Rick Riordan Quotes

That was the worst part about having cancer, sometimes: The physical evidence of disease separates you from other people.

I was modest--they accused me of being crafty: I became secretive. I felt deeply good and evil--nobody caressed me, everybody offended me: I became rancorous. I was gloomy--other children were merry and talkative. I felt myself superior to them--but was considered inferior: I became envious. I was ready to love the whole world--none understood me: and I learned to hate.

I was ready to love the whole world, but no one understood me, and I learned to hate.

I really do wish people could understand me some day.

The one thing I’d learned was that having someone with you all the time did not take away the loneliness. You could be surrounded by people and be lonely. Something was missing. I could almost pinpoint it, but right when it was within my grasp I forgot; it just slipped away.

The brief relief of seeing other people when I leave my room turns into a desperate need to be alone, and then being alone turns into a terrible fear that I will have no friends, I will be alone in this world and in my life. I will eventually be so crazy from this black wave, which seems to be taking over my head with increasing frequency, that one day I will just kill myself, not for any great, thoughtful existential reasons, but because I need immediate relief.

And as I stood there in the hallway―alone―trying to understand what had just happened and why, I realized the truth: I wasn't worth an explanation―not even a reaction. Not in your eyes.

I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There's always going to be a kind of tidal movement back and forth between the two.

I think that all writers feel alienated. ... I know that I do. ... I still feel, as I think most creative people do, absolutely isolated.

Genius is lonely without the surrounding presence of a people to inspire it.

the lonliest sound in the world is other people making love.

I feel like people didn't understand where I was about to go. And a lot of people still don't.

I crawled back into myself all alone, just delighted to observe that I was even more miserable than before, because I had brought a new kind of distress and something that resembled true feeling into my solitude.

Even people within a relationship can be really alone, and then have to go outside of it in order to find something, whatever it is. It may be very bizarre and maybe something very tender.

This city desert makes you feel so cold. It's got so many people, but it's got no soul.

I'm surrounded by people and feel alone.

Success definitely brings on loneliness. People think you're lucky, that you have everything. They think you can go anywhere and do anything, but that's not the point. One hungers for the basic stuff.

Sometimes you don't realize how dependent you are on just a few people, and if they disappear, suddenly you can be thrown on your own resources, which may be limited, and you're really in a fix. So I think that's authentic to the experience that it might be very lonely.

Her absence had felt like torture--almost a form of personal punishment. He had nobody to discuss his feelings with, and for the first time he realised with appalling clarity what a destructive hold she had over him.

She wished there was some place where she could go to hum it out loud. Some kind of music was too private to sing in a house cram fall of people. It was funny, too, how lonesome a person could be in a crowded house.

Writing is a sad process, sitting on your ass for many, many hours, alone in a room, smelling like coffee, sadness and bitterness, and watching your youth leave.

I was telling some people in my dressing room some of my other stories, my psychotic break, and blah, blah, blah, and no, they kind of look at you and it's just not what they wanted to hear.

People who were born alone are defined by feelings like "Who's gonna be with me when I die? Who will ever understand me? Will I always feel so alone? Maybe if I write a book..." and you forget that that doesn't help you so much.

Stupid people can cause problems, but it usually takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe.

All along — not only since she left, but for a decade before — I had been imagining her without listening, without knowing that she made as a poor a window as I did. And so I could not imagine her as a person who could feel fear, who could feel isolated in a roomful of people, who could be shy about her record collection because it was too personal to share. Someone who might have read travel books to escape having to live in the town that so many people escape to. Someone who — because no one thought she was a person — had no one to really talk to.