Thomas Hardy Quotes

Nobody knows me.

As from a star I saw, coldly and soberly, the separateness of everything. I felt the wall of my skin; I am I. That stone is a stone. My beautiful fusion with the things of this world was over.

The individualists stare into each other's eyes and yet deny the existence of each other.

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.

A lone walker is both present and detached, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation.

We live as we dream - alone.

I am alone, I thought, and they are everybody.

From childhood's hour I have not been. As others were, I have not seen. As others saw, I could not awaken. My heart to joy at the same tone. And all I loved, I loved alone.

There's only two ways to be completely alone in this world, lost in a crowd or in total isolation.

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

I think, at the end of the day, I have an outsider's heart.

Nobody notices me. Nobody thinks I'm me. But then I look less like me than most of the people coming to our concerts.

I'm nobody, who are you?

I just knew I was different from everyone else. I still feel like that today, sitting in rooms with people.

Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.

Perhaps I am no one. True, I have a body and I cannot escape from it. I would like to fly out of my head, but that is out of the question.

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.

He walked on in silence, the solitary sound of his footsteps echoing in his head, as in a deserted street, at dawn. His solitude was so complete, beneath a lovely sky as mellow and serene as a good conscience, amid that busy throng, that he was amazed at his own existence; he must be somebody else's nightmare, and whoever it was would certainly awaken soon.

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

He was a very private person, and sometimes it seemed to me that he was no longer interested in the world or in other people... I got the feeling that Julián was living in the past, locked in his memories. Julián lived within himself, for his books and inside them - a comfortable prison of his own design." "You say this as if you envied him." "There are worse prisons than words.

My brain sometimes departs from the agreed-upon reality, and my private reality is a very lonely place. But in the end, I'm not sure I wish I'd never gone there.

The thinking man always finds himself in a gigantic orphanage in which people are continually proving to him that he has no parents.

She's alone, they kept telling themselves, and surely she danced in no one's arms, yet somehow that seemed to matter less and less. As the night went on, and clarinet and coyote call mingled beyond the lantern light, the magic of their own powder-blue jackets and orchids seemed to fade, and it came to them in small sensations that they were more alone than she was.

I stood among them, but not of them: in a shroud of thoughts which were not their thoughts.