Elie Wiesel Quotes

Friends: not one. Just a few acquaintances who imagine they feel something for me and who might be sorry if a train ran over me and the funeral was on a rainy day.

They cared for no one, they were outside humanity, and death, had it come, would only have continued their pursuit of a retreating horizon.

Reality was utterly coolheaded and utterly lonely.

I want to be alone. Sympathies wasted on my hollow shell. I feel there's nothing left to fight for. No reason for a cause.

Ain't nobody gonna care enough to catch you fall.

The lonely become either thoughtful or empty.

Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.

Life has no friend.

Being a stranger was like being dead, and brought to mind how, in a book he had read that most folks misunderstood one common state: The flip side of love is indifference, not hate.

I wonder if I shall ever see her again, and I realize that I scarcely care. I can feel the sheets beneath me, and the cold air on my chest. I feel fine. I feel absolutely fine. I feel nothing at all.

I wandered off, walking through streets that seemed emptier than ever, thinking that if I didn't stop, if I kept on walking, I wouldn't notice that the world I thought I knew was no longer there.

I don’t care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual.

Why can’t the world hear? I ask myself. Within a few moments I ask it many times. Because it doesn’t care, I finally answer, and I know I’m right. It’s like I’ve been chosen. But chosen for what? I ask.

Indifference pretends to create peace, but it is based on not caring, a silent resignation. It is a movement away, a separation fed by a subtle fear of the heart. We pull back, believing that what happens to others is not our concern. Our courage leaves us. Indifference is a misguided way of defending ourselves.

I am nothing. I’m like someone who’s been thrown into the ocean at night, floating all alone. I reach out, but no one is there. I call out, but no one answers. I have no connection to anything.

Sometimes the world seems like a big hole. You spend all your life shouting down it and all you hear are echoes of some idiot yelling nonsense down a hole.

I have very few friends. I'm an associate of everybody and friend of none.

Nobody helps anybody.

Christmas is a holiday that persecutes the lonely, the frayed, and the rejected.

I've been in that angst of loneliness, where you're really alone in the universe, except for the dog.

But I also think all of the great stories in literature deal with loneliness. Sometimes it's by way of heartbreak, sometimes it's by way of injustice, sometimes it's by way of fate. There's an infinite number of ways to examine it.

The manager is by himself. He can't mingle with his players. I enjoyed my players, but I could not socialize with them so I spent a lot of time alone in my hotel room. Those four walls kind of close in on you.

I think, at the end of the day, I have an outsider's heart.

I had never felt so lonely and so sad in my entire life.

You reach out your hand, but you're all alone, in those time passages.