Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace.
Eugene O'NeillRead
It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must be a little in love with death!
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects deep existential feelings of alienation and longing for belonging.
Eugene O'Neill's quote expresses the profound sense of detachment and dissatisfaction with human existence. The speaker feels that being born a man was a mistake, longing instead for the simplicity and freedom of being a seagull or a fish—creatures unburdened by the complexities of human emotions and societal expectations. This sense of being a 'stranger' highlights a common human struggle with identity, belonging, and acceptance, leading to a melancholic acknowledgment of mortality.
Themes
AlienationBelongingIdentityExistentialismLonging
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about identity and belonging, one may use this quote to illustrate the feeling of being an outsider.
More from Eugene O'Neill
All quotes →Writing is my vacation from living.
Eugene O'NeillRead
When you're 50 you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity - but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.
Eugene O'NeillRead
I am so far from being a pessimist...on the contrary, in spite of my scars, I am tickled to death at life.
Eugene O'NeillRead
I have had my dance with Folly, nor do I shirk the blame; I have sipped the so-called Wine of Life and paid the price of shame; But I know that I shall find surcease, the rest my spirit craves, Where the rainbows play in the flying spray, 'Mid the keen salt kiss of the waves.
Eugene O'NeillRead
There is no present or future-only the past, happening over and over again-now.
Eugene O'NeillRead
Similar quotes
To sit and contemplate - to remember the faces of women without desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be everything and everywhere in sympathy and yet content to remain where and what you are.
Virginia WoolfRead
The truth is that every morning war is declared afresh. And the men who wish to continue it are as guilty as the men who began it, more guilty perhaps, for the latter perhaps did not foresee all its horrors.
Marcel ProustRead
The tourist transports his own values and demands to his destinations and implants them like an infectious disease, decimating whatever values existed before.
Arthur EricksonRead
I turn to history not for lessons but to confront my experience with the experience of others and to win for myself a sense of responsibility for the state of the human conscience.
Zbigniew HerbertRead
The true worth of a race must be measured by the character of its womanhood.
Mary Mcleod BethuneRead
We can see nothing whatever of the soul unless it is visible in the expression of the countenance; one might call the faces at a large assembly of people a history of the human soul written in a kind of Chinese ideograms.
Georg C. LichtenbergRead