George Eliot Quotes

Even at church, people would not shake my hand.

People would get up and leave so they would not have to sit anywhere near me.

I was ostracized by my community.

You can't always be pushing people away. Someday nobody'll come back.

One day you're racing about the business of life, harried but vital, a part of its machinery. Then gradually but inexorably you are left out, until one day you find the machinery tearing along without you - and nobody even notices.

The people I used to be surrounded by are getting along without me. Somehow, that really bugs me.

He was slumped in the back, gazing out of the window, as though his parents were two people who had picked him up hitchhiking, connected to him merely by chance and proximity.

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

I only had the right to sit in the shadows of the world,in complete silence. Whether I was laughed at, or told I was discusting, or thought of as unpleasant I would sit in the shadows.

It is dreadful the way all the comfortable, happy people stay off to themselves.

What have I to do with millions [of people]? The eighty I know despise me.

I know nothing. I know no one. I’m lonely. Every time I see you, you’ve put up some new wall, and you never let me in.

There is a definite loneliness in the game. Most people stay away from you since they think they're intruding upon your time. And after the ball game, when it's 11 o'clock and you want to eat dinner some place, the restaurants are closed.

Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.

Beauty set up distance between other people and me. It warped their behavior.

Sometimes you feel sad to be left out of a big debate.

At school I pretended I had a normal life, but I felt lonely all the time and different from everyone else. I never felt like I fit in, and I wasn't allowed to participate in after-school activities, go to sports events or parties or date boys. Many times I had to make up stories about why I couldn't do anything with my classmates.

I think most writers feel like they're on the outside looking in much of the time. All of us feel, to a certain extent, alienated from the stuff going on around us.

The thing is, I really can't relate to anyone my own age. Not in a superior way - an inferior way, if anything. Socially, I have no idea what my friends are talking about. I don't listen to any new music. I feel very secluded.

It wasn't that I got pinned against my locker, but I was intensely aware that the things I valued weren't shared by anyone. Girls didn't like me, and I had few friends.

I think isolation is one of the greatest problems, an ever-growing obstacle to political solidarity.

I'd get invited to parties, and instead it would be these abandoned houses.

Isolation is a self-defeating dream.

I never really had any close friends in India, and I felt a terrible loneliness and isolation for many years. Westernized Indians don't like my books and I tend not to like westernized Indians - so we're quits.

The entire time I was in Portland, which was the five years, I had absolutely no contact with any of my family.