Lawrence Wright Quotes

… a rude and remote kingdom

Wyoming - God bless you in Wyoming - it's very boring, and it's the most isolated place on Earth.

In the bare room under the old library on the hill in the town at the tip of the small peninsula on the cold island so far from everything else, I lived among strangers and birds.

I build a wall around myself. I'm hard to get to know. Any trait you have, it gets worse as you go along.

I know I can be very standoffish.

Australia, to the rest of the world, is just far away, and Australia in the Thirties was the faraway of the faraway.

I just don't have this magnetic personality that everyone is drawn to. I don't make friends easily... I'm just not one of those people.

O solitude, where are the charms That sages have seen in thy face? Better dwell in the midst of alarms, Than reign in this horrible place.

I don't have no friends. I don't want no friends. That's how I feel.

I'm not fit company for man or beast.

I usually kept everybody at arm's distance.

When we lived in Juneau, Alaska, it was a town of about 7,000 people, and totally isolated; the only way to get to it was by ship.

We were so far back in the woods, they almost had to pipe in sunlight.

I've been with my husband and friends for so long, I've forgotten what is unappealing to new people.

The desert feels Irish in a way - lonely and barren.

All looked distant and peaceful and strange. The shore seemed refined, far away, unreal. Already the little distance they had sailed had put them far from it and given it the changed look, the composed look, of something receding in which one has no longer any part.

p.61 He [Roark] was usually disliked, from the first sight of his face, anywhere he went. His face was closed like the door of a safety vault; things locked in safety vaults are valuable; men did not care to feel that. He was a cold, disquieting presence in the room; his presence had a strange quality: it made itself felt and yet it made them feel that he was not there; or perhaps that he was and they weren't.

My land is bare of chattering folk; / the clouds are low along the ridges, / and sweet's the air with curly smoke / from all my burning bridges.

I really was alone, and the only thing worse than being alone was having everyone else see how lonely you were

I'm consumed by the chill of solitary.

I have always had plenty of friends, and now at age sixty, I face four walls as a common prisoner.

empty and closed, hovering in some frozen netherworld neither sun nor rain could thaw.

It's the silence I imagine in the rest of the world, the silence of an endless ocean and uninhabitable island, a silence that can be seen from space.

Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.

I am alone in this white, garden-rimmed street. Alone and free. But this freedom is rather like death.