Lady Bird Johnson Quotes

The proud, the cold untroubled heart of stone, that never mused on sorrow but its own.

For the air of lonely men surrounded him now, a still atmosphere in which the world around him slipped away, leaving him incapable of relationship, an atmosphere against which neither will nor longing availed. This was one of the significant earmarks of his life.

Most of my songs are about insensitivity of some kind.

Even in the presence of others he was completely alone.

I believe we shall come to care about people less and less. The more people one knows the easier it becomes to replace them. It's one of the curses of London.

The capacity for not feeling lonely can carry a very real price, that of feeling nothing at all.

Those who do not feel pain seldom think that it is felt.

You can meet lots of actors who are in their own world and do their own thing, and they have no idea what's going on and they don't know anyone's name around them.

I have a good poker face because I am half-dead inside.

I have this morbid fascination with being completely alienated from everybody, and a lot of the time I really do feel that way.

I won't disturb the slumber of feelings that have died. If I never loved I never would have cried...I am a rock.

My problem might be that even if I did go home, I wouldn’t belong there, among people who give without thinking and care without trying.

Pity those who don't feel anything at all

She had changed him. The ice was in his eyes and in his heart, like he had predicted with that song, but now they were deep embedded there, all the pain of the world. Not pain to make you feel for somebody else but pain to make you stop feeling.

When we suffer we have made it into a personal affair. We shut out all the suffering of mankind.

How often, in this cold and bitter world, is the warm heart thrown back upon itself! Cold, careless, are we of another's grief; we wrap ourselves in sullen selfishness.

How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

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.

Self-absorption intensifies isolation, but permits it to go unnoticed.

I may not know the weight of those things, but I could feel the weight of that one, so I kept it to myself. You know that things aren't going well for you when you can't even tell people the simplest fact about your life, just because they'll presume you're asking them to feel sorry for you. I suppose it's why you feel so far away from everyone, in the end; anything you can think of to tell them just ends up making them feel terrible.

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.

As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.

I have neither curiosity, interest, pain nor pleasure, in anything, good or evil, they can say of me. I feel only a slight disgust, and a sort of wonder that they presume to write my name.

One must go through periods of numbness that are harder to bear than grief.