A. E. Housman Quotes

Nobody helps anybody.

Love is not my bag.

I don't know what's the matter with me, why I'm so adept at distance, why I feel so remote from things, why life feels like a rumor.

Being a stranger was like being dead, and brought to mind how, in a book he had read that most folks misunderstood one common state: The flip side of love is indifference, not hate.

He was slumped in the back, gazing out of the window, as though his parents were two people who had picked him up hitchhiking, connected to him merely by chance and proximity.

I don’t care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual.

It has been strange to me to return to life and to feel that I have any sympathy with human beings, after the long interval of quiet and indifference which succeeded my marriage.

I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them; I have nothing in common with them.

I seem fated to pass through the world without colliding with it or moving it — and I'm sure I can't tell you whether the fate's good or evil. I don't die — I don't fall in love. And if other people die or fall in love they always do it when I'm just not there.

I think most writers feel like they're on the outside looking in much of the time. All of us feel, to a certain extent, alienated from the stuff going on around us.

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

I have always written about characters who fall somewhere in the spectrum between solitary and totally alienated.

Friends and relatives might be surprised that I think of myself as lonely. I'm married to a man I not only love but like, and we spend a lot of time together. If I feel like socializing, I can usually find someone to meet for coffee or a drink.

I'm used to living in a disassociated universe.

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.

Often, marriage was solitude, with company.

I meet so many people, but I don't know anybody.

Everything else outside me seems far, far away.

I have very little interest in the modern world, and I'm not in any way conflicted about that.

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

I just always assume no one is listening.

When you're in New York, there's women galore. At the end of the day, when I'm by myself or even, at times, when there was a woman next to me, I was feeling alone. It was not the same as it is with my wife. The experience is not the same; the time is not the same.

I've never been super close to family. I've never relied on anyone.

I am truly a "lone traveler" and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart.

I don't care if your world is ending today because I wasn't invited to it anyway.