Jerzy Kosinski Quotes

Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.

Relationship is a mirror in which you can see yourself, not as you would wish to be, but as you are.

When you look back... on your love affairs... what you really find out is that the only person you really go to bed with is yourself.

What you really have to know is one: yourself. And the only way you can know that one is in the mirror of the others. And the only way you can see into the mirror of the others is by love or its opposite—by profound emotion. Certainly not by curiosity—by dancing around asking, looking, making notes. You have to live relationships to know.

All my life, I will continue obstinately to write about love, solitude and passion among the kind of people I know. The rest don't interest me.

I don't believe I've ever truly been in love because I don't believe that I've known myself well enough in the past to allow someone to love me.

To develop our real selves, we need time alone for thought and meditation. To be always giving out and never pumping in, the well runs dry.

Your absence has not taught me how to be alone, it merely has shown that when together we cast a single shadow on the wall

In love, each man is his own personal challenge.

I am no longer alone with myself, and I can only artificially recall the scary and beautiful feeling of solitude. This is the shadow side of the fortune of love.

Once more I realize that solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people (all naturally solitary people must feel this) precludes awareness of one's self, so after a while the self no longer knows that it exists.

I wasn't really testing it on myself as much as I was learning from other people about what it meant to live and love with your whole heart, and then thinking, oh my god, I'm not doing that.

Turning 30 was really big for me. I can get really stuck on 'I don't like this or that about myself.' I've found that the only thing that breaks that for me is being able to spend time alone, going to the movies by myself or going to art museums alone. I do that a lot. I've discovered the importance of even 15 or 30 minutes a day where it is just me.

Love After Love all your life, whom you have ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.

We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds' feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable.

In the quiet moments of your day, what do you think and do? When you are with your Self and no one else, how does life proceed for you? Who are you when you are alone? Self-creation is a Holy Experience. It is sacred. It is you, deciding Who You Are.

To read your own mind is to look at your self and read your soul. Hatred becomes love and that is the path I am working on

I was a self-centered bore. I was masochistic, and only thought I was happy. When I woke up and said, "there must be something wrong with me", I grew up. Because I never understood myself, how could I hope to understand anyone else? That's why I can truly say that now I can give a woman love for the first time in my life, because I can understand her.

It's important not to lose who you are in a relationship just because it's nice to cuddle with somebody.

Share yourself with others after you have first spent some time with yourself.

When you are with everyone but me, you're with no one. When you are with no one but me, you're with everyone. Instead of being so bound up with everyone, be everyone. When you become that many, you're nothing. Empty.

Solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people... precludes awareness of one's self so that after a while the self no longer knows that it exists.

Most of your suffering comes from the lack of understanding of yourself and others.

Have I ever been in love? Really in love? And why is it that with each new guy I think I'm more in love with him than the last?