Andy Rooney Quotes

It is sad that the air is the only thing we share. No matter how close we get to each other, there is always air between us.

To talk, simply to talk! It sounds so little, and how much it is! When you have existed to the brink of middle age in bitter loneliness, among people to whom your true opinion on every subject on earth is blasphemy, the need to talk is the greatest of all needs.

Living alone,' November whispered, 'is a skill, like running long distance or programming old computers. You have to know parameters, protocols. You have to learn them so well that they become like a language: to have music always so that the silence doesn't overwhelm you, to perform your work exquisitely well so that your time is filled. You have to allow yourself to open up until you are the exact size of the place you live, no more or else you get restless. No less, or else you drown. There are rules; there are ways of being and not being.

The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.

I need, absolutely, to be alone.

I want to be around people, not crickets.

I have days where the only words I say are to the person making my sandwich at the grocery store.

If loneliness is part of our essence, that is, our essential nature, that is only because of the way, in practical terms, we actually exist; that is, the way we move and work and live in the world.

I have to get out once a week and speak with people or I start thinking I'm the emperor of Abyssinia.

Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.

Being-alone is a deficient mode of being-with; its possibility is a proof for the latter.

I don't want to be alone, I want to be left alone.

The desert has its holiness of silence, the crowd its holiness of conversation.

I say I like to be alone, yet I am always surrounded by people.

One of the odd enjoyments in life is to be alone in a room full of people. To have them there as unknowing human filler in your wide shot.

Writing is too lonely. I'd rather talk.

I used to dream about being able to sit at a table with another human being, have a normal conversation, and have a meal with normal cutlery, and have normal moments.

People live, work, walk, play, shop, study, and eat with other people. There are few desert dwellers who live alone without depending in some way on people.

I don't know when I'll ever get a chance to be all alone in a film.

I never want to feel too far away from people. I think that's when you get in trouble.

Here is the infallible test. Imagine yourself in a situation where you are alone, wholly alone on earth, and you are offered one of the two, books or men. I often hear men prizing their solitude but that is only because there are still men somewhere on earth even though in the far distance. I knew nothing of books when I came forth from the womb of my mother, and I shall die without books, with another human hand in my own. I do, indeed, close my door at times and surrender myself to a book, but only because I can open the door again and see a human being looking at me.

Now that I am alone, I don't have to hide it; I don't have to hide anything any longer. I can let my face go because no one can see me; because there's twenty-one thousand feet between me and them... No, I don't have to press my teeth together or tighten the muscles of my jaw.

It is difficult to live among people because silence is so difficult.

Not only is there no question of solitude, but in the long run we may not choose our company.

Other people may complicate our lives, but life without them would be unbearably desolate. None of us can be truly human in isolation. The qualities that make us human emerge only in the ways we relate to other people.