Ismail Kadare Quotes

I felt like I might as well have been living in another part of the solar system.

I felt a tremendous distance between myself and everything real.

In our hearts... there must abide some pity for those people who have always felt themselves to be separate from even their most familiar surroundings, those people who either are foreigners or who suffer a singular point of view that makes them feel as if they’re foreigners - even in their native lands. In our hearts... there also abides a certain suspicion that such people need to feel set apart from their society. But people who initiate loneliness are no less lonely than those who are suddenly surprised by loneliness, nor are they undeserving of our pity.

I am more exempt and more distant than any man in the world.

The manager is by himself. He can't mingle with his players. I enjoyed my players, but I could not socialize with them so I spent a lot of time alone in my hotel room. Those four walls kind of close in on you.

Exile is more than a geographical concept. You can be an exile in your homeland, in your own house, in a room.

I've been out on the periphery.

Everything else outside me seems far, far away.

I'm an outsider, I guess.

I stand at a distance, like a person who comes from another world.

She watched the prairies the rivers, the towns slipping past at an untouchable distance below - and she noted that the sense of detachment one feels when looking at the earth from a plane was the same sense she felt when looking at people: only her distance from people seemed longer. - Dagny Taggart

I stood among them, but not of them: in a shroud of thoughts which were not their thoughts.

I have come one step away from everything. And here I stay, far from everything, one step away.

I had always felt that I was an observer, never a participant; that I was watching from behind a thick glass wall as people went about the business of living--and did it with such ease, with a skill that they took for granted and that I had never known.

Conor was no longer invisible. They all saw him now. But he was further away than ever.

Her face was a stranger’s face, which was as it should be. Love each other from the day we are born to the day we die, we are still strangers every minute, and nobody should forget that, even though we have to.

I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have.

I feel like an outsider, and I always will feel like one. I've always felt that I wasn't a member of any particular group.

I have very few friends. I'm an associate of everybody and friend of none.

The world doesn't understand me and I don't understand the world, that's why I've withdrawn from it.

Society's dark hull drifts further and further away. It is this place - the place of our separation, our distinction - that much of his poetry occupies.

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

In a certain sense, a writer is an exile, an outsider, always reporting on things, and it is part of his life to keep on the move. Travel is natural.

I do feel like an outsider, but I don't lose any sleep over it.

I wanted to be as far away from everybody as I could be. I found it difficult to be close to anybody, not just the guys in the band.