Henry Rollins Quotes

It's curious how we act in moments of personal despair.

Loneliness is something you can't walk away from.

I crawled back into myself all alone, just delighted to observe that I was even more miserable than before, because I had brought a new kind of distress and something that resembled true feeling into my solitude.

There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind--wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one's own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.

Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you.

Alexander smoked and watched her from his tree stump bench. What are you doing? she would ask him. Nothing, he would reply. Nothing but growing my pain into madness.

you’d think that silence would be peaceful. but really, it’s painful.

We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us.

That is how prison is tearing me up inside. It hurts every day. Every day takes me further from my life.

Maybe men are separated from each other only by the degree of their misery.

Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.

Solitude, isolation, are painful things and beyond human endurance.

Wherever you are in the world, whoever you are with, sometimes you feel desperately lonely.

I've certainly felt alone a lot of my life.

Now I know what loneliness is, I think. Momentary loneliness, anyway. It comes from a vague core of the self - - like a disease of the blood, dispersed throughout the body so that one cannot locate the matrix, the spot of contagion.

I felt myself in a solitude so frightful that I contemplated suicide. What held me back was the idea that no one, absolutely no one, would be moved by my death, that I would be even more alone in death than in life.

My greatest affliction... is perhaps the major theme of my writings, the affliction of loneliness that follows me like a shadow, a very ponderous shadow too heavy to drag after me all of my days and nights.

It's a spooky thing to be left alone inside an angry innerverse.

Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering—this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary day-time advice for everyone. But at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work—and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

He walked on in silence, the solitary sound of his footsteps echoing in his head, as in a deserted street, at dawn. His solitude was so complete, beneath a lovely sky as mellow and serene as a good conscience, amid that busy throng, that he was amazed at his own existence; he must be somebody else's nightmare, and whoever it was would certainly awaken soon.

Raw hatred took its time making an outpost of its rage and prepared for me a savage crown with rusty, bloodstained spikes. It wasn't pride that made me keep my heart at a distance from such terror, nor did I waste on revenge or the pursuit of power the forces that came from my selfish griefs or my accumulated joys. It was something else-my helplessness.

Loneliness is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings.

You don’t know what it’s like to be alone until you’ve had someone inside your head.

I could tell you it's the heart, but what is really killing him is loneliness. Memories are worse than bullets.