John le Carre Quotes

Solitude is painful when one is young, but delightful when one is more mature.

I spent my whole childhood wishing I were older and now I'm spending my adulthood wishing I were younger.

You can be around 100 people and be completely alone. People don't realize what it's really like.

I'm blessed with a great memory. To be honest, a lot of times, being on my own at such a young age, my memories were all I had. I didn't have many pictures.

The older I grow, the more I find myself alone.

The surest sign of age is loneliness.

I've shut myself inside these walls, and I'm going to be a very lonely old lady if I'm not careful.

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.

As I've gotten older I've occasionally found myself nostalgic for earlier periods of solitude, though I realize that's also likely a false nostalgia, as I know there was nothing I wanted more during those periods than to not be alone, whatever that means.

When I was growing up and until I got married, I had some times when I felt a bit lonely and a little bit isolated - even after I got married.

It is loneliness that makes the loudest noise. This is true of men as of dogs.

...I realized that I knew less about loneliness than I had thought - and much less than I would know when he went away.

It's (the lack of communication between the people in his paintings, ed.) probably a reflection of my own, if I may say, loneliness. I don't know. It could be the whole human condition.

It is hard to conceive that the old, whose thoughts have been all thought out, should ever love to live alone. Solitude is surely for the young, who have time before them for the execution of schemes, and who can, therefore, take delight in thinking

One can experience loneliness in two ways: by feeling lonely in the world or by feeling the loneliness of the world.

The one thing I’d learned was that having someone with you all the time did not take away the loneliness. You could be surrounded by people and be lonely. Something was missing. I could almost pinpoint it, but right when it was within my grasp I forgot; it just slipped away.

The most general deficiency in our sort of culture and education is gradually dawning on me: no one learns, no one strives towards, no one teaches--enduring loneliness.

Loneliness is an aspect of the land.

I was always sad as a child, for as long as I can think back. I hated crowds of people, and used to sit in a corner by myself, just thinking.

And Max, the king of all wild things, was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.

Everyone sort of feels alienated at that point, so it's hard to say whether I felt like that because everyone does or because I was so focused on acting [since the age of 8].

If I'm such a legend, then why am I so lonely? If I'm such a legend, then why do I sit at home for hours staring at the damned telephone, hoping it's out of order, even calling the operator asking her if she's sure it's not out of order?

Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.

When I was a kid, I had two friends, and they were imaginary and they would only play with each other.

A child blind from birth doesn't even know he's blind until someone tells him. Even then he has only the most academic idea of what blindness is; only the formerly sighted have a real grip on the thing. Ben Hanscom had no sense of being lonely because he had never been anything but. If the condition had been new, or more localized, he might have understood, but loneliness both encompassed his life and overreached it.