Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes

Maybe existence is ultimately a lonely thing.

What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipwrecked and stranded in the limitless wastes of a boundless and indifferent ocean.

They were here all at once, but not together. Survival took self-absorption, and it made them strangers with nothing to do and no way to relate. Emergencies gave you a shape and a plot to take part in, while death was no story at all. It left you nothing.

This self now as I leant over the gate looking down over fields rolling in waves of colour beneath me made no answer. He threw up no opposition. He attempted no phrase. His fist did not form. I waited. I listened. Nothing came, nothing. I cried then with a sudden conviction of complete desertion. Now there is nothing. No fin breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me. No echo comes when I speak, no varied words. This is more truly death than the death of friends, than the death of youth.

Alone, what did Bloom feel? The cold of interstellar space, thousands of degrees below freezing point or the absolute zero of Fahrenheit, Centigrade or Réaumur: the incipient intimations of proximate dawn.

I've been in that angst of loneliness, where you're really alone in the universe, except for the dog.

Separation penetrates the disappearing person like a pigment and steeps him in gentle radiance.

I want to be around people, not crickets.

Sometimes, only one person is missing, and the whole world seems depopulated.

Oh, what a void there is in things.

The dominant feeling of the battlefield is loneliness.

Loneliness is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man.

All my friends, they're all gone. I've outlived them all.

For a long time now my heart has had its shutters closed, its steps deserted, formerly a tumultuous hotel, but now empty and echoing like a great empty tomb.

In this vast country that he had so loved, he was alone.

It is very hard to stay alive just for your own sake. It is very hard to stare into day after day without another familiar face staring back. It turns your heart into a purposeless muscle.

I go out there. I'm out there every day. [Pause] There is nothing out there.

Everything is nothing when you got no one.

But inside or out, I was alone, and I was beginning to wonder if I always had been, if I always would be.

You have an utterly sincere glance when you look around after you are shipwrecked. You weep a long time on an island when you realize what's happened to you.

You need as much ballast as possible to stop you from floating away; you need people around you, things going on, otherwise life is like some film where the money ran out, and there are no sets, or locations, or supporting actors, and it's just one bloke on his own staring into the camera with nothing to do and nobody to speak to, and who'd believe in this character then?

The only place their voices were left was in my head. It was better than being alone but it was so, so lonely.

I wandered off, walking through streets that seemed emptier than ever, thinking that if I didn't stop, if I kept on walking, I wouldn't notice that the world I thought I knew was no longer there.

There were people everywhere but no one was mine, and I was no one's.