“I might have been afraid that if I really loved someone and needed her, one day she might suddenly disappear without a word, and I d be left all alone.”
“Loneliness wasn t just a state of mind, was it? It was tactile. She could feel it. It was a sixth sense, not in some fanciful play of words, but physically. It hurt... it hurt like phagocytes devouring the white matter of her brain. It wasn t merely that she had no friends. She didn t even have a sanctuary in which she could simply be alone.”
“Cos every breath is unbearably painful”
“To feel loved again feels good, but to know they don t love you make things worse.”
“But-when you really think about it-that emotional support only applies to the experience of living in public. We don t have ways to quantify ideas like amazing or successful or lovable without the feedback of an audience. Nobody sits by himself in an empty room and thinks I m amazing. It s impossible to imagine how that would work. But being amazing is supposed to be what life is about. As a result, the windows of time people spend by themselves become these meaningless experiences that don t really count. It s filler. They re deleted scenes. pg 156”
“The strongest man in the world is he who stands alone.”
“Remember, you are never alone in this world. Never.”
“She doesn t give directions but there is a pot of gold at the end of her rainbow...Find it. If you can.”
“We knit alone our life, before seeing by it our shroud. (Nous tricotons notre vie seule, Avant d y voir notre linceul)”
“Sometimes I feel like I m disappearing.”
“And one bad mistake which is called love.. Can drive you insane till rapture..”
“Marriage is full of such cut-and-dry arrangements, Rhonda thought,then felt that small ache she sometimes got at the back of her skull-the one that told her she might be alone forever, not a fate that she chose but rather a fate that seemed to have been chosen for her.”
“Jason knew his life would never be the same again. British intelligence now had an ace up their sleeve, and Jason had to overcome his fears and deal with the secret world he was now a part of. He would have to grow a tough shell around himself. Despite his many friends, his grandparents and love of his father, he was painfully aware he was very much alone in this world. When it came down to it, there was only one person he could really rely on in the world, and he was called Jason Steed.”
“Living things don t all require light in the same degree. Some of us make our own light: a silver leaf like a path no one can use, a shallow lake of silver in the darkness under the great maples. But you know this already. You and the others who think you live for truth and, by extension, love all that is cold.”
“Being alone will show you who you really are, and if you cannot get-on positively as the sole master of your space in that room alone, then you can absolutely forget about it after you add another person.”
“I used to be fine in my loneliness but something or someone snapped me out of it and showed me company. What it’s like to feel at home, and so the going on by myself part wasn’t as easy anymore. Seasons happened and things got colder and harder and suddenly I found myself smoking circles in the air by myself in the snow and I was not okay.”
“I watched the moon alone, unable to share his cold beauty with anyone.”