Clifford Stoll Quotes

We all fall into our habits, our routines, our ruts. They're used quite often, consciously or unconsciously, to avoid living, to avoid doing the messy part of having relationships with other people, of dealing with a person next to us. That's why we can all be in a room on our cell phones and not have to deal with one another.

I'm the only one in my family who is deaf, and there are still conversations that go around me that I miss out on. And I ask what's going on, and I have to ask to be included. But I'm not going to be sad about it. I don't live in sad isolation. It's just a situation I'm used to.

In talking, shyness and timidity distort the very meaning of my words. I don't pretend to know anybody well. People are like shadows to me and I am like a shadow.

I'm always drawn to stories about characters who are somewhat isolated inside themselves by their inability to communicate in some way. That's what interested me about 'Children of a Lesser God.'

Writers seem to me to be people who need to retire from social life and do a lot of thinking about what's happened - almost to calm themselves.

Once I was condemned to three months' absolute silence. As I could not speak, I wrote a book.

A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man.

I was writing from the age of 10, and I was never really into going to discos and dances and stuff. I never told anyone at school that I did that because I feared it would alienate me even more.

I was never the pretty girl at school. I'm tiny and mixed-race. I grew up in a white area. I was always the loner.

I was always the biggest nerd in school: I had very few friends; I was always picked on; I used to wear really big glasses. I was the epitome of a nerd.

I wanted to communicate and connect. I simply didn't seem able to do it.

I have a family, loving aunts, and a good home. No, on the surface I seem to have everything except my one true friend. All I think about when I'm with friends is having a good time. I can't bring myself to talk about anything but ordinary everyday things. We don't seem to be able to get any closer, and that's the problem.

I'm interested in telling a story about a gay man and what he's going through as an artist and as a lonely, single gay man. I want to reveal what I know about loneliness.

Growing up, I never expressed myself to nobody. I never told nobody when something was wrong.

When I was a kid, I never spoke. I would sit under a table and not speak to anybody. No words for years.

My shyness probably defined the first 30 years of my life, really. It's a crippling thing. It can be very lonely knowing that you've got things to say, but you daren't say them.

I had to live with the models in one big house for two months, 24 hours a day. Only a few of them actually learned how to sign... I couldn't really communicate with anybody, and I felt isolated.

I was a wallflower. I never talked to anybody. I was so afraid of people, I never said a word.

As efficiently as our phones connect us to one another, and as much as we take advantage of that, we must remember that they have the power to alienate us, too.

I was in my early 30s, and I longed for real friendships and real relationships, and I started asking myself why I didn't have that. I had a couple of male friends, but every time I would hang out with them, it felt like there was something keeping us apart.

Faced with ostracization at school and confinement at home, I turned to karaoke.

I have very few friends and don't talk much.

There was a long stretch of time where I was making these videos, and everyone just thought I was a weirdo because I was making videos in my apartment instead of, like, going out, you know. And so I, like, it's hilarious now because everyone gets YouTube now. But, you know, in 2006, when I started making videos, like, no.

I think I developed a very closed personality. I didn't really have friends. I changed schools every year.

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