Inability to Connect Quotes

I think that the inability to love is the central problem, because that inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And if you can't be touched, you can't be changed. And if you can't be changed, you can't be alive.

Because I have become such a solitary, and not in the Aristotelian sense: not a beast, not a god. Rather, a loner troubled by longings, incapable of finding a suitable language and despairing at the impossibility of composing messages in a playable key--as if I no longer understood the codes used by the estimable people who wanted to hear from me and would have so much to reply if only the impediments were taken away.

Each one of us is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain. We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them.

The sick soon come to understand that they live in a different world from that of the well and that the two cannot communicate.

I distrust the incommunicable; it is the source of all violence

Ever since I was little, I've shied away from romance. It's not that I dislike women, but I'm not good with them.

Whatever made me the way I am left me hollow, empty inside, unable to feel. It doesn't seem like a big deal. I'm quite sure most people fake an awful lot of everyday human contact. I just fake it all. I fake it very well, and the feelings are never there.

When you wept it was just over yourself and not because of the marvelous impossibility of reaching her through the difference that separates you.

One never discusses anything with anybody who can understand one discusses things with people who cannot understand.

The fact that we are I don't know how many millions of people, yet communication, complete communication, is completely impossible between two of those people, is to me one of the biggest tragic themes in the world.

Pity those who don't feel anything at all

Maybe I was being too picky. Maybe I didn't want to be close to anyone. Maybe I'd just be the type who couldn't feel love all the way or something. I couldn't tell what was wrong, but what was wrong was that it just wasn't right.

Narcissism is not about self love. It's a clinical trait that belies a deep sense of emptiness, low self-esteem, emotional detachment, self-loathing, extreme problems with intimacy.

I'm very shy and awkward; I can't have a normal conversation, and then people think I'm being a bit rude, but really I'm not.

Those inevitable dreams where you can't get your column in, you know, and at first they were the Xerox telecopy, and then they were the fax machine, and then they were, you know, email. The anxiety remains the same, but the technology has changed.

Detachment produces a peculiar state of mind. Maybe that's the worst sentence of all, to be deprived of feeling what a human being ought to be entitled to feel.

To not have the wherewithal to give fully to a relationship bothered me.

All the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunes that fill the history books, all the political blunders, all the failures of the great leaders have arisen merely from a lack of skill at dancing.

My first job had me miscast as a bubbly shopgirl; I was pathologically shy and, thus, tended to replace human speech with excessive head gestures. It was like being waited on by Harpo Marx.

I am so used to being able to express myself from being an actor. So when people don't understand me, I'm just completely lost.

I'm always drawn to stories about characters who are somewhat isolated inside themselves by their inability to communicate in some way. That's what interested me about 'Children of a Lesser God.'