Ben Gibbard Quotes

There's this thing of you can live in a city and be completely alone, not notice anything going on around you.

I am alone here in New York, no longer a we.

The way I spend my time is very isolated and cut off.

The entire time I was in Portland, which was the five years, I had absolutely no contact with any of my family.

Exile is not a time frame. Exile is an experience. It's a sentiment.

In a big city like L.A. you can spend a lot of time surrounded by hundreds of people yet you feel like an alien or a ghost or something.

I hated London; I was so lonely.

Especially in America, when you move away from home, sometimes you get disconnected with your grandparents, your friends you grew up with.

The hardest thing for me was leaving my friends and family behind.

I cry for everything I abandoned and because I, too, have been left behind -- by Alex, by my mom, by time that has cut through our worlds and separated us.

Obviously, you've spent some time in New York. I moved there and it was a bit much. It was a bit overwhelming for me. I didn't want to go out. I just felt a little homesick. I was just waiting to feel excited about something. I went through a phase of feeling kind of dull. It's really easy to shut off in New York and stay in your apartment.

There is something peculiarly dispriting about the emptiness that wells up when, in a strange city, one dials the same telephone numbers in vain.

You were one person alive and your brain was encased in a skull. There were other people out there. It took effort to be connected.

We are all really alone. We're isolated in our own mind.

They were like people who run to meet, holding out their arms, but their aim is wrong; they pass each other and keep running.

There is a chasm between me and the world outside of me. A gap so wide my feelings can't cross it. By the time my screams reach the other side, they have dwindled into groans.

I felt a tremendous distance between myself and everything real.

...sometimes it only makes one more lonely to know that somewhere else, one's friends and family are well.

I would never be able to live in a huge city. I'd feel like one of 100,000 people doing the same thing.

People are islands,' she said. 'They don't really touch. However close they are, they're really quite separate. Even if they've been married for fifty years.

The clothes are packed off to Goodwill I said my good-byes up on the hill The house is empty, the furniture sold Soon your smell will decay to mold Don't know why I bother calling, ain't nobody answering Don't know why I bother singing, ain't nobody listening "Disconnect" Collateral Damage, Track 10

but then she did. she died. no more visits, no more phone calls. And without even realizing it, I began to drift, as if my roots had been pulled, as if I were floating down some side branch of a river.

I'm an outsider. I will always be an outsider.

I feel like I've been shut in a closet, and he's on the other side, and he doesn't have the key to unlock the door.

The great renunciation of old age as it prepared for death, wraps itself up in its chrysalis, which may be observed at the end of lives that are at all prolonged, even in old lovers who have lived for one another, in old friends bound by the closest ties of mutual sympathy, who, after a certain year, cease to make the necessary journey or even to cross the street to see one another, cease to correspond, and know that they will communicate no more in this world.