Leonard Cohen Quotes

I created the OASIS because I never felt at home in the real world. I didn't know how to connect with the people there.

I could see the road ahead of me. I was poor and I was going to stay poor. But I didn't particularly want money. I didn't know what I wanted. Yes, I did. I wanted someplace to hide out, someplace where one didn't have to do anything. The thought of being something didn't only appall me, it sickened me . . . To do things, to be part of family picnics, Christmas, the 4th of July, Labor Day, Mother's Day . . . was a man born just to endure those things and then die? I would rather be a dishwasher, return alone to a tiny room and drink myself to sleep.

With technology, there is so much isolation with people now, that there are very few places where you can connect.

I'm not a registered Republican or Democrat. I don't even vote.

Disaffection stalks around us.

I sometimes found myself more comfortable around my TV family than I did with my own parents and sister.

When people told me 'It's great to be here', they meant at the house, not with me.

There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.

I think the degree of alienation and despair is more universal.

I didn't have any vices before the Internet. There are a lot of cracks in the day, moments where you don't know what to do next, so you have a little hole where you look at your phone. You want something that will mean you're not alone in that moment.

There's a generation of people I think without a strong connection to family, to religion, to civic duty. They have a real disassociation from the problems of the world.

A big part of depression is feeling really lonely, even if you're in a room full of a million people.

The smartphones and the computer separates everybody, makes you think that you don't need nobody else.

I don't listen to the news or read newspapers. I don't know what's going on in this world, or why I should vote for George McGovern or Richard Nixon. I don't have enough time.

Though we are more prosperous a nation and more connected a global community than ever before, many of us still feel lonely, disoriented and uncertain of the future.

There are several factors in modern society that contribute to loneliness. One is that we are more mobile than we have been in decades past, which is fantastic in many respects, but also leads to us to move away from communities that we grew up with and got to know over time.

Loneliness can become a downward spiral.

A lot of the time in modern Britain, certainly in urban life, we barely have any contact at all with the people around us.

I don't care if your world is ending today because I wasn't invited to it anyway.

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

She didn't want to have anything to do with the party. She was tired of feeling like she didn't fit in, but she didn't want to go home, either, because she was a tired of being lonely and she was a little drunk.

Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression's actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it.

I know nothing. I know no one. I’m lonely. Every time I see you, you’ve put up some new wall, and you never let me in.

So, this is how it's become? This is how I've become? A walking contradiction? I'm surrounded by people and feel alone. I claim to crave a bit of normalcy but now that I have some, it's like I don't know what to do with it, I don't know how to be a normal person anymore.

All through the nineties I met people. Crowds of people. Met and met and met, until it seemed that people were born and hastily grew up, just to be met.