Nelson Algren Quotes

When friendship disappears then there is a space left open to that awful loneliness of the outside world which is like the cold space between the planets. It is an air in which men perish utterly.

The house clock, place certain there at the bottom of things, strikes the half hour dry and null. All is so much, all is so deep, all is so dark and cold!

All the fear in the world, and the violence that comes from the fear, and the hatred that comes from the violence, and the lonliness that comes from the hatred. All the unhappiness, all the cruelty, it gathers like clouds in the air, and grows dark and cold and heavy, and falls like grey snow in thick layers over the land. Then the world is muffled and numb, and no one can hear each other or feel each other. Think how sad and lonely that must be.

Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

I am nothing. I’m like someone who’s been thrown into the ocean at night, floating all alone. I reach out, but no one is there. I call out, but no one answers. I have no connection to anything.

A picture of my existence... would show a useless wooden stake covered in snow... stuck loosely at a slant in the ground in a ploughed field on the edge of a vast open plain on a dark winter night.

And then when all around grows dark, when we feel utterly alone, when all men right and left pass us by and know us not, a forgotten feeling rises in the breast.

It's a terrible feeling being lonely.

I felt very alone in Hollywood.

You are forever alone.

The most terrifying thing I can think of is being alone - and I mean utterly alone, like no one else in the world alone - at night. That's the nucleus of the first story in my collection and it's also where the title came from for the book.

The writer is all alone.

How lonely it is going to be now on the Yellow Brick Road.

With her high pale brow under her faded brown hair, she was like a rock washed clean by years of her husband's absences at conventions, dinners, committee meetings or simply at the office.

When I was little, I didn't like being left on my own in the dark.

It smote me to the heart that I had found no one in all the world who loved me more than all others.

What loneliness is more lonely than mistrust.

I know what it's like when the phone doesn't ring. It's the loneliest feeling in the world.

Wyoming - God bless you in Wyoming - it's very boring, and it's the most isolated place on Earth.

Weeks go by, and I don't talk to another living soul.

Loneliness will sit over our roofs with brooding wings.

The best thing would be to break your neck, but you'd probably just break your leg and then you couldn't do a thing. You'd yell at the top of your lungs, but nobody;d hear you, and you couldn't expect anybody to find you, and you'd have centipedes and spiders crawling all over you, and the bones of the ones who died before are scattered all around you, and it's dark and soggy, and way overhead there's this tiny, tiny circle of light like a winter moon. You die there in this place, little by little, all by yourself.

Well, I know about loneliness. I won't talk about it, but I was very lonely after the war. I know what it feels like to spend a whole weekend all by yourself and no one wants you at all.

Once a month I wake in the night, slippery with terror. I'm afraid, not because there's someone in the room, in the dark, in the bed, but because there isn't. I'm afraid of the emptiness, which lies beside me like a corpse.