Dislocation Quotes

“my brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.”
― William Styron , Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

“Beauty promises recognition, connection, and loftiness. It invites us to soar and transcend. Beauty lends magnitude to our lives, but we feel dislocated if we miss sense and substance. Its absence is like a fall from grace. Beauty is one of the last refuges against emptiness. Without it, we become void drifters in a barren world. (“Absence of Beauty is like Hell“ )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Blood stains are not easy to remove. Yes, and they will enter the rooms and see my bedding. Perhaps a young girl will fit into my daughter’s clothes. Or it’ll all be a waste because they too lost a young daughter in the vadda raula. These clothes will haunt them. They will want to go back. How crazy! I don’t want to be here and they don’t want to be there. They can’t be here and I can’t be there. How absurd! It is like someone just did it in jest. What value does my life have? Zilch. Nobody thought of this? They live with my nightmares, I live with theirs. And then learn to ignore these sounds I hear from the crevices of the new house. Each night I plug my ears and shut my eyes. A new story over my story. The slate has been wiped clean. With blood.”
― Sakoon Singh, In The Land of The Lovers

“There would remain no sign of you ever having played in this house. Your childhood is going to be swept under a camel-skin rug and elevators are going to be built over the lake we once swam in. This address, as we know it, would be lost forever and we’ll wake up in a box-sized room: cramped, trampled and sensationally unhappy.'
('Left from Dhakeshwari')”
― Kunal Sen

“Later, you will learn that a common feature of domestic abuse is "dislocation." That is to say, the victim has just moved somewhere new, or she's somewhere where she doesn't speak the language, or has been otherwise uprooted form her support network, her friends or family, her ability to communicate. She is made vulnerable by her circumstance, her isolation. Her only ally is her abuser, which is to say, she has no ally at all. And so she has to struggle against an unchangeable landscape that has been hammered into existence by nothing less than time itself; a house that is too big to dismantle by hand; a situation too complex and overwhelming to master on her own. The setting does its work.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“..it’s like the people in the play are living in the same world but separately from each other, like their worlds have somehow become disjointed or broken off each other’s worlds. But if they could just step out of themselves, or just hear and see what’s happening right next to their ears and eyes, they’d see it’s the same play they’re all in, the same world, that they’re all part of the same story.”
― Ali Smith, Winter

“She felt exhausted: her energy first spent wanting so sorely to return and then accepting the loss as final. As her old life in Okara was fast becoming just a story to be told, she too was becoming irrelevant, like an out-of-use currency, or an old train route, defunct. Her body became slightly bent over and the folds of her skin began to hang loose, like they had lost interest in life. And all like a misunderstanding, like someone your own, someone very close, had tricked you, surreptitiously moved the very roof from over your head.”
― Sakoon Singh, In The Land of The Lovers

“Being misplaced, even by choice, is so very difficult on our body and soul. In my case, I still long for what, once, I took for granted— That immediacy of culture and belonging. And for those who did not choose — So many are forced to be misplaced in our world today! Some are misplaced even in the lands that they were born on, striped away by cultural warfare, greed and ignorance. I wish for us to know this void in each other— To witness it for one another so we would be able to imagine a new, WHOLE, body.”
― Shahar Rabi, Spiritual Misfits: Collaboration and Belonging in a Divisive World

“Papuans in PNG think they are part of Australia, but Australians will never accept them as equals, and Papuans in West Papua think they are part of Asian Indonesia, but Asian Indonesians will never accept them as equals.

The Papuans of New Guinea island are the world's most psychologically, linguistically, and conceptually dislocated people.”
― Yamin Kogoya

“The pain of having his fingers relocated had been sudden, but not altogether unwelcome. It was as if his body knew that something was being righted. The pain of being put back together was not so bad as the pain of being taken apart. At least, that was the logic he clung to as each resounding pop reverberated in his ears and threatened to turn his stomach.”
― Molly Collier, The Paragon