dumb for college, and-and-and freak Buffy, too strong for construction work. And-and my job at the magic shop? I was bored to tears even before the hour that wouldn't end. And the only person that I can even stand to be around is a... neutered vampire who cheats at kitten poker.

It’s just … everything. There are too many people. And I don’t fit in. I don’t know how to be. Nothing that I’m good at is the sort of thing that matters there. Being smart doesn’t matter—and being good with words. And when those things do matter, it’s only because people want something from me. Not because they want me.

It's as if I've inherited a skin I cannot quite fit, and so I walk about constantly pulling and and tugging, pinning and pruning, trying desperately to fill it out, hoping that no one will look at me struggling and say, 'That one there- she's a fraud, Look how she doesn't fit at all.

I walked around Soho's street for over an hour, running into familiar faces but never once stopping to chat. It was then that I felt something discomforting and comforting all at once. I didn't want to be here, in this city, anymore.

Where ever I am I always find myself looking out the window wishing I was somewhere else.

The feeling of not belonging, of not being entirely worthy, of being sometimes hostage to your own sensibilities. Those things speak to me very personally.

I've had some ambivalent feelings about being an actor. I don't know that I've ever been totally and completely comfortable with it.

It's the relationship I have with the world: always trying to escape from reality. I'm a daydreamer; I don't feel in harmony with my epoch or the societies I live in.