James Laughlin Quotes

I spent a great deal of my life being ignored. I was always very happy that way.

I play in a lot of empty rooms.

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

I lived alone, I didn't know anybody in New York, and I was definitely a recluse. It had been, like, two weeks, and I realized I hadn't said anything. I was laying in bed, and I was like, 'Hello?' I just talked to hear my own voice. And it was such a strange feeling.

I wonder that you will still be talking. Nobody marks you.

I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.

What could be lonelier than trying to communicate?

Nothing echoes like an empty mailbox.

When you are not near me, I make the sound of one hand clapping.

I hate holidays because it's the quietest; it's the most deafening sound in my apartment.

We're all like the little sailor. From the harbors we hear the strains of accordions and the murky soapy noises of the docks, from the mountains we receive the dish of silence that the shepherds eat, but we don't hear more than our own distances. And what distances without end and without doors and without mountains!

No one to hear, you might as well scream.

"Is it how she moves, or how she looks?" I say it's loneliness suspended to our own like grappling hooks, And as long as she's got noise, she's fine. But I could teach her how I learned to dance when the music's ended.

...the sound of our lack of conversation amplified by the echo of our footsteps on the stone around us.

More and more I find myself at a loss for words and didn't want to hear other people talking either. Their conversations seemed false and empty. I preferred to look at the sea, which said nothing and never made you feel alone.

I love the sound of breaking glass Especially when Im lonely I need the noises of destruction When theres nothing new.

Nothing again. No one is listening. No one is waiting to hear the kicking of a man above. It is unexpected. You have no ears for someone like me.

Your empty eyes seem to pass me by and leave me dancing with myself.

We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others.

There was no one to call me to bed, no one to demand that the rhythms of my life operate in a duet.

I live here among the ignorant like a lost man in fact like one whom the rest seems careless of having anything to do with — they hardly dare talk in my company for fear I shoud mention them in my writings & I find more pleasure in wandering the fields then in mixing among my silent neighbours who are insensible of everything but toiling & talking of it & that to no purpose.

I am, I said to no one there and no one heard at all, not even a chair.

Together, we looked down at the tiny house, the sole thing on this vast, flat surface. Like the only person living on the moon. It could be either lonely or peaceful, depending on how you looked at it. "It's a start," I said.

Life has no friend.

In the midst of friends, home, and kind parents, she was alone.