Anne Rice Quotes

You can sit up here, feeling above it all while knowing you’re not, coming to the lonely conclusion that the only thing you can ever really know about anyone is that you don’t know anything about them at all.

There are moments when you can only stand and stare, watching the world forget you as you remove yourself from it - when you overcome it and cease to exist as the person you were.

The man whose whole activity is diverted to inner meditation becomes insensible to all his surroundings. His passions are mere appearances, being sterile. They are dissipated in futile imaginings, producing nothing external to themselves.

I'm kind of in my own world.

I would be at home reading, because I felt so disconnected from humanity.

But inside or out, I was alone, and I was beginning to wonder if I always had been, if I always would be.

A lone walker is both present and detached, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation.

Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them

They cared for no one, they were outside humanity, and death, had it come, would only have continued their pursuit of a retreating horizon.

Here, in my solitude, I have the feeling that I contain too much humanity.

--then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

I felt that I was not, never had been and never would be a living part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply meaningful world around me.

These days I must take the world in small and carefully measured doses. It is a sort of homeopathic cure I am undergoing, though I am not certain what this cure is meant to mend. Perhaps I am learning to live amongst the living again. Practising, I mean. But no, that is not it. Being here is just a way of not being anywhere.

I paint with my back to the world

To be alone and to be drunk with your own aloneness is what meditation is all about. Be in the world, but don't be of it.

Your empty eyes seem to pass me by and leave me dancing with myself.

Why am I always looking at life through a window?

He liked the loneliness of inner space, the sense of being forgotten by the world.

Lonely people console themselves with self-absorption or curiosity.

I must tell you that I should really like to think there's something wrong with me- Because, if there isn't, then there's something wrong with the world itself-and that's much more frightening! That would be terrible. So I'd rather believe there is something wrong with me, that could be put right.

But it’s only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it.

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion; in order to serve others better, one has to hold them at a distance for a time. But where can one find the solitude necessary to vigor, the deep breath in which the mind collects itself and courage gauges its strength? There remain big cities.

It is strange people should be so greedy, when they are alone in the world.

When you're at your best, you're analyzing yourself and becoming increasingly isolated from a broader narrative.

Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!