Tom Stoppard Quotes

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.

What now on the other hand makes people sociable is their incapacity to endure solitude and thus themselves.

You have to be with other people, he thought. In order to live at all. I mean before they came here I could stand it... But now it has changed. You can't go back, he thought. You can't go from people to nonpeople." - J.R. Isidore

Not only is there no question of solitude, but in the long run we may not choose our company.

Solitude is only a good idea if you have the right people along to share it.

Solitude is a condition best enjoyed in company.

There is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along.

Alone, lonely people talk to themselves. In company, they often continue.

I am persuaded there is no such thing after all as a perfect enjoyment of solitude; for the more delicious the solitude the more one wants a companion.

It explains why people come home from work or school and immediately switch on the television. They are not interested in the program much of the time, they do not even know what is on. But they are desperate for the sound of another human voice in their lives

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 want to be around people, not crickets.

If loneliness is part of our essence, that is, our essential nature, that is only because of the way, in practical terms, we actually exist; that is, the way we move and work and live in the world.

I'm not crazy about having lots of time to myself. Whenever I come back from filming away, I immediately want to go and see my friends and my family and re-establish my life. I can fill time when I'm alone, but I love being around other people.

Being-alone is a deficient mode of being-with; its possibility is a proof for the latter.

I can go days without meaningful human interaction.

The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.

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 say I like to be alone, yet I am always surrounded by people.

I cannot live alone.

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.

I've always been someone who needs someone with them to poke and annoy. I'm useless at being by myself.

It takes effort to not be lonely.

I have always been very interested in the idea of loneliness and the presumption that romantic relationships are supposed to rid you of that.

So it is that Lonely Places attract as many lonely people as they produce, and the loneliness we see in them is partly in ourselves.