“I was terribly sure trees and flowers were the same as birds or people. That they thought things and talked among themselves. And we could hear them if we really tried. It was just a matter of emptying your head of all other sounds. Being very quiet and listening very hard. Sometimes I still believe that. But one can never get quiet enough.”
Lonely feeling
Lonely Quotes — page 46 of 309
“Home is where you feel at home. I'm still looking.”
“I was a loner and never hung out with anyone. I never had any friends.”
“You could say, in a vulgar Freudian way, that I am the unhappy child who escapes into books. Even as a child, I was most happy being alone. This has not changed.”
“I'm not recognised that much. I'm just a bald man in glasses and there's a rash of them in Dublin. It'd be different if I had a mohican.”
“…I hate myself for not being able to go downstairs naturally and seek comfort in numbers. I hate myself for having to sit here and be torn between I know not what within me.”
“When you're growing up in a family without a lot of money and four boys, it can't always be, 'Let's go see a specialist, see if you're okay.' If you got hurt, you just walked it off.”
“People like me prove that you can survive without romance, even though you end up a bit unbalanced and you tend to argue with your own reflection.”
“You're the one who is weak. You will never know love or friendship. And I feel sorry for you.”
“I maintain that I have been a Negro three times--a Negro baby, a Negro girl and a Negro woman. Still, if you have received no clear cut impression of what the Negro in America is like, then you are in the same place with me. There is no The Negro here. Our lives are so diversified, internal attitudes so varied, appearances and capabilities so different, that there is no possible classification so catholic that it will cover us all, except My people! My people!”
“If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.”
“I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am.”
“At first I felt dizzy - not with the kind of dizziness that makes the body reel but the kind that's like a dead emptiness in the brain, an instinctive awareness of the void.”
“There is one thing infinitely more pathetic than to have lost the woman one is in love with, and that is to have won her and found out how shallow she is!”
“Most parents don’t know really their children.”
“The moment you say, "We are proud. I'm proud to be this, and I'm proud to be that," what you're saying is we're almost as good as the others. "Almost" always means not quite.”
“But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning.”
“The eagle has no liberty; he only has loneliness.”
“I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.”
“I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”