Denis Johnson Quotes

I don't think words reach people. Maybe nothing does

Now we're like planets, holding to each other from a great distance. [...] Now we're hundreds of miles apart, our short arms keep us lonely, no one hears what's in my head. [...] It's March, even the birds don't know what to do with themselves.

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.

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.

Weeks go by, and I don't talk to another living soul.

I lived alone, I didn't know anybody in New York, and I was definitely a recluse. It had been, like, two weeks, and I realized I hadn't said anything. I was laying in bed, and I was like, 'Hello?' I just talked to hear my own voice. And it was such a strange feeling.

Nothing echoes like an empty mailbox.

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.

I had always felt that I was an observer, never a participant; that I was watching from behind a thick glass wall as people went about the business of living--and did it with such ease, with a skill that they took for granted and that I had never known.

Isolation is a self-defeating dream.

I am alone; I am always alone no matter what.

The capacity for not feeling lonely can carry a very real price, that of feeling nothing at all.

I live like a Hottentot. I cannot exchange one sensible word with anyone.

Forget sex or politics or religion, loneliness is the subject that clears out a room.

The story of 'Mr. Robot' is really about this guy who's lonely - who's alone and feels so disconnected from the world.

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

I ain't got no friends.

Those reflective moments for me usually come from loneliness and separation from people.

I am loved by thousands, but I feel like the loneliest man in the world.

In view of the fact that I surround myself with numbskulls now, I shall die among numbskulls, and on my deathbed shall be surrounded by numbskulls who will not understand what I am saying ... Whom am I sleeping with these days ? Franz Kafka.

I live here among the ignorant like a lost man in fact like one whom the rest seems careless of having anything to do with — they hardly dare talk in my company for fear I shoud mention them in my writings & I find more pleasure in wandering the fields then in mixing among my silent neighbours who are insensible of everything but toiling & talking of it & that to no purpose.

Life has no friend.

Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.

Words are loneliness.

Loneliness Got a mind of its own The more people around The more you feel alone