“I don’t care too much about talking, but I don’t like being alone.”
“The church grew very lonely about him, and he began to feel like a child whose mother has forsaken it. Only he knew that to be left alone is not always to be forsaken.”
“But it doesn t happen that way, I keep telling myself knowingly and sadly. Only in our fraternity pledges and masonic inductions, our cowboy movies and magazine stories, not in our real-life lives. For, the seventeenth-century humanist to the contrary, each man is an island complete unto himself, and as he sinks, the moving feet go on around him, from nowhere to nowhere and with no time to lose. The world is long past the Boy Scout stage of its development; now each man dies as he was meant to die, and as he was born, and as he lived: alone, all alone. Without any God, without any hope, without any record to show for his life. ( New York Blues )”
“I turned my ear toward the door because I heard him breathing. When you’re alone and afraid, the simple sound of the steady in and out of air being drawn by another person is good medicine.”
“A game like sardines is scary, not so much for the hider but for the seekers. It s scary because you lose your companions and the whole world creeps up quiet and you slowly realize you re going to stumble upon a secret place where everyone will jump out at you. And then, when you are the very last seeker, you start to wonder if you re the only person in the world. If the hiding place somehow sucked up the players and the last one has to decide to run away or get sucked up, too.”
“No one ever said aloud any of the kinds of things he was so constantly thinking, because no one in the parish, not Alice, not Lady Higgs, not anybody, ever seemed to see the things he saw. If they thought as he did, if they saw what he did, they never mentioned it; and to have things which are precious to one eternally unmentioned makes one, he had long discovered, lonely. These August nights, for instance—remarkably and unusually beautiful, warm and velvety as he had never known them, ushered in each evening by the most astonishing variety of splendid sunsets—nobody had said a single word about them. They might have been February ones, for all the notice they got. Sometimes he climbed up to the top of Burdon Down towards evening, and stood staring in amazement at what looked like heaven let loose in flames over England; but always he stood alone, always there was no one but himself up there, and no one afterwards, when he descended from his heights, seemed to be aware that anything unusual had been going on.”
“If shame had a face I think it would kind of look like mine If it had a home would it be my eyes Would you believe me if I said I m tired of this Well here we go now one more time I tried to climb your steps I tried to chase you down I tried to see how low I could get it down to the ground I tried to earn my way I tried to tame this mind You better believe that I tried to beat this [CHORUS] So when will this end it goes on and on Over and over and over again Keep spinning around I know that it won t stop Till I step down from this for good I never thought I d end up here Never thought I d be standing where I am I guess I kinda thought it would be easier than this I guess I was wrong now one more time I tried to climb your steps I tried to chase you down I tried to see how long I could get it down to the ground I tried to earn my way I tried to tame this mind You better believe that I tried yo beat this [REPEAT CHORUS] Sick cycle carousel This is a sick sycle, yeah Sick cycle carousel This is a sick cycle, yeah [REPEAT CHORUS TWICE] Sick cycle carousel Sick cycle carousel Sick cycle carousel...”
“I m self-sufficient. I spend a lot of time on my own and I shut off quite easily. When I communicate, I communicate 900 per cent, then I shut off, which scares people sometimes.”
“Make yourself your role model, because people who do not have qualities depend on the qualities of others to shape their own qualities.”
“Even among familiar faces, people often feel invisible and desolate, like an island in cold waters or a shadow apart from the crowd. Be the reason another never feels alone.”
“I inhale loneliness like it is the sweet smell of virgin earth conquered by fiery rain drops. Within me, I m a thousand others.”
“I hope you know that you are not alone, and in those hours when you feel that you are, just know there are other people out there — singing the same melodies of wanderlust, climbing over mountains in the dark, and waking in the night to stare at the moon, thinking of this large world and dreaming — just like you”
“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 was merely that she had no friends. She didn t even have a sanctuary in which she could simply be alone.”
“The Strong Man is Mightiest Alone.”