“Most of a modest woman's life was spent, after all, in denying what, in one day at least of every year, was made obvious.”
Lonely feeling
Lonely Quotes — page 248 of 309
“Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people - what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes.”
“Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table--it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-hankerchief. You then stuff your hankerchief back into your pocket--that is not Byron; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep.”
“I often wish I'd got on better with your father,' he said.”
“Tell me", he wanted to say, "everything in the whole world" - for he had the wildest, most absurd, extravagant ideas about poets and poetry - but how to speak to a man who does not see you? who sees ogres, satyrs, perhaps the depth of the sea instead?”
“letters are venerable; and the telephone valiant, for the journey is a lonely one, and if bound together by notes and telephones we went in company, perhaps - who knows? - we might talk by the way.”
“Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day older or Cam either. These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as the way they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters.”
“I am obsessed at nights with the idea of my own worthlessness, and if it were only to turn a light on to save my life I think I would not do it. These are the last footprints of a headache I suppose. Do you ever feel that? - like an old weed in a stream. What do you feel, lying in bed?”
“The city's full of people who you just see around.”
“Even our fears make us feel important, because we fear we might not be.”
“Mort was hurt by this. It was one thing not to want to marry someone, but quite another to be told they didn't want to marry you.”
“She was also, by the standards of other people, lost. She would not see it like that. She knew where she was, it was just that everywhere else didn't.”
“I had a deprived childhood, you see. I had lots of other kids to play with and my parents bought me outdoor toys and refused to ill-treat me, so it never occurred to me to seek solitary consolation with a good book.”
“I'm super shy, especially at parties.”
“I do like to hang out in the corner and keep my eye on the party, or be outside in a smaller group.”
“But no man's a hero to himself. I've lived with me a lifetime. I know everything worth knowing about myself--" ~Something Wicked This Way Comes”
“Here at this far lost end of the continent, where the trail wagons had stopped and the people with them.”
“I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don't seem to name their daughters Lolita any more. I have heard of young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but of no human beings.”
“You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.”
“I have never seen a more lucid, more lonely, better balanced mad mind than mine.”