Robin McKinley Quotes

Not much touches us, but we long to be touched. We lie awake at night willing the darkness to part and show us a vision.

I never trusted anybody at all. I don't know why it was so hard, I just didn't.

I have days where the only words I say are to the person making my sandwich at the grocery store.

I'm not very interested in people. I recognize it in myself - there is a basic indifference toward people.

Nothing terrifies me more than being social.

Because I am basically so insecure and anxious and afraid, I never, ever in my life learned to reach out for help, ever.

Sometimes, in my adult life, I have memories of when I was young and really scared of being too close to people.

Sometimes I feel like I don't belong anywhere, & it's gonna take so long for me to get to somewhere, Sometimes I feel so heavy hearted, but I can't explain cuz I'm so guarded. But that's a lonely road to travel, and a heavy load to bear. And it's a long, long way to heaven but I gotta get there Can you send an angel? Can you send me an angel...to guide me.

Sometimes I dread loneliness more than bores. Other times, the reverse.

It is difficult to live among people because silence is so difficult.

That only shows you have no heart,’ she said. But her eyes said that she knew he had a heart, and that was why she was afraid of him

Not only is there no question of solitude, but in the long run we may not choose our company.

but he only found her in the image that saturated his private and terrible solitude.

Throughout our lives we long to love ourselves more deeply and to feel connected with others. Instead, we often contract, fear intimacy, and suffer a bewildering sense of separation. We crave love, and yet we are lonely. Our delusion of being separate from one another, of being apart from all that is around us, gives rise to all of this pain.

As if to build a fence around the fatal emptiness inside her, she had to create a sunny person that she became. But if you peeled away the ornamental egos that she had built, there was only an abbys of nothingness and the intense thirst that came with it. Though she tried to forget it, the nothingness would visit her periodically - on a lonely rainy afternoon, or at dawn when she woke up from a nightmare. What she needed at such times was to be held by someone, anyone.

That's what I miss, being a real human.

Fear can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy. If you’re afraid you don’t commit yourself to life completely; fear makes you always, always hold something back. You shouldn’t be alone. It’s killing you; it’s undermining you. All the time, every day, you should be somewhere with people.

An entire life of solitude contradicts the purpose of our being, since death itself is scarcely an idea of more terror.

I'm a total wreck. Afraid to let anyone near. Afraid they'll see the real me.

Several times in my life I've gone through long periods without sex or any other kind of physical contact. The hunger it produces is deep and low; it's possible to lose track of it, to forget or fail to perceive how it's emptied everything out of you and made the world papery and thin. Touch starved, you brush against existence like a stick against dry leaves. You become insubstantial yourself, a hungry ghost.

Isn't it fascinating how long a few minutes seem when you are completely alone with not a familiar face in sight?

There are times when I am convinced I am unfit for any human relationship.

I am persuaded there is no such thing after all as a perfect enjoyment of solitude; for the more delicious the solitude the more one wants a companion.

April 27. Incapable of living with people, of speaking. Complete immersion in myself, thinking of myself. Apathetic, witless, fearful. I have nothing to say to anyone - never.

In all my life I'd never been approached this way, the car pulling up, the Where you going? It was something I wish had happened hundreds of times. I was a looker - someone who looked over at every car at every traffic light, hoping something would happen, and almost never finding anyone looking back - always everyone looking forwards, and every time I felt stupid. Why should people look at you? Why should they care?