Terry Pratchett Quotes

Maybe existence is ultimately a lonely thing.

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

We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.

I started to see human beings as little lonesome, water based, pink meat, life forms pushing air through themselves and making noises that the other little pieces of meat seemed to understand. I was thinking to myself, 'There's five billion people here but we've never been more isolated.' The only result of the aggressive individualism we pursue is that you lose sight of your compassion and we go to bed at night thinking, 'Is this all there is?' because we don't feel fulfilled.

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

In the United States, man does not feel that he has been torn from the center of creation and suspended between hostile forces. He has built his own world, and it is built in his own image: it is his mirror. But now he cannot recognize himself in his inhuman objects, nor in his fellows.

Loneliness comes with life.

Just having the pain of being alive without anything else, whether it's good or bad. There's a lot of serious songs on the record, you know. That song is just about feeling like a fish out of water, feeling like you don't belong on the planet sometimes.

The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.

Life's an awfully lonesome affair. You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming.

Los Angeles can be a really sad city.

It would be really wonderful if people connected to the loneliness of what it means to be a human being in the world today.

You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming.

We're all alone in this world.

I walked around the block twice, passed 200 people and failed to see a human being.

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.

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, Into the living sea of waking dreams, Where there is neither sense of life or joys, But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems; And e'en the dearest--that I love the best-- Are strange--nay, rather stranger than the rest.

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?

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.

He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.

Sonnet XXV Before I loved you, love, nothing was my own: I wavered through the streets, among Objects: Nothing mattered or had a name: The world was made of air, which waited. I knew rooms full of ashes, Tunnels where the moon lived, Rough warehouses that growled 'get lost', Questions that insisted in the sand. Everything was empty, dead, mute, Fallen abandoned, and decayed: Inconceivably alien, it all Belonged to someone else - to no one: Till your beauty and your poverty Filled the autumn plentiful with gifts.

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.

Although it is a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out, sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation

There was an enjoyment to being alive, he felt, that because of an underlying meaninglessness–like how a person alone for too long cannot feel comfortable when with others; cannot neglect that underlying the feeling of belongingness is the certainty, really, of loneliness, and nothingness, and so experiences life in that hurried, worthless way one experiences a mistake–he could no longer get at.