Henry David Thoreau Quotes

I have very few friends. I'm an associate of everybody and friend of none.

You can grow apart from people very quickly.

I've been out on the periphery.

Everything else outside me seems far, far away.

I felt like I might as well have been living in another part of the solar system.

You never come back, not all the way. Always there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier thin as the glass of a mirror, you never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and no one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad.

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

Even through the shut window pane, the world looked cold.

This is how it is with insomnia. Everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy. The insomnia distance of everything, you can't touch anything and nothing can touch you.

I felt a tremendous distance between myself and everything real.

Now they were as strangers; nay worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted.

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.

I detest my fellow-beings and do not feel that I am their fellow at all

I am more exempt and more distant than any man in the world.

I feel like an outsider, and I always will feel like one. I've always felt that I wasn't a member of any particular group.

I maintain my sanity by keeping my distance.

Nobody helps anybody.

Beauty set up distance between other people and me. It warped their behavior.

The manager is by himself. He can't mingle with his players. I enjoyed my players, but I could not socialize with them so I spent a lot of time alone in my hotel room. Those four walls kind of close in on you.

I think most writers feel like they're on the outside looking in much of the time. All of us feel, to a certain extent, alienated from the stuff going on around us.

The world doesn't understand me and I don't understand the world, that's why I've withdrawn from it.

Society's dark hull drifts further and further away. It is this place - the place of our separation, our distinction - that much of his poetry occupies.

I think, at the end of the day, I have an outsider's heart.

I wanted to be as far away from everybody as I could be. I found it difficult to be close to anybody, not just the guys in the band.

I not only lived physically away from my native land, but the values and critical judgments of those closest to me became stranger and stranger.