Steve Toltz Quotes

It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.

Lonely, ain't it? Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely.

Poetry has ceased to be a public art and has become, as Whitehead said of religion, "What man does with his aloneness.

I'm a weirdo and an only child. That comes together to create one-woman shows.

Alas, everything that men say to one another is alike; the ideas they exchange are almost always the same, in their conversation. But inside all those isolated machines, what hidden recesses, what secret compartments! It is an entire world that each one carries within him, an unknown world that is born and dies in silence! What solitudes all these human bodies are!

She had become accustomed to being lonely. She was used to walking alone and to being considered 'different.' She did not suffer too much.

I don’t go where people are. I go where the people aren’t.

The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her.

That was the thing about being alone, in theory or in principle. Whatever happened - good, bad, or anywhere in between - it was always, if nothing else, all your own.

We live as we dream - alone.

I am alone with the masses.

A man is an island in the only sense that matters, not an easy way to be. We live in mystery, a cosmos of separate lonely bodies, men, insects, stars. It is all loneliness and men know it best.

Solitude is separate experience.

Pain is the most individualized thing on earth. It is true that it is the great common bond as well, but that realization only comes when it is over. To suffer is to be alone. To watch another suffer is to know the barrier that shuts each of us away by himself Only individuals can suffer.

All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night.

She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind besides Tess was only a passing thought. Even to friends she was no more than a frequently passing thought.

The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present.

So therefore I dedicate myself, to my art, my sleep, my dreams, my labors, my suffrances, my loneliness, my unique madness, my endless absorption and hunger because I cannot dedicate myself to any fellow being.

So now, all alone or not, you gotta walk ahead. Thing to remember is if we're all alone, then we're all together in that too.

Me, myself and I. That's all I got in the end.

I had as lief have been myself alone.

The individualists stare into each other's eyes and yet deny the existence of each other.

All men of honor are alone.

It is not good that man should be alone. ... Hitherto all things that have been named, were approved of God to be very good: loneliness is the first thing which God's eye named not good: whether it be a thing, or the want of something, I labour not.

Even with one companion ecstasy is almost banished.