Rick Yancey Quotes

He spoke of human solitude, about the intrinsic loneliness of a sophisticated mind, one that is capable of reason and poetry but which grasps at straws when it comes to understanding another, a mind aware of the impossibility of absolute understanding. The difficulty of having a mind that understands that it will always be misunderstood.

All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens.

In the end, the only thing between us was silence.

All the suffering that humanity ever knew can be traced to the one fact that no man in the history of the Galaxy ... could really understand one another. Every human being lived behind an impenetrable wall of choking mist within which no other but he existed.

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.

He lay far across the room from her, on a winter island separated by an empty sea. She talked to him for what seemed a long while and she talked about this and she talked about that and it was only words, like the words he had heard once in a nursery at a friend's house, a two-year-old child building word patters, like jargon, making pretty sounds in the air.

I think that we're all totally isolated beings and always will be.

The entire time I was in Portland, which was the five years, I had absolutely no contact with any of my family.

If you feel alienated from people around you, it's because no one tries to understand you.

I'm used to living in a disassociated universe.

Alienation, I suppose, can't be hackneyed because it will always exist.

No one feels another's grief, no one understands another's joy. People imagine they can reach one another. In reality they only pass each other by.

Everything else outside me seems far, far away.

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

Sometimes, when I open my mouth, all hell breaks loose. Other times, I feel like a voice in the wilderness and I wonder, 'Does anybody get this?'

Those reflective moments for me usually come from loneliness and separation from people.

To be misunderstood even by those whom one loves is the cross and bitterness of life. It is the secret of that sad and melancholy smile on the lips of great men which so few understand.

To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings.

We all, sometimes, leave each other there under the skies, and we never understand why.

Now we're like planets, holding to each other from a great distance. [...] Now we're hundreds of miles apart, our short arms keep us lonely, no one hears what's in my head. [...] It's March, even the birds don't know what to do with themselves.

What could be lonelier than trying to communicate?

The unhappy are egotistical, base, unjust, cruel, and even less capable of understanding one another than are idiots. Unhappinessdoes not unite people, but separates them.

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

This is the ultimate cruelty, isn't it? That I can talk and talk and to anyone listening, it's only air--too rich a diet to be swallowed by a mundane world.

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.