Ray Bradbury Quotes

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

There is a chasm between me and the world outside of me. A gap so wide my feelings can't cross it. By the time my screams reach the other side, they have dwindled into groans.

Perhaps that is our doom, our human curse, to never really know one another.

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

When you stop to think about it, so many films today where we don't have that kind of contact are films about alienation. About alienated feelings. We are much more alienated from our colleagues nowadays.

In all of my work, I think I'm exploring the idea that we are aliens to each other, how there is a huge distance that separates us all.

I'm used to living in a disassociated universe.

I don't belong in the world. That's what it is. Something separates me from other people.

Everything else outside me seems far, far away.

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

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.

Those reflective moments for me usually come from loneliness and separation from people.

I don't know what's the matter with me, why I'm so adept at distance, why I feel so remote from things, why life feels like a rumor.

To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings.

Now we're like planets, holding to each other from a great distance. [...] Now we're hundreds of miles apart, our short arms keep us lonely, no one hears what's in my head. [...] It's March, even the birds don't know what to do with themselves.

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction--every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and excitement at about a million miles an hour.

I stood among them, but not of them: in a shroud of thoughts which were not their thoughts.

In all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing that made her feel as if she belonged to it... She stood apart from mortal interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer make itself seen or felt.

I felt a tremendous distance between myself and everything real.

People are islands,' she said. 'They don't really touch. However close they are, they're really quite separate. Even if they've been married for fifty years.

human relationships simply aren't durable. I think back to the women in my life. they seem non-existent.

I had always felt that I was an observer, never a participant; that I was watching from behind a thick glass wall as people went about the business of living--and did it with such ease, with a skill that they took for granted and that I had never known.

It is a lonely feeling when someone you care about becomes a stranger.

What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary?

But after a moment a sense of waste and ruin overcame him. There they were, close together and safe and shut in; yet so chained to their separate destinies that they might as well been half the world apart.