Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

It's a lot easier to find a friend on television than love.

Loneliness is my least favorite thing about life. The thing that I'm most worried about is just being alone without anybody to care for or someone who will care for me.

I've spent my whole life not talking to people, and I don't see why I should start now.

We're really all alone. We can't ever get inside another person's spirit, and see the world they do. So we are alone in that sense. The only way we have to communicate feelings is through words.

A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.

Somewhere we know that without silence words lose their meaning, that without listening speaking no longer heals, that without distance closeness cannot cure.

Forget sex or politics or religion, loneliness is the subject that clears out a room.

Unless we love and are loved, each of us is alone, each of us is deeply lonely.

When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships.

Loneliness sucks. It's a slog. It feels wonderful and exhilarating when someone makes it go away. But love is a whole different ball game.

I wanted to communicate and connect. I simply didn't seem able to do it.

As Americans lose the wider face-to-face ties that build social trust, they become more dependent on romantic relationships for intimacy and deep communication and more vulnerable to isolation if a relationship breaks down.

I have a family, loving aunts, and a good home. No, on the surface I seem to have everything except my one true friend. All I think about when I'm with friends is having a good time. I can't bring myself to talk about anything but ordinary everyday things. We don't seem to be able to get any closer, and that's the problem.

Most films have a relationship or lack of it. They are about human beings.

My shyness probably defined the first 30 years of my life, really. It's a crippling thing. It can be very lonely knowing that you've got things to say, but you daren't say them.

I was a wallflower. I never talked to anybody. I was so afraid of people, I never said a word.

I was in my early 30s, and I longed for real friendships and real relationships, and I started asking myself why I didn't have that. I had a couple of male friends, but every time I would hang out with them, it felt like there was something keeping us apart.

Not listening to people who care about you, not to be open or transparent, will make you isolated.

I am no longer alone with myself, and I can only artificially recall the scary and beautiful feeling of solitude. This is the shadow side of the fortune of love.

The sheer act of listening speaks volumes that even a great speech can't communicate.

The opposite of Loneliness is not Togetherness , It's Intimacy.

April 27. Incapable of living with people, of speaking. Complete immersion in myself, thinking of myself. Apathetic, witless, fearful. I have nothing to say to anyone - never.

Nobody listens anymore. I can't talk to the walls because they're yelling at me, I can't talk to my wife; she listens to the walls. I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough it'll make sense. And I want you to teach me to understand what I read.

Honestly, humans are social creatures that really crave intimacy, and I think that the friends I have who are trying to somehow go it alone are suffering for it.

I'm always on the phone because I'm usually not with the people I want to be with.