David Henry Hwang Quotes

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.

I guess I'm quite used to not being understood rather than being understood.

Of course there are moments for everyone, and certainly for me, where you do feel misunderstood. You feel like you can't really connect. You do feel like you're alone in something.

What could be lonelier than trying to communicate?

I don't expect to be understood at all.

Misanthropy is born, I think, out of an almost oppressive sense of loneliness, a conviction that there's no one on earth who understands you. I don't think misanthropes hate people: They hate that people hate them.

Nobody can understand me.

Because I have become such a solitary, and not in the Aristotelian sense: not a beast, not a god. Rather, a loner troubled by longings, incapable of finding a suitable language and despairing at the impossibility of composing messages in a playable key--as if I no longer understood the codes used by the estimable people who wanted to hear from me and would have so much to reply if only the impediments were taken away.

Why can’t the world hear? I ask myself. Within a few moments I ask it many times. Because it doesn’t care, I finally answer, and I know I’m right. It’s like I’ve been chosen. But chosen for what? I ask.

There is a chasm between me and the world outside of me. A gap so wide my feelings can't cross it. By the time my screams reach the other side, they have dwindled into groans.

Each one of us is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain. We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them.

I was ready to love the whole world, but no one understood me, and I learned to hate.

It's a sad man my friend who's livin' in his own skin and can't stand the company.

We all have times when we go home at night and pull out our hair and feel misunderstood and lonely and like we're falling. I think the brain is such that there is always going to be something missing.

In talking, shyness and timidity distort the very meaning of my words. I don't pretend to know anybody well. People are like shadows to me and I am like a shadow.

I'm so used to being misunderstood.

There is no loneliness greater than the loneliness of a failure. The failure is a stranger in his own house.

Loneliness is the ultimate poverty.

My character in 'La Haine,' he's not bad; he's unhappy, and usually, people are like that. Most of us are angry.

I hated London; I was so lonely.

Wherever you are in the world, whoever you are with, sometimes you feel desperately lonely.

Sometimes I'm not into being a human.

It is sad when people can't connect, and the sense of desperation that you feel when there is nothing to look forward to.

Loneliness can become a downward spiral.

I just always assume no one is listening.