Reiko Aylesworth Quotes

The first years when I came to New York, everything was too big and too much. For me, it was too difficult here, but bit by bit, it became one of my favorite places.

New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.... Always before I had felt like a person, an individual, hopeful that I could mold my life according to some desire of my own. But here in New York I was ignorant, insignificant, unimportant--one in millions whose destiny concerned no one. New York did not even know of my existence. Nor did it care.

I'm tired and nervous and I'm in America. Here you don't know that you live.

I remember being this little girl missing her daddy and living so far away in France and from anything that was familiar to me. I felt so different and so isolated. When you're removed from everything that's familiar, you realize who you are.

But I was feeling quite down at the time. I was living in L.A., which was kind of weird for me.

I lived in England to learn English. When I went to England for the first time, it was like being on the Moon. I had no friends, I couldn't speak the language. I was very isolated.

LA's a very hard place to be unless you have people there that love you. It can be very, very lonely, and it can eat you up if you don't take care of yourself. In LA, nobody wants to talk to each other, everybody's giving each other catty looks.

Everywhere I go, I feel strange.

We moved from the East coast to the town of Spokane, Washington, when I was about 13 years old, and I did not adapt very well to the, to the style of the place, and I spent most of my time in the public library.

New York is tough on lonely people.

I moved out to L.A. from New York... and I remember feeling, kind of like anyone does when they first move, so very lonely and isolated.

Though we are more prosperous a nation and more connected a global community than ever before, many of us still feel lonely, disoriented and uncertain of the future.

Welcome to New York, where everybody's a stranger, and nobody is.

New York was a city where you could be frozen to death in the midst of a busy street and nobody would notice.

You can live in the same city your entire life and still be completely a foreigner when you step out, in your old age, onto the street.

…he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men [...] In the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I’m outside or is it all America?

Stranger in a strange country.

Obviously, you've spent some time in New York. I moved there and it was a bit much. It was a bit overwhelming for me. I didn't want to go out. I just felt a little homesick. I was just waiting to feel excited about something. I went through a phase of feeling kind of dull. It's really easy to shut off in New York and stay in your apartment.

Living in Manchester was like living on the moon... wherever that might be

I moved to New York first and was really apprehensive about moving to L.A., but I really, really like it.

There is a huge sense of loneliness as people leave villages and move to cities. It's hard to find that human connection as you move away from where you started.

Everywhere is nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends.

I came to London. It had become the center of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost.

It is about this very abstract sense of displacement that he feels the moment he turns off the television.

My family moved from California to New Jersey in the beginning of my sophomore year of high school. I will never forget the first day in a new school, walking into the cafeteria during lunch and not knowing a single soul. I didn't feel confident enough to share a seat at just anyone's table.