Jon McGregor Quotes

Most men I do not meet at all, for they seem not to have time; they are busy about their beans.

In the end, the only thing between us was silence.

She understood how a world jammed with phones, email, and faxes could still leave you feeling utterly alone.

I think most writers feel like they're on the outside looking in much of the time. All of us feel, to a certain extent, alienated from the stuff going on around us.

The way I spend my time is very isolated and cut off.

I don't have any social life or anything.

The entire time I was in Portland, which was the five years, I had absolutely no contact with any of my family.

I don't have time for friends.

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

Everything has become so easy. It's great that it's at your fingertips, but I miss those good old days. And we're connected, but it can be very alienating. There is this distance between all of us because we're speaking to each other through cameras and monitors and icons and Emojis.

I felt like I might as well have been living in another part of the solar system.

We have a million ways to get ahold of people, and we're the loneliest we've ever been.

I want to be together with everyone else but stay lonely.

There's certainly a loss of connection with folks on the ground who I care for and love and I want to spend time with.

Being cut off from the outside world is scary.

As for me, I was a lonely kid, with few close friends until I was an adult - even when I might have been perceived as being on the inside, I felt like I was on the outside, kind of like viewing the world through a sheet of glass.

I've lived a very isolated life.

We are so busy that the truth about our lives can't catch up.

All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens.

Locked into loneliness were we two and looking at one another every evening we each saw the one we blamed for it.

My problem might be that even if I did go home, I wouldn’t belong there, among people who give without thinking and care without trying.

For the air of lonely men surrounded him now, a still atmosphere in which the world around him slipped away, leaving him incapable of relationship, an atmosphere against which neither will nor longing availed. This was one of the significant earmarks of his life.

It’s hard for everyone isn’t it? Anyone who says it’s easy is a liar. There’s this huge divide between me and Alex right now because I feel like we’re living in such different worlds, I don’t know what to talk about with him anymore. And we used to be able to talk all night. He phones once a week and I listen to what he’s been up to during the week and try to bite my tongue every time I go into another Katie story. Truth is I have nothing other to talk about but her and I know it bores people. I think I used to be interesting once upon a time.

And it was just the three of us - three bodies and two people - the three who knew what had happened and too many layers between all of us too much keeping us from one another.

She watched the prairies the rivers, the towns slipping past at an untouchable distance below - and she noted that the sense of detachment one feels when looking at the earth from a plane was the same sense she felt when looking at people: only her distance from people seemed longer. - Dagny Taggart