David Byrne Quotes

I walked around the block twice, passed 200 people and failed to see a human being.

My face, my self, what would they mean to anybody? Just another stiff. So this self of mine passes some other's self on the street - what do we have to say to each other? Hey there! Hi ya!That's about it. Nobody raises a hand. No one turns around to take another look.

Strangers are an endangered species.

With technology, there is so much isolation with people now, that there are very few places where you can connect.

I like being alone and I think this movie, as much as it is an investigation of connection and people bonding, I also think it's just as much about loneliness.

There is a huge sense of loneliness as people leave villages and move to cities. It's hard to find that human connection as you move away from where you started.

I'm not very interested in people. I recognize it in myself - there is a basic indifference toward people.

In all of my work, I think I'm exploring the idea that we are aliens to each other, how there is a huge distance that separates us all.

We have a million ways to get ahold of people, and we're the loneliest we've ever been.

I think people are isolated and really lonely.

When I was young as a teenager, that was the biggest mystery in the world to me: Why don't people connect?

But 'midst the crowd, the hum, the shock of men, To hear, to see, to feel, and to possess, And roam along, the world's tired denizen, With none who bless us, none whom we can bless.

All through the nineties I met people. Crowds of people. Met and met and met, until it seemed that people were born and hastily grew up, just to be met.

Loneliness has little to do with what we do or where we do it, whether we're married or unmarried, optimists or pessimists, heterosexual or homosexual. Loneliness has to do with the sudden clefts we experience in every human relation, the gaps that open up with such stomach-turning unexpectedness. In a brief moment, I and my brother or sister have moved away into different worlds, and there is no language we can share.... It is in the middle of intimacy that the reality of loneliness most dramatically appears.

I am like the fish in the aquarium, thinking in a different language, adapting to a life that’s not my natural habitat. I am the people in the other cars, each with his or her own story, but passing too quickly to be noticed or understood.

Welcome to New York, where everybody's a stranger, and nobody is.

No shame in saying that I felt a loneliness drifting through me. Funny how it was, everyone perched in their own little world with the deep need to talk, each person with their own tale, beginning in some strange middle point, then trying so hard to tell it all, to have it all make sense, logical and final.

There is a horrifying loneliness at work in this time. No, listen to me. We lived six and seven to a room in those days, when I was still among the living. The city streets were seas of humanity; and now in these high buildings dim-witted souls hover in luxurious privacy, gazing through the television window at a faraway world of kissing and touching. It is bound to produce some great fund of common knowledge, some new level of human awareness, a curious skepticism, to be so alone.

Maybe we had just gotten too used to being alone-- and maybe that needed to change.

It suddenly seemed to me that I was lonely, that every one was forsaking me and going away from me. Of course, any one is entitled to ask who "every one" was. For though I had been living almost eight years in Petersburg I had hardly an acquaintance. But what did I want with acquaintances? I was acquainted with all Petersburg as it was.

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

I came to the conclusion that people were just peculiar, I withdrew from them, and never thought about them until I was forced to.

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

They could read him, they could study him, they could pick him apart, but they couldn't laugh or be sad with him.

I fear you may become a lonely man, even in the company of others.