Esther Dyson Quotes

I try not to spend too much time online but at the same time if I didn't, I'd be isolated.

The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.

Spy novels are traditionally about lone wolves, but how many people actually live like that?

Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.

I guess I'm pretty much of a lone wolf. I don't say I don't like people at all, but, to tell you the truth, I only like it then if I have a chance to look deep into their hearts and their minds.

Rather than bringing me closer to others, the time that I spend online isolates me from the most important people in my life, my family, my friends, my neighbourhood, my community.

Writing can be a very solitary profession, and when deadlines are looming, it's tempting to glue myself to my desk, but I try to make sure I get out a few times a month with friends just so I don't forget what it means to be social.

And remember don't high post when you're far from home, and high posting when you're all alone.

You can't open anything after your 50. You have to wait 'til people stop by the house. 'Oh my God, I'm glad you're here.'

Absolutely lonely people have few personal interactions of any kind.

Social connection is such a basic feature of human experience that when we are deprived of it, we suffer.

I didn't have any vices before the Internet. There are a lot of cracks in the day, moments where you don't know what to do next, so you have a little hole where you look at your phone. You want something that will mean you're not alone in that moment.

I think if you alienate people and just focus on your work then it just becomes lonely and it's not fun anymore.

There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to.

I'd always lived with people - my family, or had people living with me, because I'd never liked being on my own.

I think people are isolated because of the nature of human consciousness, and they like it when they feel the connection between themselves and someone else.

When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships.

Where are all our friends?

The Internet has played a major role in undermining public morality.

I sound like an old man when I talk about the Internet, but I am actually worried about what it's doing to our brains and our sense of connection.

Think about back in the day when we had Archie Bunker, 'The Jeffersons.' We had stuff to sit down and share and laugh at. The Internet has made it so we don't have to sit together anymore. It's so self-absorbed. No one has to talk to each other anymore, and people don't realize that that is killing us.

E-mail is a whole new way of being friends with people: intimate but not, chatty but not, communicative but not; in short, friends but not. What a breakthrough. How did we ever live without it? I have more to say on this subject, but I have to answer an instant message from someone I almost know.

For me, I value connection a lot, talking to people and connecting. Don't get me wrong: I enjoy having my own time, but I think it's really important to have that connection, so living on Mars would be a struggle for me.

It turns out that people who are more socially connected to family, to friends, to community, are happier, they're physically healthier, and they live longer than people who are less well connected.

I think I am very anti-social.