Daniel Tammet Quotes

Stories have always been the things that entertain me and make me feel happy and sad and move me and give me the experience of being able to live many lives in one lifetime. It's the best thing about being alive.

Six is the hardest number for me to experience, the smallest. It's the absence of something - it's cold, dark, almost like a black hole. If someone tells me they are depressed, I might imagine myself in the hole of a six to help me empathise.

I went to bed and woke in the middle of the night thinking I heard someone cry, thinking I myself was weeping, and I felt my face and it was dry. Then I looked at the window and thought: Why, yes, it's just the rain, the rain, always the rain, and turned over, sadder still, and fumbled about for my dripping sleep and tried to slip it back on.

I have a feeling only for shadows

It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone.

This world that I live in is empty and cold/the loneliness cuts me and tortures my soul.

A dead afternoon in a dark bar was not the worst of fates.

She was waiting, but she didn't know for what. She was aware only of her solitude, and of the penetrating cold, and of a greater weight in the region of her heart.

A strange thing has happened, do you know? I am in darkness. There is a person who, departing, took away the sun.

The hollowness was in his arms and the world was snowing.

For in spite of the snapdragons and the duty millers and the cherry blossoms, it was always winter.

I am glad to be going. This is the lonesomest pace in the world?

Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.

Boredom, that silent spider, was spinning its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.

I'm a winter girl. I like coming out when things are desolate and everybody's ready to slit their wrists.

Vienna is cold, and dark, and sad. It is laid out as though for a royal parade; the streets are wide and they're flanked by monumental buildings, decorated with the faces of angry gods. And on the roof are statues of national heroes, wielding weapons of destruction.

I would paint a portrait which would bring the tears, had I canvas for it, and the scene should be -- solitude, and the figures -- solitude -- and the lights and shades, each a solitude.

So lonely I make friends with the ravens that prey on lambs.

Twilight whippoorwill... Whistle on, sweet deepener Of dark loneliness

Just think how many thoughts a blanket smothers while one lies alone in bed, and how many unhappy dreams it keeps warm.

There are things of such darkness and horror—just, I suppose, as there are things of such great beauty—that they will not fit through the puny human doors of perception.

Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is like a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue. . . .

Once upon a midnight dreary

Sunset is the saddest light there is.