Maurice Blanchot Quotes

Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering.

The individualists stare into each other's eyes and yet deny the existence of each other.

Only one man ever understood me, and he didn't understand me.

I think I should be here alone to rethink the world - I do. I want these lesser humans gone.

I like being alone and I think this movie, as much as it is an investigation of connection and people bonding, I also think it's just as much about loneliness.

The myth of my solitude makes me laugh.

If there is anything good about exile, it is that it teaches one humility. It accelerates one’s drift into isolation, an absolute perspective. Into the condition at which all one is left with is oneself and one’s language, with nobody or nothing in between. Exile brings you overnight where it would normally take a lifetime to go.

We live as we dream - alone.

I require silence to write the way an apple tree requires winter to make fruit. Being with people is intimate and joyous, but at some point, I'll wander off by myself. The paradox is that what began in childhood as an act of necessary solitude has led me straight to a life with others, in which I fly to China or Lithuania or northern Minnesota to read my poems and talk with other people who love language made into a lathe on which a life can be tuned and be turned.

Eventually, we all end up alone.

I think that we're all totally isolated beings and always will be.

It is strange to be known so universally and yet to be so lonely.

Somebody's boring me. I think it's me.

You know you lose a lot of social skills if you're a writer. You spend too long alone. And its forced me to address that.

We are all in this together, by ourselves.

For me, books have always been a way to feel less alone while being alone. Perhaps if I was depressed and isolated, just communicating with these authors through their sentences helped me.

One advantage of talking to yourself is that you know at least somebody's listening.

I've spent my life alone in a room with a typewriter.

I can gabble on now, but I couldn't when I was a kid, so I spent a lot of time in my own head on the moors by myself. It felt like writing was the right way to express myself.

We're really all alone. We can't ever get inside another person's spirit, and see the world they do. So we are alone in that sense. The only way we have to communicate feelings is through words.

When even the most strictly logical mind looks round and investigates the phenomena attending its own existence, perhaps the first fact to attract attention by its strongly marked prominence is the remarkable loneliness of man. He stands alone.

Writing is an antidote for loneliness.

One of the things reading does, it makes your loneliness manageable if you are an essentially lonely person.

It was either Voltaire or Charlie Sheen who said, 'We are born alone. We live alone. We die alone. And anything in between that can give us the illusion that we're not, we cling to.'

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.