William Maclay Quotes

I had very strict parents. My two brothers were power and freedom. I was powerlessness and seclusion.

Generally, I like all islands. There, it is easier to rule.

Sovereignty, loyalty, and solitude.

I am such a notorious hermit - almost pathological. And, I'm not a hoarder. But that's just a symptom of things that I do feel.

Nothing is quite as bad as being without privacy and lonely at the same time.

And this that you call solitude is in fact a big crowd.

Isolation from power makes men look for a mob in which they can be strong.

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

At any moment solitude may put on the face of loneliness.

The object in America is to avoid contact, to treat all as foes unless they're known to be friends. Here you have a million crabs living in a million crevices. ... But the garden's greatest benefit, I feel, as not relief to the eyes, but to make the eyes sees our neighbors.

I call myself the assistant cult leader.

As President, I will not be the last to know what is going on in my command.

Even though I get a lot done with my solitude, and I make the best use of it possible, I always think solitude is an interlude in a period of time, which is populated by others.

To the men exposed to his rule Lymond never appeared ill: he was never tired; he was never worried, or pained, or disappointed, or passionately angry. If he rested, he did so alone; if he slept, he took good care to sleep apart. “—I sometimes doubt if he’s human,” said Will, speaking his thought aloud. “It’s probably all done with wheels.

Loneliness comes in two basic varieties. When it results from a desire for solitude, loneliness is a door we close against the world. When the world instead rejects us, loneliness is an open door, unused.

I know, you've been here a year, you think these people are normal. Well, they're not. WE'RE not. I look in the library, I call up books on my desk. Old ones, because they won't let us have anything new, but I've got a pretty good idea what children are, and we're not children. Children can lose sometimes, and nobody cares. Children aren't in armies, they aren't COMMANDERS, they don't rule over forty other kids, it's more than anybody can take and not get crazy.

None of you understand. I'm not locked up in here with YOU. You're locked up in here with ME.

I don't beef with people, because I don't be around people. Nobody can't say nothing about me, because ain't nobody know nothing about me.

It was better to be in a jail where you could bang the walls than in a jail you could not see.

For the present you can just call me the Kingfish.

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

If you want to see your plays performed the way you wrote them, become President.

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

Air travel reminds us who we are. It's the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern. The process removes us from the world and sets us apart from each other. We wander in the ambient noise, checking one more time for the flight coupon, the boarding pass, the visa. The process convinces us that at any moment we may have to submit to the force that is implied in all this, the unknown authority behind it, behind the categories, the languages we don't understand. This vast terminal has been erected to examine souls.

They stood there, King of the Hill, Top of the Heap, Ruler of All They Surveyed, Unimpeachable Monarchs and Presidents, trying to understand what it meant to own a world and how big a world really was.