Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

I don't belong in the world. That's what it is. Something separates me from other people.

I don't know what's the matter with me, why I'm so adept at distance, why I feel so remote from things, why life feels like a rumor.

I have always written about characters who fall somewhere in the spectrum between solitary and totally alienated.

Exile is more than a geographical concept. You can be an exile in your homeland, in your own house, in a room.

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.

Because no one thought she was a person, she had no one to really talk to.

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction--every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and excitement at about a million miles an hour.

He was slumped in the back, gazing out of the window, as though his parents were two people who had picked him up hitchhiking, connected to him merely by chance and proximity.

I felt a tremendous distance between myself and everything real.

Outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness. I look down into the warm, earthy world. Into a nest of lovers' beds, baby cribs, meal tables, all the solid commerce of life in this earth, and feel apart, enclosed in a wall of glass.

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.

I'm an outsider.

I feel like an outsider, and I always will feel like one. I've always felt that I wasn't a member of any particular group.

I think most writers feel like they're on the outside looking in much of the time. All of us feel, to a certain extent, alienated from the stuff going on around us.

I've always felt outside of things; I've always felt different.

The entire time I was in Portland, which was the five years, I had absolutely no contact with any of my family.

I not only lived physically away from my native land, but the values and critical judgments of those closest to me became stranger and stranger.

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.

If you feel like an outsider, you tend to observe things a lot more.

In all of my work, I think I'm exploring the idea that we are aliens to each other, how there is a huge distance that separates us all.

I'm used to living in a disassociated universe.

Alienation, I suppose, can't be hackneyed because it will always exist.

I belong nowhere and to no one.

I know what it feels like to be an outsider.