Urban Alienation Quotes & Sayings

I could fall in love with you and have no regrets ... I want you so bad. You'll never understand how much. — Kenya Wright

My difficulties belong to me! — Alfred Adler

These are but dreaming men. Breathe, and they fade. — Dylan Thomas

That autumn, I kept coming back to Hopper's images, drawn to them as if they were blueprints and I was a prisoner; as if they contained some vital clue about my state. Though I went with my eyes over dozens of rooms, I always returned to the same place: to the New York diner of Nighthawks, a painting that Joyce Carol Oates once described as "our most poignant, ceaselessly replicated romantic image of American loneliness" ...
Green shadows were falling in spikes and diamonds on the sidewalk. There is no colour in existence that so powerfully communicates urban alienation, the atomisation of human beings inside the edifices they create, as this noxious pallid green, which only came into being with the advent of electricity, and which is inextricably associated with the nocturnal city, the city of glass towers, of empty illuminated offices and neon signs. — Olivia Laing

If you're able to enjoy something, to devote your life to it or a reasonable amount of time and energy, it will work out for you. — Jerry Garcia

You do not have to see the air to know you breathe it. You do not have to see the truth to believe it and you do not have to have witnessed love to feel it. — Kathryn Smith

I think certainly if I'd started getting published when I was in my early twenties, I was quite sheltered then and didn't know anything much about the world. I hadn't had any direct experience of how the world works. — Richard K. Morgan

And if you find everything as soon as you look for it, you find it in vain, you look for it in vain. — Antonio Porchia

As a source of innovation, an engine of our economy, and a forum for our political discourse, the Internet can only work if it's a truly level playing field. Small businesses should have the same ability to reach customers as powerful corporations. A blogger should have the same ability to find an audience as a media conglomerate. — Al Franken

John 5:44, Jesus continued, How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God? — James MacDonald

What I wanted to try and figure out was, okay, in contemporary 21st century life the alienation between the self and the land around you or the self and even the urban landscape. You name it. — DJ Spooky

Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject ... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual. — Susan Sontag

I'm not in the habit of having my photo snapped on some pretty young thing's arm. I avoid pictures because they serve no purpose, except to point out each new line, which is very meaningless. — George Harrison

Henceforth the crisis of urbanism is all the more concretely a social and political one, even though today no force born of traditional politics is any longer capable of dealing with it. Medico-sociological banalities on the 'pathology of housing projects,' the emotional isolation of people who must live in them, or the development of certain extreme reactions of rejection, chiefly among youth, simply betray the fact that modern capitalism, the bureaucratic society of consumption, is here and there beginning to shape its own setting. This society, with its new towns, is building the terrain that accurately represents it, combining the conditions most suitable for its proper functioning, while at the same time translating in space, in the clear language of organization of everyday life, its fundamental principle of alienation and constraint. It is likewise here that the new aspects of its crisis will be manifested with the greatest clarity. — Tom McDonough