Quote by Elias Canetti: “The profoundest emotion is the transformation of everything familiar into something strange.”

There are moments when things you have known all your life — a word you have said a thousand times, a room you have lived in for years — suddenly seem completely alien and unknowable. Canetti identifies this estrangement not as confusion but as the deepest form of emotional experience: when reality refuses to stay settled.

Canetti was living in London during the Blitz, having fled Vienna after the Anschluss in 1938. He was writing in German while England was at war with the German-speaking world. This estrangement — cultural, linguistic, national — saturated his thinking. He worked during the war on notes that would become the basis for his major books on crowd psychology and on transformation.

Bulgarian-born writer who lived most of his life in Vienna, Zurich, and London and wrote in German. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981. His major work Crowds and Power is a sweeping analysis of the psychology of mass movements, and his autobiography The Tongue Set Free is a memoir of rare richness and precision.