Etty Hillesum Quotes

I'm so secluded. Very alone.

Nothing is quite as bad as being without privacy and lonely at the same time.

In the bare room under the old library on the hill in the town at the tip of the small peninsula on the cold island so far from everything else, I lived among strangers and birds.

I would love to live in the wilds of nowhere, and when writing 'Chronicles,' I would occasionally rent a cottage in the middle of nowhere that had no mobile reception, but I'm not about to move away from my family.

You can be around 100 people and be completely alone. People don't realize what it's really like.

I really want to disappear, grow a beard, not talk to anyone, not make any friends... I just want to disappear and study.

I like the idea of isolation, I like the idea of solitude. You can be connected and have a phone and still be lonely.

We're all outsiders in a way. We're all alone and can become very lonely.

I understand being alone. I understand not liking it, wishing for something else.

It gets very lonely out on the road some times.

There is nothing like the bootless solitude of those who are caged together.

In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.

Confronted by too much emptiness ... the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?

I really was alone, and the only thing worse than being alone was having everyone else see how lonely you were

I believe that it is sometimes less difficult to wake up and feel that I am alone when I really am, than to wake up with someone else and be lonely.

Loneliness comes in two basic varieties. When it results from a desire for solitude, loneliness is a door we close against the world. When the world instead rejects us, loneliness is an open door, unused.

For hours, for days, for years, she had wandered endlessly within herself but never met anybody, nobody.

I have always had plenty of friends, and now at age sixty, I face four walls as a common prisoner.

It's the silence I imagine in the rest of the world, the silence of an endless ocean and uninhabitable island, a silence that can be seen from space.

One can experience loneliness in two ways: by feeling lonely in the world or by feeling the loneliness of the world.

Usually there's no specific reason for loneliness - it's a broad feeling.

Zuleika, on a desert island, would have spent most of her time in looking for a man's footprint.

...loneliness is not a function of solitude.

Loneliness is an aspect of the land.

There would never be a way for me to live comfortably with people. Maybe I'd become a monk. I'd pretend to believe in God and live in a cubicle, play an organ and stay drunk on wine.