Diane Ackerman Quotes

For every five well-adjusted and smoothly functioning Americans, there are two who never had the chance to discover themselves. It may well be because they have never been alone with themselves.

When a man is extremely lonely, he starts discovering himself.

One man runs to his neighbor because he is looking for himself, and another because he wants to loose himself. Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison for you.

Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone.

When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world.

I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.

I like to spread myself out. Since I was a kid, I always recognized some void.

I had friends but I was spending a great deal of my time alone and for me that was vital because there's an awful lot you learn about yourself when you're alone.

Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

Writing is a tribute to solitude. It is choosing introversion over extroversion, lonely hours/days/weeks/years over fun and sociability.

I like the idea of isolation. I like the reality of it. You realize what you are... not that the knowledge is inevitably rewarding.

There have been moments in my life when I've become numb to certain aspects of myself that I found frightening. Or I've conformed to certain morals of society and then maybe rebelled or found a way out.

I was quite a different child, I felt isolated. In time, that level of being with yourself crystallises who you are, and you can see what other people are without being blinded by what they want from you.

Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.

Only in Relationship can you know yourself, not in abstraction and certainly not in isolation. The movement of behavior is the sure guide to yourself. It's the mirror of your consciousness; this mirror will reveal its content, the images, the attachments, the fears, the loneliness, the joy and sorrow. Poverty lies in running away from this, either in its sublimations or its identities.

I think it's good for a person to spend time alone. It gives them an opportunity to discover who they are and to figure out why they are always alone.

There was something special about being in a strange place, all alone in a mass of people even if you had just screwed up your life, or perhaps especially if you had just screwed up your life.

If you are never alone, you cannot know yourself.

You can forget who you are if you're alone too much.

What are we taking from people and what do we give is a life-long struggle, I think, for most of us. Who are we? Do we like who we are? Do we know who we are? Do we care? Does anyone care? That's such a big topic. I could tackle that in many movies. So could other people.

When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.

When we bury our feelings, we also bury ourselves. It means we exist in a state of alienation. We rarely know it, but we are lonely for ourselves.

I think something that I've learned from other actresses is to really take the time to get to know yourself, especially because I think that your sense of self is easy to lose when you're playing other people.

Loneliness Got a mind of its own The more people around The more you feel alone