Bret Easton Ellis Quotes

My theory is - we don’t really go that far into other people, even when we think we do. We hardly ever go in and bring them out. We just stand at the jaws of the cave, and strike a match, and ask quickly if anybody’s there.

Nobody knows anybody. Not that well.

I don't know what other people are like, I haven't been able to crawl inside anybody else.

In all of my work, I think I'm exploring the idea that we are aliens to each other, how there is a huge distance that separates us all.

I usually kept everybody at arm's distance.

One of the illusions that we live by is that we can really know anybody else, and we're often surprised by traits in people that we thought we knew very well. The struggle to overcome loneliness, which is sort of our universal burden, leads us to leap to conclusions about who other people are.

She watched the prairies the rivers, the towns slipping past at an untouchable distance below - and she noted that the sense of detachment one feels when looking at the earth from a plane was the same sense she felt when looking at people: only her distance from people seemed longer. - Dagny Taggart

More and more do I feel, as I advance in life, how little we really know of each other. Friendship seems to me like the touch of musical-glasses--it is only contact; but the glasses themselves, and their contents, remain quite distinct and unmingled.

You have to meet people where they are, and sometimes you have to leave them there.

People knew less of each other, perhaps, but they felt more free of each other, and so were more individual. The entire world was not for them only a push or a switch away. Strangers were strange, and sometimes with an exciting, beautiful strangeness. It may be better for humanity that we should communicate more and more.

People are islands,' she said. 'They don't really touch. However close they are, they're really quite separate. Even if they've been married for fifty years.

On connecting: Where does one person end and another person begin?

Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us enables us to live with them.

Sherlock Holmes becomes more human and more adept at fitting in with a lot of people, but he remains separate from the human race because he finds that a better place to observe that from. He stays on the mountain top because there, he can see clearly.

Sometimes I need what only you can provide: your absence.

One passes through the world knowing few, if any, of the important things about even the people with whom one has been from time to time in the closest intimacy.

artists ... all have a need that cannot be met by another human being.

…often between ourselves and those nearest and dearest to us there exists a reserve which it is very hard to overcome.

I like people too much or not at all.

I had always felt that I was an observer, never a participant; that I was watching from behind a thick glass wall as people went about the business of living--and did it with such ease, with a skill that they took for granted and that I had never known.

Vladimir: Did I ever leave you? Estragon: You let me go.

It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun.

I know nothing. I know no one. I’m lonely. Every time I see you, you’ve put up some new wall, and you never let me in.

She wanted nothing that he could offer her, except perhaps his absence.

Conor was no longer invisible. They all saw him now. But he was further away than ever.