Browsing Quotes With Tag: loneliness (13)
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It’s easy, when in the world, to live by the opinion of the world. It’s easy, in solitude, to live by your own. But the truly great man is who, in the midst of a crowd, keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Speaker: AnonymousPosted: 21 Aug 2008 at 1:17 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
You are alone here, but part of your growth and experience is to learn how to find needed assistance.
Speaker: Richard G. ScottPosted: 21 Aug 2008 at 9:22 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
That man may last, but never lives,
Who much receives, but nothing gives;
Whom none can love, whom none can thank,
Creation’s blot, creation’s blank.Speaker: Thomas GibbonsSource: Divine Center, thePosted: 21 Aug 2008 at 9:03 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I know I brought this all on myself. I know that I deserve this. I’d do anything not to be this way. I’d do anything to make it up to everyone. And to not have to see a psychiatrist, who explains to me about being “passive aggressive,” and to not have to take the medicine he gives me, which is too expensive for my dad. And to not have to talk about bad memories with him. Or to be nostalgic about bad things.
Speaker: Stephen ChboskyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 4:43 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I walked over to the hill where we used to go and sled. There were a lot of little kids there. I watched them flying. Doing jumps and having races. And I thought that all those little kids are going to grow up someday. And all of those little kids are going to do the things that we do. And they will all kiss someone someday. But for now, sledding is enough. I think it would be great if sledding were always enough, but it isn’t.
Speaker: Stephen ChboskyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 4:36 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
People go on about places like Starbucks being unpersonal and all that, but what if that’s what you want? I’d be lost if JJ and people like that got their way, and there was nothing unpersonal in the world. I like to know that there are big places without windows where no one gives a shit. You need confidence to go into small places with regular customers – small bookshops and small music shops and small restaurants and cafes. I’m happiest in the Virgin Megastore and Borders and Starbucks and PizzaExpress, where no one gives a shit, and no one knows who you are. My mum and dad are always going on about how soulless those places are, and I’m like, Der. That’s the point.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:56 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“No, I get it,” said Jess.
“Yeah?”
“Course I do. You’re fucked.” She waved an apologetic hand in Maureen’s direction, like a tennis player acknowledging a lucky net cord. “You thought you were going to be someone, but now it’s obvious you’re nobody. You haven’t got as much talent as you thought you had, and there was no Plan B, and you got no skills and no education, and now you’re looking at forty or fifty years of nothing. Less than nothing, probably. That’s pretty heavy. That’s worse than having the brain thing, because what you got now will take a lot longer to kill you. You’ve got the choice of a slow, painful death, or a quick, merciful one.”
She shrugged.
She was right. She got it.Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:55 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Kavita stood to give me a hug. It was the tender, close hug that a woman gives a man when she knows she can trust him, or when she’s sure his heart belongs to someone else. It was a rare enough embrace between foreigners. Coming from an Indian woman, it was uniquely intimate in my experience. And it was important. I’d been in the city for years; I could make myself understood in Marathi, Hindi, and Urdu; I could sit with gangsters, slum-dwellers, or Bollywood actors, claiming their goodwill and sometimes their respect; but few things made me feel as accepted, in all the Indian worlds of Bombay, as Kavita Singh’s fond embrace.
I never told her that – what her affectionate and unconditional acceptance meant to me. So much, too much, of the good that I felt in those years of exile was locked in the prison cell of my heart: those tall walls of fear; that small, barred window of hope; that hard bed of shame. I do speak out now. I know now that when the loving, honest moment comes it should be seized, and spoken, because it may never come again. And unvoiced, unmoving, unlived in the things we declare from heart to heart, those true and real feelings wither and crumble in the remembering hand that tries too late to reach for them.Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:37 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
At first, when we truly love someone, our greatest fear is that the loved one will stop loving us. What we should fear and dread, of course, is that we won’t stop loving them, even after they’re dead and gone. For I still love you with the whole of my heart, Prabaker. I still love you. And sometimes, my friend, the love that I have, and can’t give to you, crushes the breath from my chest. Sometimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 10:06 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
They claim a hidden corner of our hearts, all those moments that stay with us unscreamed. That’s where loves, like elephants, drag themselves to die. It’s the place where pride allows itself to cry. And in those sleep-lonely nights and thing-rambled days, Modena’s face was always there, staring at the door.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 10:00 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I didn’t answer her. Of course I missed him. He was a good kid. I missed my daughter. I missed my mother and all of my family. I missed my friends: I missed them all and I was sure, in those desperate years, that I would never see them again. Missing the people I loved was a kind of grieving for me, and it was worse, much worse, for the fact that – so far as I knew – they weren’t dead. My heart, sometimes, was a graveyard full of blank stones. And when I was alone in my apartment, night after night, that grieving and missing choked me. There was money in bundles on the dressing table, and there were passports freshly forged that could send me… anywhere. But there was nowhere to go: nowhere that wasn’t emptied of meaning and identity and love by the vacuum of those who were missing and lost forever.
I was the fugitive. I was the vanished one. I was the one who was missing: missing in action. But inside slipstream of my flight, they were the missing ones. Inside my exile, it was the whole world I once knew that was missing. The fugitive kind run, trying against their hearts to annihilate the past, and with it every tell-tale trace of what they were, where they came from, and those who once loved them. And they run into that extinction of themselves, to survive, but they always fail. We can deny the past, but we can’t escape its torment because the past is a speaking shadow that keeps pace with the truth of what we are, step for step, until we die.Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:53 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Khaled, my first teacher, was the kind of man who carried his past in the temple fires of his eyes, and fed the flames with pieces of his broken heart. I’ve known men like Khaled in prisons, on battlefields, and in the dens where smugglers, mercenaries, and other exiles meet. They all have certain characteristics in common. They’re tough, because there’s a kind of toughness that’s founding the worst sorrow. They’re honest, because the truth of what happened to them won’t let them lie. They’re angry, because they can’t forget the past or forgive it. And they’re lonely. Most of us pretend, with greater or lesser success, that the minute we live in is something we can share. But the past for every one of us is a desert island; and those like Khaled, who find themselves marooned there, are always alone.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:39 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
One of the reasons why we crave love, and seek it so desperately, is that love is the only cure or loneliness, and shame, and sorrow. But some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths about yourself are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. And some things are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:56 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment!