Cosmic Isolation Quotes

There is in certain living souls a quality of loneliness unspeakable, so great it must be shared as company is shared by lesser beings. Such a loneliness is mine; so know by this that in immensity there is one lonelier than you.

We are not without empathetic terror when we open Pascal's 'Pensees' and read, 'I am the great silent spaces between worlds.'

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.

Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.

The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.

The real moon,if you could reach it and survive it, would in a deep and deadly sense be just like anywhere else...no man would find an abiding strangness on the moon unless he were the sort of man who could find it in his own back garden.

I feel completely detached from any country, any group. I am a metaphysically displaced person

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces Between stars—on stars where no human race is. I have it in me so much nearer home To scare myself with my own desert places.

Living in Manchester was like living on the moon... wherever that might be

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,as if orchards were dying high in space.Each leaf falls as if it were motioning "no."And tonight the heavy earth is fallingaway from all other stars in the loneliness.We're all falling. This hand here is falling.And look at the other one. It's in them all.And yet there is Someone, whose handsinfinitely calm, holding up all this falling.

Again the pressure pushes me in the chair, shuts my eyes. I notice the dark red tongues of the flame outside the windows. I'm trying to memorize, fix all the feelings, the peculiarities of this descending, to tell those, who will be conquering space after me.

And as I have always said, the only thing more scary than knowing we are not alone in the universe is knowing we are alone in the universe.

I had known loneliness before, and emptiness upon the moor, but I had never been a NOTHING, a nothing floating on a nothing, known by nothing, lonelier and colder than the space between the stars. It was more frightening than being dead.

I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here.

The moon, our own, earthly moon is bitterly lonely, because it is alone in the sky, always alone, and there is no one to turn to, no one to turn to it. All it can do is ache across the weightless airy ice, across thousands of versts, toward those who are equally lonely on earth, and listen to the endless howling of dogs. (“A Story About The Most Important Thing”)

For most of my life I've liked to pretend I live in a starship. Punching in fake codes to get into doorways that obviously are not secure. I love that idea of living on a spaceship. Because essentially we are: a gigantic thing floating in some infinite darkness that's running on principles that we don't even understand.

I felt like I'd been misplaced in the cosmos and I belonged in Maine.

...and a dream away in space with neither her nor there where all the footsteps ever fell can never fare nearer to anywhere nor from anywhere further away. Nor for in the end again by degrees or as though switched on dark falls there again that certain dark that alone certain ashes can. Through it who knows yet another end beneath a cloudless sky of a last end if ever there had to be another absolutely had to be.

The phenomenon of UFO doesn't say anything about the presence of intelligence in space. It just shows how rare it is here on the earth.

And I guess, I guess it's a humanist film. It's not really a spiritual film and it's, you know, it's saying that we're all one tribe of humans and we're on this little rock, floating through the universe and (Amenabar) has these (transitional shots of) POVs where you see humans like ants.

Our struggle is--isn't it?--to achieve and retain faith on a lower level. To believe that there is a Listener at all. For as the situation grows more and more desperate, the grisly fears intrude. Are we only talking to ourselves in an empty universe? The silence is often so emphatic. And we have prayed so much already

Nonetheless, Scranton had travelled in space. He had known the loneliness of separation from all other human beings, he had gazed at the empty perspectives that I myself had seen.

I think the universe is so big you can't really deal with everybody.

How can the human race be, like, the only living form in the universe? There have to be other life forms out there. I believe it.