Etty Hillesum Quotes

What could be lonelier than trying to communicate?

I stay away from the telephone if at all possible.

I'm used to living in a disassociated universe.

I've done the thing where I stop being communicative, and I've been on the other side where the other person isn't communicating, and I become frustrated.

Sometimes, when I open my mouth, all hell breaks loose. Other times, I feel like a voice in the wilderness and I wonder, 'Does anybody get this?'

Walls are built up between people a hell of a damn sight faster than--broken down.

Now we're like planets, holding to each other from a great distance. [...] Now we're hundreds of miles apart, our short arms keep us lonely, no one hears what's in my head. [...] It's March, even the birds don't know what to do with themselves.

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.

In the end, the only thing between us was silence.

With this book in my hands, reading aloud to my friends, questioning them, explaining to them, I was made clearly to understand that I had no friends, that I was alone in the world. Because in not understanding the meaning of the words, neither I nor my friends, one thing became very clear and that was that there were ways of not understanding and that the difference between the non-understanding of one individual and the non-understanding of another created a world of terra firma even more solid than differences of understanding.

There is a chasm between me and the world outside of me. A gap so wide my feelings can't cross it. By the time my screams reach the other side, they have dwindled into groans.

More and more I find myself at a loss for words and didn't want to hear other people talking either. Their conversations seemed false and empty. I preferred to look at the sea, which said nothing and never made you feel alone.

It's a strange thing, to be talked about instead of talked to.

But after a moment a sense of waste and ruin overcame him. There they were, close together and safe and shut in; yet so chained to their separate destinies that they might as well been half the world apart.

I want to be understood by my country, but if I fail to be understood - what then?, I shall pass through my native land to one side, like a shower of slanting rain.

People talking without speaking,/ People listening without hearing...Sounds of Silence.

I think, increasingly, despite what we are being told is an ever more open world of communication, there is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes.

No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you'll see why.

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

Yet, in spite of this world-wide system of linkages, there is, at this very moment, a general feeling that communication is breaking down everywhere, on an unparalleled scale.

I have always written about characters who fall somewhere in the spectrum between solitary and totally alienated.

In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.

I love my friends and family, but I also love it when they can't find me and I can spend all day reading or walking all alone, in silence, eight thousand miles away from everyone. All alone and unreachable in a foreign country is one my most favorite possible things to be.

I need to go someplace faraway that doesn't have telephones and doesn't have a record player and doesn't have movie theaters and people walking down the street in order to not do anything.

Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.