Simeon Strunsky Quotes

I become a hermit when I am in Los Angeles and I don't leave my apartment at all from Monday through Thursday unless I have to and I don't get much sleep.

New York City is a place where you can lock yourself up in your little studio apartment, and not go outside at all, and not feel in the slightest guilty about it.

The most solitary I ever felt was when I was living in New York. I used to live in Enrico Caruso's old apartment, and I had a special staircase that took me up to the roof. There was nobody up there.

I miss the anonymity that comes with New York because everyone around you is so immersed in their own journey.

I'm very social, and in a place like New York, even if you're alone on the subway, you never feel lonely.

I've always lived in a city. I'm very social, and in a place like New York, even if you're alone on the subway, you never feel lonely.

I love New York! You walk around, nobody notices you, you don't notice anybody, you're in your own little world.

In cities no one is quiet but many are lonely; in the country, people are quiet but few are lonely.

New York is tough on lonely people.

I liked Los Angeles for odd reasons. For one, there was no sense of community. You were really left to your own resources, spending this inordinate amount of time alone in a balloon of an automobile. I liked that a lot.

There is a dark side to being single in a great big city like New York. There's this sense of isolation and I think you can get fairly desperate.

The city can be the loneliest place of all.

I walk a lot in New York, not for the exercise but to get from place to place, and because it's the way of having the least contact with human beings.

I prayed for the city to be cleared of people, for the gift of being alone—a-l-o-n-e: which is the one New York prayer that rarely gets lost or delayed in channels, and in no time at all everything I touched turned to solid loneliness.

She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.

New York was a city where you could be frozen to death in the midst of a busy street and nobody would notice.

in the big city nobody has time to make friends. The big city is a big solitude.

I have at last, after several months' experience, made up my mind that [New York] is a splendid desert--a domed and steepled solitude, where the stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race.

Imagine all human beings swept off the face of the earth, excepting one man. Imagine this man in some vast city, New York or London. Imagine him on the third or fourth day of his solitude sitting in a house and hearing a ring at the door-bell!

Solitude in the city is about the lack of other people or rather their distance beyond a door or wall, but in remote places it isn’t an absence but the presence of something else, a kind of humming silence in which solitude seems as natural to your species as to any other, words strange rocks you may or may not turn over.

There are no small number of people in this world who, solitary by nature, always try to go back into their shell like a hermit crab or a snail.

I was in L.A. in '08. It was a cold Saturday night. I had spread my phone number out to a score of women and was just indulging this sweet, sad, elegiac, bale loneliness - don't tell me you haven't been there.

In L.A., you really are in your car all day alone, and there's very little public life.

Cities can be paradoxical places. In the mornings they buzz with commuters, in the evenings they come alive with diners and partygoers, at weekends the streets fill with shoppers and market traders. But amidst the hustle and bustle, even the greatest city can be a lonely place.

Maybe I am becoming a hermit, opening the door for only a few special animals? Maybe my skull is too crowded and it has no opening through which to feed it soup?