Tom Stoppard Quotes

I remember one day sitting at the pool and suddenly the tears were streaming down my cheeks. Why was I so unhappy? I had success. I had security. But it wasn't enough. I was exploding inside.

No one ever discovers the depths of his own loneliness.

What makes loneliness an anguish is not that I have no one to share my burden, but this: I have only my own burden to bear.

I said 'It can't go on' and he said 'No, it can't.' Honestly, I don't think I could have mattered less to him by then. But by then, nothing mattered to him.

I've never wanted to hear.

For one who is indifferent, life itself is a prison. Any sense of community is external or, even worse, nonexistent. Thus, indifference means solitude. Those who are indifferent do not see others. They feel nothing for others and are unconcerned with what might happen to them. They are surrounded by a great emptiness. Filled by it, in fact. They are devoid of all hope as well as imagination. In other words, devoid of any future.

Everything means nothing to me

The principle tragedy of my life is, like all tragedies, an irony of Destiny. I reject real life as if it were a condemnation; I reject dreams as if they were an ignoble liberation. [...]After the end of the stars uselessly whitened in the morning sky and the breeze became less cold in the barely orange tinged in the yellow of the light on the scattered low clouds, I, who hadn't slept, could finally, slowly raise my body, exhausted from nothing from the bed from which I had thought the universe.

No sooner do we think we have assembled a comfortable life than we find a piece of ourselves that has no place to fit in.

I no longer care about the financial system. I gave them my roadmap. OK? Thanks, bye. I've no idea what's going on. I'm disconnected. I'm totally disengaged.

I know what it's like to have someone coming home who looks at you not in the way they used to in the old days, and I've seen my own face contorted with sadness and rage in the mirror.

That sense of failure, I don't know where people put it who don't write songs and aren't able to emote physically. It must go somewhere.

So in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds, And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds.

You know, that single girl life and that sense of isolation - that doesn't leave you just like that. And that's what that song is about. I remember that, and that is imprinted on me, that sense.

Do you know what it's like to love and be alone?

Let the poets cry themselves to sleep, and all their tearful words will turn back into steam.

Everyone thought I had everything. I had nothing.

I had a lovers quarrel with the world.

If I look at my old lyrics, they seem to be full of rage, but empty. There was an emptiness in my life.

Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.

Now that I have found someone, I'm feeling more alone... than I ever have before.

I think that all the anger and cynicism comes from suppressing things that we always wanted.

Panging is the kind of sharp pain you feel inside when you're reminded of some kind of unattended need or something that you've neglected.

I was told by the world for a long time that I was angry, or that I was sad.

When your outlet is taken away from you, when your catharsis is stripped from you and you don't understand why, and you're so disappointed, and you're so blindsided by it, it hurts.