Paulo Coelho Quotes

Not understanding anything is terrible, because I communicate very much in my real life.

She looked at him, and oh, the weariness to her, of the effort to understand another language, the weariness of hearing him, attending to him, making out who he was, as he stood there fair-bearded and alien, looking at her. She knew something of him, of his eyes. But she could not grasp him. She closed her eyes.

There are some days when no matter what I say it feels like I'm far away in another country & whoever is doing the translating has had far too much to drink.

The world doesn't understand me and I don't understand the world, that's why I've withdrawn from it.

You can't put abandonment and alienation under arrest.

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.

Most of my films seem to be about people bewildered by the world around them, who don't fit into it and are trying to understand it.

Nobody can understand me.

There,” she said triumphantly. “Like that.” He began to wonder if they were speaking the same language. “Like what?” “That! What you just said.” He crossed his arms. It seemed the only acceptable reply. If she couldn’t speak in complete sentences, he saw no reason why he had to speak at all.

This is the ultimate cruelty, isn't it? That I can talk and talk and to anyone listening, it's only air--too rich a diet to be swallowed by a mundane world.

Does nobody understand?

I actually don't understand a word Paula's saying anymore. It's like a new language.

Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression's actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it.

She is written in a foreign tongue.

We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality.

People, unprotected by their roles, become isolated in beauty and intellect and illness and confusion.

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

I wasn't being bullied at school at this point. I had a group of friends, and I was isolated because I wasn't communicating with my parents. I wasn't telling them what I was going through.

I don't think you ever know in yourself whether you have gone mad. You exist in a bubble. There comes a point where you suddenly feel not really a part of the world, you're just passing through.

I think the degree of alienation and despair is more universal.

Loneliness is, I think, people's biggest fear, whether they are conscious of it or not.

Isolation is a dream killer.

We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness.

I'm perpetually lonely.

Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.