Donald Barthelme Quotes

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

I am dead to them, even though I once flowered.

I felt a tremendous distance between myself and everything real.

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

Exile is more than a geographical concept. You can be an exile in your homeland, in your own house, in a room.

I belong nowhere and to no one.

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

Well, I've always felt connected to the outsider.

I don't know what she is now. A stranger, mostly. It's as if she has become a part of a different world, one that doesn't include me anymore.

I've always felt like my nose is pressed to glass. I always feel a little bit like an outsider.

Stephen Blackpool fall into the loneliest of lives, the life of solitude among a familiar crowd. The stranger in the land who looks into ten thousand faces for some answering look and never finds it, is in cheering society as compared with him who passes ten averted faces daily, that were once the countenances of friends

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 was difficult when I was very young because I was so separated from my family. When I was at school or acting in a play, I felt very much part of something, and then it would always change, and I would be by myself.

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.

The thing is, I really can't relate to anyone my own age. Not in a superior way - an inferior way, if anything. Socially, I have no idea what my friends are talking about. I don't listen to any new music. I feel very secluded.

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

Selfishness, narcissism, being uncomfortable in your own skin, not feeling connected to the world around you, feeling dislocated from family and youth, having a strange relationship with your childhood - all those things feel really true to me.

I have always written about characters who fall somewhere in the spectrum between solitary and totally alienated.

I've always craved to belong to somewhere, but I never have and never will.

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.

L.A. really doesn't feel like home to me anymore.

You get people who come to London, sever links with where they come from, and then when they need people, there's nobody there. To feel like you can't go back home would be a horribly sad place to be, as is mistaking fame for genuine love and affection.

Lots of times you can feel as an exile in a country that you were born in.

Alienation, I suppose, can't be hackneyed because it will always exist.

People tell me there are a lot of guys like me, which doesn't explain why I'm lonely.