Paul Fleischman Quotes

Every year in my life, I trust fewer and fewer people.

I don't have many friends.

I don't have many friends; I'm very much a loner. As a child I was very isolated, and I've never been really close to anyone.

I don't have any friends; I just have lawyers.

I don't have many friends.

The rare few, who, early in life have rid themselves of the friendship of the many.

We should be asking the hard questions that mean you may not have any friends at all—and some of us don’t.

What loneliness is more lonely than mistrust.

As soon as you're locking doors, you're narrowing your circle. And your circle gets smaller and smaller until it's finally just yourself and your buddy and you've got no one to party with.

When I was in Paris I was at a big club in a major city, but nobody really cared about each other. It didn't have that family feeling, I didn't see any team spirit.

I never felt like I belong to anything - to any groups of friends. I never really had that.

I have very few friends.

We are a most solitary people, and we live, repelled by one another, in the gray, outcast cities of Cain.

I have lately got back to that glorious society called Solitude, where we meet our friends continually, and can imagine the outside world also to be peopled. Yet some of my acquaintance would fain hustle me into the almshouse for the sake of society, as if I were pining for that diet, when I seem to myself a most befriended man, and find constant employment. However, they do not believe a word I say.

If you haven't already noticed, all my books are about a lonely person looking for some way to connect with other people.In a way, that is the opposite of the American Dream: to get so rich you can rise above the rabble, all those people on the freeway or, worse, the bus.

I'm with a crowd but oh so alone.

No one has the least regard for the man; with them all, he has been an object of avoidance, suspicion, and aversion; but the spark of life within him is curiously separable from himself now, and they have a deep interest in it, probably because it IS life, and they are living and must die.

After long enough, everyone in the world will be you enemy.

Solitude does not consist in living alone; it consists in living with others, with people who take no interest in you.

I have never belonged wholeheartedly to country or State, to my circle of friends or even to my own family... Such isolation is sometimes bitter, but I do not regret being cut off from the understanding and sympathy of other men. I lose something by it,to be sure, but I am compensated for it in being rendered independent of the customs, opinions and prejudices of others, and am not tempted to rest my peace of mind upon such shifting foundations.

I am alone in this white, garden-rimmed street. Alone and free. But this freedom is rather like death.

in the big city nobody has time to make friends. The big city is a big solitude.

I think with success you do get a little more guarded and you start to change your friends. You become more isolated. And you start hanging around with people who have money! I think that's the biggest thing. Once you do get a bit of change in your pocket, you start hanging around with other people who have some change. It was kind of strange to all of a sudden go from one extreme-Manhattan-to where I went, upstate New York. But I did it because I was dying in the city. I couldn't take it. I couldn't take one more dinner party. I couldn't take one more party, period.

Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?

Lately he'd been seen going out less and less, becoming that strangest of animals in a small town: a loner.