Simon McBurney Quotes

A lone walker is both present and detached, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation.

He [Ma's Tooth] was part of her a minute ago but now he's not. Just a thing.

I stood among them, but not of them: in a shroud of thoughts which were not their thoughts.

As from a star I saw, coldly and soberly, the separateness of everything. I felt the wall of my skin; I am I. That stone is a stone. My beautiful fusion with the things of this world was over.

No one can cross the boundary into another -- for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself

I'm used to living in a disassociated universe.

Sometimes I wonder where I am from. I am either way ahead or I come from another world. I don't recognise this world.

I'd really like to be in closer contact with life. I'm a little too distant, I guess. I like to place myself outside.

I feel like I'm in my own world: in the world but not a part of it.

I felt like I might as well have been living in another part of the solar system.

It was so easy to disown what you couldn't recognize, to keep yourself apart from things that were foreign and unsettling. The only person you can be sure to control, always, is yourself. Which is a lot to be sure of, but at the same time, not enough.

I could hear rain still pouring from the gutters and a thin branch scraping against one of the windows; but the church seemed completely cut off from the restless day outside--just as I felt cut off from the church. I thought: I am a restlessness inside a stillness inside a restlessness.

You draw closer to truth by shutting yourself off from mankind.

There was something special about being in a strange place, all alone in a mass of people even if you had just screwed up your life, or perhaps especially if you had just screwed up your life.

She watched the prairies the rivers, the towns slipping past at an untouchable distance below - and she noted that the sense of detachment one feels when looking at the earth from a plane was the same sense she felt when looking at people: only her distance from people seemed longer. - Dagny Taggart

We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.

Perhaps I am a man of exceptional moods. I do not know how far my experience is common. At times I suffer from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all. This feeling was very strong upon me that night. Here was another side to my dream.

Be alone even when there's a million people around, because tomorrow it will be a different million people.

I came alone and I go as a stranger. I do not know who I am, nor what I have been doing.

There is a chasm between me and the world outside of me. A gap so wide my feelings can't cross it. By the time my screams reach the other side, they have dwindled into groans.

The Divorce, it's just like any performance that's given where I really just completely lost myself in that life.

I felt a tremendous distance between myself and everything real.

What is there? I know first of all that I am. But who am I? All I know of myself is that I suffer. And if I suffer it is because at the origin of myself there is mutilation, separation. I am separated. What I am separated from -- I cannot name it. But I am separated.

But he had gone his way, the grass all mown, And I must be, as he had been - alone, As all must be, I said within my heart, Whether they work together or apart.

I had always felt that I was an observer, never a participant; that I was watching from behind a thick glass wall as people went about the business of living--and did it with such ease, with a skill that they took for granted and that I had never known.