John Banville Quotes

Don't go away. I don't want to be alone. I can't stand being alone.

Loneliness is about the scariest thing out there.

There is nothing else to do in my life... I have no family, relationships - this is the only thing that I do.

My life used to be full of everything. Now if you aren't with me I haven't a thing in the world.

Loneliness and hunger were my fortunes of creation.

I've been in that angst of loneliness, where you're really alone in the universe, except for the dog.

And then when all around grows dark, when we feel utterly alone, when all men right and left pass us by and know us not, a forgotten feeling rises in the breast.

I give the fight up: let there be an end, a privacy, an obscure nook for me. I want to be forgotten even by God.

When I walked out of the seminary, I was 31, but I was like a scared, frightened kid. I had no place to live, no license, no clothes. I was just a lost soul.

When friendship disappears then there is a space left open to that awful loneliness of the outside world which is like the cold space between the planets. It is an air in which men perish utterly.

I can't imagine anything worse than being just left alone, scared out of your mind.

It's a terrible feeling being lonely.

You know that day after day of, Oh God what am I going to do with myself feeling? The fear of the emptiness that it implies keeps me going.

Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.

Lonesome. Lonesome. I know what it means. Here all by my lonesome, dreaming empty dreams. Weary. Weary at the close of day, wondering if tomorrow brings me joy or sorrow.

You are forever alone.

I have never felt bereft of anything.

Maybe I should quit the business. There's no one left for me to love. Mama's dead. Mr. Burns couldn't care less about me. What's left?

You write a story about loneliness, and you grab them all because everybody's an expert on that one.

Hell is a half-filled auditorium.

The dominant feeling of the battlefield is loneliness.

The 'Burials' title really speaks to all the different levels that are on the record. It speaks to silence and panic and anxiety and loss of self and isolation and those different levels of hiding.

The thing about Lucifer is that by the end of the first season, his world is falling apart a bit. Anyone that he could call an ally or trust, he now can't, and that leaves him in a place that he's never been before.

I'd think the house was the source of great sadness or pressure. I knew it wasn't. I knew it was just where I lived. But I'd walk up the stairs and the second floor was just desolate. My old bedroom: empty. My old rehearsal room: empty. First floor studio: messy and empty. Middle room: broken gear everywhere.

On my travels I, at least, did not see Serbia as a land of paranoiacs - much more as the huge room of an orphaned, yes, an orphaned, abandoned child.