Joel Stein Quotes

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

Be alone even when there's a million people around, because tomorrow it will be a different million people.

The wise person often shuns society for fear of being bored.

I felt a bit bookish, cut off from life.

I like being alone and I think this movie, as much as it is an investigation of connection and people bonding, I also think it's just as much about loneliness.

For me, books have always been a way to feel less alone while being alone. Perhaps if I was depressed and isolated, just communicating with these authors through their sentences helped me.

I have contact with no one involved in the trial.

When you stop to think about it, so many films today where we don't have that kind of contact are films about alienation. About alienated feelings. We are much more alienated from our colleagues nowadays.

I'm somewhat in my own cloud.

One of the things reading does, it makes your loneliness manageable if you are an essentially lonely person.

I live alone, so I don't really talk to anyone once I'm home. I have some silent nights.

I'm used to living in a disassociated universe.

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

When everyone goes home, you're stuck with yourself.

I've always kind of lived in my own world.

All these cities I go to, I never see them. They may be the most beautiful places in the world, but I'll just usually go to the nearest bar. I need a couple of hours by myself.

Even though I write about the human race, the further away from them, the better I feel. Two miles is great; two thousand miles is beautiful.

I feel like I'm in my own world: in the world but not a part of it.

I felt like I might as well have been living in another part of the solar system.

Those reflective moments for me usually come from loneliness and separation from people.

I'm kind of in my own world.

I am truly a "lone traveler" and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart.

I live here among the ignorant like a lost man in fact like one whom the rest seems careless of having anything to do with — they hardly dare talk in my company for fear I shoud mention them in my writings & I find more pleasure in wandering the fields then in mixing among my silent neighbours who are insensible of everything but toiling & talking of it & that to no purpose.

If there is anything good about exile, it is that it teaches one humility. It accelerates one’s drift into isolation, an absolute perspective. Into the condition at which all one is left with is oneself and one’s language, with nobody or nothing in between. Exile brings you overnight where it would normally take a lifetime to go.

He walked on in silence, the solitary sound of his footsteps echoing in his head, as in a deserted street, at dawn. His solitude was so complete, beneath a lovely sky as mellow and serene as a good conscience, amid that busy throng, that he was amazed at his own existence; he must be somebody else's nightmare, and whoever it was would certainly awaken soon.