Peter S. Beagle Quotes

You can be much more alone with other people than you are by yourself. Even if it's people you love.

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

Loneliness has little to do with what we do or where we do it, whether we're married or unmarried, optimists or pessimists, heterosexual or homosexual. Loneliness has to do with the sudden clefts we experience in every human relation, the gaps that open up with such stomach-turning unexpectedness. In a brief moment, I and my brother or sister have moved away into different worlds, and there is no language we can share.... It is in the middle of intimacy that the reality of loneliness most dramatically appears.

I’ve never been the one. Not for anybody.” He closed the distance between them. “You’ll get used to it.” He tipped her face up to his, kissed her. “Why? Why am I the one?” “Because my life opened up, and it flooded with color when you walked back into it.

It is sad that the air is the only thing we share. No matter how close we get to each other, there is always air between us.

surrounded by strangers who love me (un)strangers made strange by pain

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.

The writer is always to some extent in exile, wherever he is, because he is somehow outside, separated from others; there is always a distance.

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

Strangers are an endangered species.

Sometimes my hands they don’t feel like my own; I need someone to love, I need someone to hold.

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.

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

I am more exempt and more distant than any man in the world.

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.

Society's dark hull drifts further and further away. It is this place - the place of our separation, our distinction - that much of his poetry occupies.

At the beginning and at the end of love, the two lovers are embarrassed to find themselves alone.

Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything.

I just don't want to die alone, that's all. That's not too much to ask for, is it It would be nice to have someone care about me, for who I am, not about my wallet.

How we need another soul to cling to.

I'm not very interested in people. I recognize it in myself - there is a basic indifference toward people.

Contemplating Christmas when you are isolated and far from home brings its own unique pain.

We're really all alone. We can't ever get inside another person's spirit, and see the world they do. So we are alone in that sense. The only way we have to communicate feelings is through words.

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.