“She saved my life...and I’ve ruined hers. They sat in silence for a full minute, the air between them growing heavy, as if they both wanted to speak, and yet had nothing to say. They were strangers, after all, on a brief and bizarre journey that had just reached a fork in the road, each of them now needing to find seperate paths.”
Lonely feeling
Lonely Quotes — page 205 of 309
“Once, in Lisbon, I tried my best to work the phone book in a way that would assuage a longing [Alice and I] had for certain Chinese dishes . . . .”
“I don't think I know a single woman who knows what she looks like.”
“Sleeping alone seemed unnatural to me, and pitiful, something done in hospitals or when you're contagious.”
“Now, see, that's why you want Internet friends. You can find people just exactly like you. Screw your neighbors and your family, too messy...the trouble is, once you filter out everybody that doesn't agree with you, all that's left is maybe this one retired surfer guy living in Idaho.”
“Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica.”
“The thing is, it's my own fault. I just can't put up with a person that won't go out of his way for me. And that's what a man is. Somebody that won't go out of his way for you. I bet it says that in the dictionary.”
“This is what it means to be alone: everyone is connected to everyone else, their bodies are a bright liquid life flowing around you, sharing a single heart that drives them to move all together. If the shark comes they will all escape, and leave you to be eaten.”
“She is inhumanly alone. And then, all at once, she isn't.”
“My life is a pitiful, mechanical thing without a past, like a little wind-up car, ready to run in any direction someone points me.”
“A woman without a man -- a condition of 'manlessness' -- is defined as alone. But a single mother is less alone than the average housewife.”
“It's tough to break yourself as news to a town that already knows you.”
“I had no place to put anything. I would give my sculpture away because I had no place to put it.”
“The girls you picked up from the bars were not the girls you took home to mother.”
“Sometimes she wished for someone she could tell about her problems, just to be able to say, ‘I’m in love with a man and I can’t have him.’ But that would only lead to questions she couldn’t answer, so she kept the secret and the pain inside, hoping someday she would no longer feel as if half of her were missing.”
“Too big to cry too young to laugh.”
“I have no wealthy or popular relations to recommend me.”
“I confess I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down but I bite my lip and keep quiet.”
“Thy soul shall find itself alone ’Mid dark thoughts of the gray tombstone— Not one, of all the crowd, to pry Into thine hour of secrecy. Be silent in that solitude, Which is not loneliness—for then The spirits of the dead who stood In life before thee are again In death around thee—and their will Shall overshadow thee: be still. [...]”
“Even brave men, and D'Arnot was a brave man, are sometimes frightened by solitude.”