Elaine Dundy Quotes

Just having the pain of being alive without anything else, whether it's good or bad. There's a lot of serious songs on the record, you know. That song is just about feeling like a fish out of water, feeling like you don't belong on the planet sometimes.

I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family. Not even casually could I indicate any claims that I might rightly advance in any direction. I have not even any defense to offer for standing on this platform, holding on to this strap, letting myself be carried along by this tram, nor for the people who give way to the tram or walk quietly along or stand gazing into shop windows. Nobody asks me to put up a defense, indeed, but that is irrelevant.

I foresaw my life unfolding as an interminable stretch of nothingness and so I spent my years on Tinos floundering, feeling like a stand-in for myself, a proxy, as though my real self resided elsewhere, waiting to unite someday with this dimmer, more hollow self. I felt marooned. An exile in my own home

There was an enjoyment to being alive, he felt, that because of an underlying meaninglessness–like how a person alone for too long cannot feel comfortable when with others; cannot neglect that underlying the feeling of belongingness is the certainty, really, of loneliness, and nothingness, and so experiences life in that hurried, worthless way one experiences a mistake–he could no longer get at.

Then when dusk began to settle he would retrace his steps, back to his own world. And on the way home, a loneliness would always claim his heart. He could never quite get a grip on what it was. It just seemed that whatever lay waiting "out there" was all too vast, too overwhelming for him to possibly ever make a dent in.

There has never been a time in which I have been convinced from within myself that I am alive. You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are now fleeting away. I have a constant longing, my dear sir, to catch a glimpse of things as they may have been before they show themselves to me.

I felt a tremendous distance between myself and everything real.

I would have done anything to feel real again.

I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.

Dena had always been a loner. She did not feel connected to anything. Or anybody. She felt as if everybody else had come into the world with a set of instructions about how to live and someone had forgotten to give them to her. She had no clue what she was supposed to feel, so she had spent her life faking at being a human being, with no idea how other people felt. What was it like to really love someone? To really fit in or belong somewhere? She was quick, and a good mimic, so she learned at an early age to give the impression of a normal, happy girl, but inside she had always been lonely.

I'm full of restlessness. Not lonely, exactly - my head is racing with ideas. But it is that old treacherous feeling that real life is happening somewhere else, and I'm left out.

Life's an awfully lonesome affair. You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming.

I think every teenager feels like a Martian in something, whether it's in their family, I think, or in their school. I think every teenager, every human being has a sense that they don't belong somewhere.

Most of my films seem to be about people bewildered by the world around them, who don't fit into it and are trying to understand it.

You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming.

We're all alone in this world.

I think a lot of kids feel alone and slightly isolated and in their own world.

Even when I wrap my work and come home or whatever it is I try to do, I can identify with that feeling of being a little outside, of struggling to get back into normality.

I am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself; that beast astray that finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him.

It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must be a little in love with death!

Alienation and loneliness plant the seeds for rebellion and consciousness.

I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me. A nearby field, a ray of sunlight, a little bit of calm along with a bit of bread, not to feel oppressed by the knowledge that I exist, not to demand anything from others, and not to have others demand anything from me - this was denied me, like the spare change we might deny a beggar not because we're mean-hearted but because we don't feel like unbuttoning our coat.

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.

In the midst of friends, home, and kind parents, she was alone.

The years rolled slowly past and I found myself alone. Surrounded by strangers I thought were my friends, I found myself further and further from my home.