Thomas Bernhard Quotes

Many people must live and die alone, even in Winesburg.

The first thing I remember about the world and I pray that it may be the last is that I was a stranger in it. This feeling, which everyone has in some degree, and which is, at once, the glory and desolation of homo sapiens , provides the only thread of consistency that I can detect in my life.

I think that we're all totally isolated beings and always will be.

Nobody knows me.

There was an enjoyment to being alive, he felt, that because of an underlying meaninglessness–like how a person alone for too long cannot feel comfortable when with others; cannot neglect that underlying the feeling of belongingness is the certainty, really, of loneliness, and nothingness, and so experiences life in that hurried, worthless way one experiences a mistake–he could no longer get at.

I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my soul desirous to be at origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects.

Like many people, I have no religion, and I am just sitting in a small boat drifting with the tide. I live in the doubts of my duty.... I think there is dignity in this, just to go on working.... Today we stand naked, defenseless, and more alone than at any time in history. We are waiting for something, perhaps another miracle, perhaps the Martians. Who knows?

The bonds between ourselves and another person exists only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind besides Tess was only a passing thought. Even to friends she was no more than a frequently passing thought.

I felt a bit bookish, cut off from life.

I like being alone and I think this movie, as much as it is an investigation of connection and people bonding, I also think it's just as much about loneliness.

I'm not very interested in people. I recognize it in myself - there is a basic indifference toward people.

In the past I have never thought about loneliness when working, and I don't think about it now. Yet there must be a reason for the fact that so many people talk about it.

Life's an awfully lonesome affair. You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming.

I belong nowhere and to no one.

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.

I don't ever feel like anybody knows who I am.

You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming.

We're all alone in this world.

We're all outsiders in a way. We're all alone and can become very lonely.

There aren't any people aligned with me passionately.

Sometimes I'm not into being a human.

I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family. Not even casually could I indicate any claims that I might rightly advance in any direction. I have not even any defense to offer for standing on this platform, holding on to this strap, letting myself be carried along by this tram, nor for the people who give way to the tram or walk quietly along or stand gazing into shop windows. Nobody asks me to put up a defense, indeed, but that is irrelevant.

I am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself; that beast astray that finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him.

Once you're alienated, you're on your own. That takes you to the world of the existential, where things just kind of float.