Joseph Conrad Quotes

I sat there with everything - and I had nothing.

Wrap parties can be really sad, actually, disorienting.

I am alone; I am always alone no matter what.

Just having the pain of being alive without anything else, whether it's good or bad. There's a lot of serious songs on the record, you know. That song is just about feeling like a fish out of water, feeling like you don't belong on the planet sometimes.

I walked around the block twice, passed 200 people and failed to see a human being.

Countries like ours are full of people who have all of the material comforts they desire, yet lead lives of quiet (and at times noisy) desperation, understanding nothing but the fact that there is a hole inside them and that however much food and drink they pour into it, however many motorcars and television sets they stuff it with, however many well-balanced children and loyal friends they parade around the edges of it. . . it aches!

You see the lighted windows and what you want to think is that there may be many interesting stories behind them, but what you know is that really there are just dull, dull souls, mere consumers of food, who think their instincts are emotions and their tiny lives of more account than a whisper of wind.

Walking on these streets, until the night falls, my life feels to me like the life they have. By day they’re full of meaningless activity; by night, they’re full of meaningless lack of it. By day I am nothing, and by night I am I. There is no difference between me and these streets, save they being streets and I a soul, which perhaps is irrelevant when we consider the essence of things

I think of the old slavery, and of the way The Economy has now improved upon it. The new slavery has improved upon the old by giving the new slaves the illusion that they are free. The Economy does not take people's freedom by force, which would be against its principles, for it is very humane. It buys their freedom, pays for it, and then persuades its money back again with shoddy goods and the promise of freedom. "Buy a car," it says, "and be free. Buy a boat and be free." Is this not the raw material of bad dreams? Or is it maybe the very nightmare itself?

What can become of him if he is in such bondage to the habit of satisfying the innumerable desires he has created for himself? He is isolated, and what concern has he with the rest of humanity? They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less.

Society is based on discontent: people wanting more and more and more, being continually dissatisfied with their homes, their bodies, their decor, their clothes, everything.

... we are all terribly alone no matter what people say.

Sonnet XXV Before I loved you, love, nothing was my own: I wavered through the streets, among Objects: Nothing mattered or had a name: The world was made of air, which waited. I knew rooms full of ashes, Tunnels where the moon lived, Rough warehouses that growled 'get lost', Questions that insisted in the sand. Everything was empty, dead, mute, Fallen abandoned, and decayed: Inconceivably alien, it all Belonged to someone else - to no one: Till your beauty and your poverty Filled the autumn plentiful with gifts.

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

I wandered off, walking through streets that seemed emptier than ever, thinking that if I didn't stop, if I kept on walking, I wouldn't notice that the world I thought I knew was no longer there.

There were people everywhere but no one was mine, and I was no one's.

Sometimes, I think the only art left for us is slowly peeling the label off a beer bottle while somebody tells you about a dream they had.

I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing

My comfortable existence is reduced to a shallow meaningless party.

Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?

We continue to be spilled on by consumerism even though we know it doesn't make us happy.

We deny our nature to build and create and then wonder why there is so much alienation and dissatisfaction.

Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it

Seven out of 10 Americans, they do not like the direction our country is going. Many of our fellow citizens feel alienated and have lost faith in our core institutions. They don't feel heard and they don't feel represented by those in office.