Wendelin Van Draanen Quotes

I love the intimacy of TV. I love the fact that you don't necessarily have the pressure of an audience or anyone around watching it - just you and it.

I just want silence... Jesus, it doesn't mean I don't like you. It just means right now, I like silence more.

No amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood.

I'm actually quite self-sufficient, so it might look as if there isn't room for anyone in my life. That isn't entirely the case.

My process is to be by myself when I record. It's quite an emotional performance to pull off when someone else is in the room. I prefer to go away and have my own time with it, bring it in later.

When people are reading a book, it's a personal thing. They're reading it; it's in their own mind; it's in their own personal space when they're reading it.

It's very intimate. There are certain moments where it feels like it's just you and the lens. It's something that has been a very stable, consistent thing in my life.

The private little world that I create with my music is something that most people like to listen to alone and get into.

Marriage is the only thing that affords a woman the pleasure of company and the perfect sensation of solitude at the same time.

When I was young, I liked romance. But to me, romance is the opposite of domestic life. I just don't want anyone in the apartment, not for longer than a few hours.

...he had a way of taking your hand which made it clear he'd have to be the one to let go." From Alice Hoffman's "Local Girls", pg.102.

Isn't it possible, he wondered, for one person to love another without trying to own each other? Or is that buried so deep in our genes that we can never get it out? Territoriality.

The great omission in American life is solitude; not loneliness, for this is an alienation that thrives most in the midst of crowds, but that zone of time and space, free from the outside pressures, which is the incubator of the spirit.

I wasn't a misanthrope and I wasn't a misogynist but I liked being alone. It felt good to sit alone in a small space and smoke and drink. I had always been good company for myself.

I'm speaking to someone I'm trying to get to fall in love with me. I'm trying to speak intimately to one person. That should be clear. I'm not speaking to an audience. I'm not writing for the podium. I'm just writing, trying to write in a fairly quiet tone to one other reader who is by herself, or himself, and I'm trying to interrupt some silence in their life, which is utterance.

If we'd put them in a vase in the living room, they would have been everyone's flowers. I wanted them to be my flowers.

There is not true intimacy between souls who do not know how to respect one another's solitude.

Every corner in a house, every angle in a room, every inch of secluded space in which we like to hide, or withdraw into ourselves, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination; that is to say, it is the germ of a room, or of a house.

At the end of the day, when it comes down to it, all we really want is to be close to somebody. So this thing where we all keep our distance and pretend not to care about each other, it's usually a load of bull. So we pick and choose who we want to remain close to, and once we've chosen those people, we tend to stick close by. No matter how much we hurt them. The people that are still with you at the end of the day, those are the ones worth keeping. And sure, sometimes close can be too close. But sometimes, that invasion of personal space, it can be exactly what you need.

Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense.

we had each other. I never needed anyone else. That’s the difference between you and me. You need all these people around you. Your friends, your boyfriend, everyone. Every single person has to like you. I only ever needed one person. Only ever needed you.

Only my books anoint me, and a few friends, those who reach into my veins.

Lovers are not snails; they don't have to protrude from their shells and meet each other halfway. Meet me within your own self.

I'm most connected to myself when I'm alone in a room, moving my hand across a page. That's when I feel most like me.

It's vital to have your own space so you aren't constantly in each other's pockets.