Became Alone Quotes & Sayings

She saw that they felt themselves alone in that crowded room. And Vronsky's face, always so firm and independent, held that look that had struck her, of bewilderment and humble submissiveness, like the expression of an intelligent dog when it has done wrong.
Anna smiled, and her smile was reflected by him. She grew thoughtful, and he became serious. Some supernatural force drew Kitty's eyes to Anna's face. She was enchanting in her simple black dress, enchanting were her round arms with their bracelets, enchanting was her firm neck with its thread of pearls, fascinating the straying curls of her loose hair, enchanting the graceful, light movements of her little feet and hands, enchanting was that lovely face in its animation, but there was something terrible and cruel about her charm. — Leo Tolstoy

At the times in my life when I was feeling the most gregarious and looking for bosom friendships, I couldn't find any takers, so that exactly when I was alone was when I felt the most like not being alone ... I became a loner in my own mind ... I decided I'd rather be alone. — Andy Warhol

When I think of [my relationship with Gable], considering the way it started, it was curious. We became devoted to each other. We weren't lovers-he was in love with Carole Lombard ... we eventually became more like siblings. Nobody believes that and you can understand why ... but our relationship was unique. Oh he sometimes gave me the macho routine when people were watching but he changed when we were alone. — Myrna Loy

It was easy enough to write a sentence, but if you were going to create a work of art, the way Melville had, each sentence needed to fit perfectly with the one that preceded it, and the unwritten one that would follow. And each of these sentences needed to square with the ones on either side, so that three became five and five became seven, seven became nine, and whichever sentence he was writing became the slender fulcrum on which the the whole precarious edifice depended. That sentence could contain anything, anything, and so it promised the kind of absolute freedom that, to Affenlight's mind, belonged to the artist and the artist alone. — Chad Harbach

Elza needed challenges in her life, needed to be occupied. Without walls to climb or windmills to attack she was the type of person who became depressed. She knew this. The feeling lived inside her somewhere - probably nestled close to her solar plexus. Yes, it seemed like that was the case. She felt it right in her chest. So, to escape dwelling on her anxieties - which she was prone to do - Elza lived in a state of perpetual movement. If she slowed down or was obstructed, even for a moment, she would suffer being left alone with herself, and then all would be lost. — Marc Fitten

The economic structure of capitalist society has grown out of the economic structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter set free the elements of the former ... [T]he historical movement which changes the producers into wage-workers, appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and this side alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire. — Karl Marx

Maybe he was worried that I would get thinner and thinner, until I became as unfindable as my mother, and I felt a stab of compassion for him, imagining my father alone in this house with the white shadows of his two invisible women. — Laura Kasischke

His agony somehow became an invisible hand, stretching out through the Force, a hand that found her, far away, alone in her apartment in the dark, a hand that felt the silken softness of her skin and the sleek coils of her hair, a hand that dissolved into a field of pure energy, of pure feeling that reached inside her
And now he felt her, really felt her in the Force, as though she could have been some kind of Jedi, too, but more than that: he felt a bond, a connection, deeper and more intimate than he'd ever had before with anyone, even Obi-Wan; for a precious eternal instant he was her ... he was the beat of her heart and he was the motion of her lips and he was her soft words as though she spoke a prayer to the stars - — Matthew Woodring Stover

When a small night-lamp alone illuminated our love-making, it became a very small, circular room which silently passed through nights humming with stars. — Fernand Dumont

he quickly became like so many people in New York; that is, comfortable, forgotten, and alone. Though — Mark Helprin

The idea of losing him made her realize how much she wanted him, because yes. Love. Charlie and Wren. Their souls colliding. And they were human, and they made mistakes, both of them, but by herself, Wren was alone. With Charlie, she was half of the 'us' he talked about, only that didn't come close to expressing what she knew to be true: that together they didn't simply become one. They became greater than one. — Lauren Myracle

There's nothing like a bunch of catty teenagers who could either kick your ass halfway across the country or set you on fire with a mere thought. That alone changed who people picked fights with or became friends with. And at the end of the day, it was always good to have a firestarter in your back pocket. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

Three a.m. drunks, all over America, were staring at the walls, having finally give it up. You didn't have to be drunk to get hurt, to be zeroed out by a woman; but you could get hurt and become a drunk. You might think for a while, especially when you were young, that luck was with you, and sometimes it was. But there were all manner of averages and laws working that you know nothing about, even as you imagined things were going well. Some night, some hot summer Thursday, night you became the drunk, you were out there alone in a cheap rented room, and no matter how many times you'd been out there before, it was no help, it was even worse because you had got to thinking you wouldn't face it again. All you could do was light another cigarette, pour another drink, check the peeling walls for lips and eyes. What men and women did to each other was beyond comprehension. — Charles Bukowski

In the beginning his dream and his happiness, in the end it was his bitter fate ... But in the midst of the freedom he had attained Harry suddenly became aware that his freedom was a death and that he stood alone. — Hermann Hesse

Jaques was only what he was; but from a distance he became something more, became everything to me, everything I did not possess. It was to him I owed pains and pleasures whose violence alone saved me from the deserts of boredom in which I found myself bogged down. — Simone De Beauvoir

The servants of God who had been a besieged garrison became a marching army; the ways of the world were filled as with thunder with the trampling of their feet and far ahead of that ever swelling host went a man singing; as simply he had sung that morning in the winter woods, where he walked alone. — G.K. Chesterton

The more he asked about her childhood at Cloonhill the more Ellie loved her interrogator. No matter how strange he still sometimes seemed, she felt as if all her life she had known him. The past he talked about himself became another part of her: The games he had played alone, the untidy rooms of the house he described, the parties given, the pictures painted. Being with him in the woods at Lyre, where the air was cold and the trees imposed a gloomy darkness, or walking among the monks' graves, or being with him anywhere, telling or listening, was for Ellie more than friendship, or living, had ever been before. — William Trevor

To be alone - the eternal refrain of life. It wasn't better or worse than anything else. One talked too much about it. One was always and never alone. A violin, suddenly - somewhere out of a twilight - in a garden on the hills around Budapest. The heavy scent of chestnuts. The wind. And dreams crouched on one's shoulders like young owls, their eyes becoming lighter in the dusk. A night that never became night. The hour when all women were beautiful. — Erich Maria Remarque

She was a woman who made mistakes, who sometimes cried on a Monday morning or at night alone in bed. She was a woman who often became bored with her life and found it hard to get up for work in the morning. She was a woman who more often than not had a bad hair day, who looked in the mirror and wondered why she couldn't just drag herself to the gym more often; she was a woman who sometimes questioned what reason had she to live on this planet. She was a woman who sometimes just got things wrong.
On the other hand, she was a woman with a million happy memories, who knew what it was like to experience true love and who was ready to experience more life, more love and make new memories. — Cecelia Ahern

The sight of the wall of water outside reassured me, giving me the idea that it made very little difference whether I stayed with her, or set out alone on my journey that had neither visible starting point nor destination. It didn't matter: since, however closely I became involved with another existence, my own world would always remain secret, inaccessible and shut-off; nobody would ever see me, except as a dim, changeable, wavering shadow, through its impenetrable, semi-opaque walls. — Anna Kavan

It is a very strange sensation to inexperience youth to feel itself quite alone the world, cut adrift from every connection, uncertain whether the port to which it is bound can be reached, and prevented by many impediments from returning to that it has quitted. The charm of adventure sweetens that sensation, the glow of pride warms it; but then the throb of fear disturbs it; and fear with me became predominant when half an hour elapsed, and still I was alone. — Charlotte Bronte

Part of my problem as a young writer was that I was too much a New Yorker, always second-guessing the 'market.' I became so discouraged that I decided to write something that would please me alone - that became my sole criterion. And that was when I wrote 'Forgetting Elena,' the first novel I got published. — Edmund White

The first time I saw you at the basement, I was fascinated. At the time I didn't understand why. But now I understand. I understand by being with you even only for a while. You accept your fate and fight. You even fight alone in that basement. I was mortified. How pathetic. I'm sick of myself who kept on running away. From that time on, you became my goal. You became a special person. — Tooru Hayama

I had always liked darkness. When I was small I was afraid of it if I was alone, but when I was with other I loved it and the change to the world it brought. Running around in the forest or between houses was different in the darkness, the world was enchanted, and we, we were breathless adventurers with blinking eyes and pounding hearts.
When I was older there was little I liked better than to stay up at night, the silence and the darkness had an allure, they carreid the promise of something immense. And autumn was my favorite season, wandering along the road by the river in the dark and the rain, not much could beat that.
But this darkness was different. This darkness rendered everything lifeless. It was static, it was the same whether you were awake or asleep, and it became harder and harder to motivate yourself to get up in the morning. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Whenever we could steal a few minutes alone, that's when we became the "other", the charged-up thing that kept me up at night, afraid of falling so fast, afraid of losing, afraid it wouldn't last once everyone found out. We stole too-short kisses in the front hallway, shared knowing and devious looks across the table when we weren't being watched. We snuck out every night behind the house to watch for shooting stars and whisper about life, our favorite books, about the meaning of songs. It wasn't the topics themselves that changed, we had talked about all of those things befores. But now, there was a new intensity, an urgency to know as much as we could, to fit as much as possible into our final nights, before somebody found out. — Sarah Ockler

As powerful as her responses were, they paled in comparison to Axum's. To be with Axum in that way was to feel his need, his hunger and his release along with her own and as if they were her own. It was the same for Axum. Her fears, doubts, and, yes, desires became his, even as they tempered his. There was nothing for them to learn of one another. Everything thought, every breath, the slightest touch moved seamlessly into the next, propelled by absolute certainty of one another's desires. Complete satisfaction was a foregone conclusion as they moved deeper into one another, beyond their bodies and into a place where they alone existed, perpetually intertwined, woven together into one being. — Kirsten Beyer

Another explanation for the failure of logic and observation alone to advance medicine is that unlike, say, physics, which uses a form of logic - mathematics - as its natural language, biology does not lend itself to logic. Leo Szilard, a prominent physicist, made this point when he complained that after switching from physics to biology he never had a peaceful bath again. As a physicist he would soak in the warmth of a bathtub and contemplate a problem, turn it in his mind, reason his way through it. But once he became a biologist, he constantly had to climb out of the bathtub to look up a fact. — John M Barry

When I was working on Eye of the Beholder, I played a character who is so aloof that my whole lifestyle became very aloof. If someone knocked on my door, there was a part of me that went into a rage, because I wanted to be isolated and alone. — Ashley Judd

Now if I believe in God's Son and remember that He became man, all creatures will appear a hundred times more beautiful to me than before. Then I will properly appreciate the sun, the moon, the stars, trees, apples, as I reflect that he is Lord over all things ... God writes the Gospel, not in the Bible alone, but also on trees, and in the flowers and clouds and stars. — Martin Luther

Strangers when you meet, strangers when you part -a gymnasium of bodies namelessly masturbating each other. People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or to love. So they became swingers. The dead fucking the dead. There was no gamble or humor in their game -it was corpse fucking corpse. Morals were restrictive, but they were grounded on human experience down through the centuries. Some morals tended to keep people slaves in factories, in churches and true to the State. Other morals simply made good sense. It was like a garden filled with poisoned fruit and good fruit. You had to know which to pick and eat, which to leave alone. — Charles Bukowski

The resource of generational history is accorded little attention our society, which seems ever more obsessed with making "new" and "better" synonymous. From my family I became aware of the importance of passing along wisdom from one generation to the next. Yet despite the increasing proliferation of digital recording and other communication technologies, we're passing on less knowledge today than our parents did through the oral tradition alone. We're drowning in photographs and videos, capturing every mundane moment of our birthdays, holidays, and vacations. Yet these can be no more than pleasant distraction, only scratching the surface of our real relationships. — Ralph Nader

Since Brazil became a democracy in 1975 over 1700 Activists and small Farmers have been murdered in Brazil alone over land reforms and the rainforest ! — Norbert F Hoffmann Jr

I was a prisoner inside my own body. I felt desperate, angry, stupid, confused, ashamed, hopeless and absolutely alone... and that this was of my own making. I could speak at home, how come I couldn't outside it? I have never been able to find the right words to describe what it was like. Imagine that for one day you are unable to speak to anyone you meet outside your own family, particularly at school/college, or out shopping, etc., have no sign language, no gestures, no facial expression. Then imagine that for eight years, but no one really understands. It was like torture, and I was the only person that knew it was happening. My body and face were frozen most of the time. I became hyperconscious of myself when outside the home and it was a relief to get back as I was always exhausted. I attempted to hide it (an impossible task) because I felt so ashamed that I couldn't do what other people seemed to find so natural and easy - to speak. At times I felt suicidal. — Carl Sutton

That's who Jesus Christ is. He became the final Priest and the final Sacrifice. Sinless, he did not offer sacrifices for himself. Immortal, he never has to be replaced. Human, he could bear human sins. Therefore he did not offer sacrifices for himself; he offered himself as the final sacrifice. There will never be the need for another. There is one mediator between us and God. One priest. We need no other. Oh, how happy are those who draw near to God through Christ alone. — John Piper

He was almost a poet in his old age and his notion of what happened took a poetic turn. 'I had come to the time in my life when prayer became necessary and so I invented gods and prayed to them,' he said. 'I did not say my prayers in words nor did I kneel down but sat perfectly still in my chair. In the late afternoon when it was hot and quiet on Main Street or in the winter when the days were gloomy, the gods came into the office and I thought no one knew about them. Then I found that this woman Elizabeth knew, that she worshipped also the same gods. I have a notion that she came to the office because she thought the gods would be there but she was happy to find herself not alone just the same. It was an experience that cannot be explained, although I suppose it is always happening to men and women in all sorts of places. — Sherwood Anderson

Both vitamin pills and vegetables are loaded with essential nutrients, but not in the same combinations. Spinach is a good source of both vitamin C and iron. As it happens, vitamin C boosts iron absorption, allowing the body to take in more of it than if the mineral were introduced alone. When I first started studying nutrition, I became fascinated with these coincidences, realizing of course they're not coincidences. Human bodies and their complex digestive chemistry evolved over millenia in response to all the different foods
mostly plants
they raised or gathered from the land surrounding them. They may have died young from snakebite or blunt trauma, but they did not have diet-related illnesses like heart disease and Type II diabetes that are prevalent in our society now, even in some young adults and children. [from an entry by Barbara Kingsolver's daughter Camille] — Barbara Kingsolver

When you missed someone you became them, that you did things to fill the space they'd left so you wouldn't feel so alone. Standing — Anna Carey

Precisely when hominins learned to manipulate fire is unclear. But recent research suggests that fire, in the form of cooking, helps account for the leap into the genus Homo, who became physiologically dependent on cooked food. By boosting calories, and by detoxifying and softening food, controlled fire allowed us to exchange big guts for big brains. Experiments confirm that we cannot thrive or reproduce on raw foods alone: they simply cannot deliver the calories and they require more chewing, digestive juices, and intestinal machinery. With cooking that digestive process begins earlier. If the observations hold, they say that humans and fire have not simply co-existed but co-evolved. We are not only the keystone species for fire: fire is a keystone process for our existence. — Anonymous

And this disease was called The Loneliness, because when you saw your home town dwindle to the size of your fist and then lemon-size and then pin-size and vanish in the fire-wake, you felt you had never been born, there was no town, you were nowhere, with space all around, nothing familiar, only other strange men. And when the state of Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, or Montana vanished into cloud seas, and, doubly, when the United States shrank to a misted island and the entire planet Earth became a muddy baseball tossed away, then you were alone, wandering in the meadows of space, on your way to a place you couldn't imagine. — Ray Bradbury

Even though conditions such as lack of sleep, insufficient food and various mental stresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone. — Viktor E. Frankl

One of the reasons I became a writer is that, unlike starting a band, directing movies, or acting in a theatrical production, you can do it alone. Your success and failure depend entirely on yourself. — Neil Strauss

She [Beatrice] alone was still real for him, still implied meaning in the world, and beauty. Her nature became his landmark - what Melville would call, with more sobriety than we can now muster, his Greenwich Standard ... — Dan Simmons

For the next two weeks, the world and all other issues would be omitted. We were two people alone in a hospital room. We allowed no visitors. We had two weeks of near-silence with each other and my increasing helplessness. I tended to tangle the IV and misplace the oxygen tube. As I started to say earlier, I could feel no sensible interest in the future. The moments became extraordinarily dimensionless - not without value but flat and a great deal emptier. When you learn you're fatally ill, time becomes very confusing, perhaps uninteresting, pedestrian. But my not caring if I lived or died hurt Ellen. And I was grateful that I could indulge my cowardice toward death in terms of living for her. — Harold Brodkey

All errour is prejudicial: it is by deceiving himself that man is plunged in misery. He neglected Nature; he understood not her laws; he formed gods of the most preposterous kinds: these became the sole objects of his hope, the creatures of his fear, and he trembled under these visionary deities; under the supposed influence of imaginary beings created by himself; under the terrour inspired by blocks of stone; by logs of wood; by flying fish; or else under the frowns of men, mortal as himself, whom his distempered fancy had elevated above that Nature of which alone he is capable of forming any idea. — Paul Henri Thiry D'Holbach

The funds are good at the moment," said the treasurer, with the bankbook in front of him. "The firms have been generous of late. Max Linder & Co. paid five hundred to be left alone. Walker Brothers sent in a hundred; but I took it on myself to return it and ask for five. If I do not hear by Wednesday, their winding gear may get out of order. We had to burn their breaker last year before they became reasonable. Then the West Section Coaling Company has paid its annual contribution. We have enough on hand to meet any obligations." "What — Arthur Conan Doyle

In the passage of their lives together every object in the garden, every item in the house, every word they spoke, attested to their mutual love, the combining of their humuours ... When the time came that Nora was alone most of the night and part of the day, she suffered from the personality of the house, the punishment of those who collect their lives together. Unconsciously at first, she went about disturbing nothing; then she became aware that her soft and careful movements were the outcome of an unreasoning fear - if she disarranged anything Robin might become confused - might lose the scent of home. — Djuna Barnes

You alone became the outer surface of my life, the side I never see, and you will be that, the unknown part of me, until I die. — Marguerite Duras

Hate cannot live alone. It It must have love as a trigger, a goad, or a stimulant. Joe early developed a gentle protective love for Joe. He comforted and flattered and cherished Joe. He set up walls to save Joe from a hostile world. And Joe gradually became proof against wrong. If Joe got into trouble, it was because the world was in angry conspiracy against him. And if Joe attacked the world, it was revenge and they damn well deserved it - the sons of bitches. Joe lavished every care on his love, and he perfected a lonely set of rules which might have gone like this:
1. Don't believe nobody. The bastards are after you.
2. Keep your mouth shut. Don't keep your neck out.
3. Keep your ears open. When they make a slip, grab on to it and wait.
4. Everybody's a son of a bitch and whatever you do they got it coming. — John Steinbeck

First New York was a sort of provincial capital, bigger and richer than Manchester or Marseilles, but not much different in its essential spirit. Then, after the war, it became one among half a dozen world cities. Today it has the appearance of standing alone, as the center of culture in the part of the world that still tries to be civilized. — Malcolm Cowley

'Home Alone' had become the absolute biggest film I had ever done, and it became the third-highest grossing film of all time. So clearly it had an effect on me that is unparalleled to any other film experience in my childhood. — Devin Ratray

With every step he took, Jacques' body became tighter and more painful. His breath as coming in hoarse gasps. He swung her into his arms and raced down the tunnels twists and turns.
"What are you doing, Jacques?" Half laughing, half concerned, Shea held on tightly, her slender arms around his neck.
"I am getting us to a place where we can be alone." He was decisive about it. "The tunnel leads to hot springs, a beautiful spot where we can rest for a time. I was taking you there when you seduced me."
Shea laughed softly. "Is that what I did? If all it takes is opening your shirt we're in for a wild time together. — Christine Feehan

"Are we alone in the universe?" This is a question which goes back to the dawn of history, but for most of human history it has been in the province of religion and philosophy. Fifty or something years ago, however, it became part of science. — Paul Davies

Jobs tended to be deeply moved by artists who displayed purity, and he became a fan. He invited Ma to play at his wedding, but he was out of the country on tour. He came by the Jobs house a few years later, sat in the living room, pulled out his 1733 Stradivarius cello, and played Bach. "This is what I would have played for your wedding," he told them. Jobs teared up and told him, "You playing is the best argument I've ever heard for the existence of God, because I don't really believe a human alone can do this." On — Walter Isaacson

I don't know why we stopped reading together, but gradually we were not doing it regularly, and then without realizing it was happening we were reading different books, and gradually we came not to care about the book the other one was reading, because it was not the book we were reading, and we became bored and drifted off when the other one talked about his book. What we were doing, reading different books, was furnishing different rooms, constructing separate worlds almost, in which we could sit and be ourselves again. Of course those were rooms in which we each sat alone, and we gradually spent more and more time in them and less and less in the house we lived in together. — Sam Savage

Ba'al led Ashtart down the underground tunnel in a dog collar. It had been thirteen years since the battle of nine kings, where Marduk had defeated Ashtart and became Ba'al, the king of the gods of Canaan. Ashtart's plan had been set back generations with the devastation of her giant progeny throughout the land by Chedorlaomer's forces. But with the addition of Ba'al as the Most High God of Canaan, the two of them together could do what she could not do alone. Ashtart had revitalized the original program of miscegenation of the Watchers. The rest of the pantheon of gods were fearful of the consequences of such a pursuit, since El Shaddai had already flooded the earth the first time such a course of action had been undertaken. But with the two most powerful divinities united, the pantheon could do little but sit back and see what happened. — Brian Godawa

And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing. — Haruki Murakami

From that unremarkable gap in dense northern forest, I could finally see clearly that if I hadn't walked away from school, through devastating beauty alone on the Pacific Crest Trail, met rattlesnakes and bears, fording frigid and remote rivers as deep as I am tall - feeling terror and the gratitude that followed the realization that I'd survived rape - I'd have remained lost, maybe for my whole life. The trail had shown me how to change.

This is the story of how my recklessness became my salvation.

I wrote it. — Aspen Matis

Until death," Jem replied gently. "Those are the words of the oath. 'Until aught but death part thee and me.' Someday, Will, I will go where none can follow me, and I think it will be sooner rather than later. Have you ever asked yourself why I agreed to be your parabatai?"
"No better offers forthcoming?" Will tried for humor, but his voice cracked like glass.
"I thought you needed me," Jem said. "There is a wall you have built about yourself, Will, and I have never asked you why. But no one should shoulder every burden alone. I thought you would let me inside if I became your parabatai, and then you would have at least someone to lean upon. I did wonder what my death would mean for you. I used to fear it, for your sake. I feared you would be left alone inside that wall. But now ... something has changed. I do not know why. But I know that it is true."
"That what is true?" Will's fingers were still digging into Jem's wrist.
"That the wall is coming down. — Cassandra Clare

It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself. — Virginia Woolf

Only the United States of America deemed ice cream "an essential item for troop morale." And so it alone continued producing, ordering ice cream freezers on submarines, ice cream freezers on tankers, ice cream freezers on cargo ships. Over the course of the war, the United States military became the largest ice cream manufacturer in history. — Susan Jane Gilman

I watched her carve her mistakes in stone, and they arranged themselves around her. They became a maze with walls that reached the sky. Because she learned from so few of them, she was lost. Because she didn't have faith in anything, she didn't try to find a way out. I watched her try to face her fears alone, too proud to ask for help, too stubborn to admit she was afraid, too small to fight them, too tired to fly away. — Amy Zhang

But somehow, I felt no inclination to be interested in it in any amateur way, let alone professional, until suddenly I became interested. And the first thing I did was to compose: not play an instrument, but to compose. — Gunther Schuller

Freeh knew the estrangement undermined the FBI. "The lost resources and lost time alone were monumental," he wrote. "So much that should have been straightforward became problematic in the extreme." But he felt compelled to keep a distance from the president. It deepened as the years went by. It became a danger to the United States. — Tim Weiner

He got worse as the night wore on. Tessa tried not to think about the wound, tried not to think about what she was going to do if he died and left her alone. Instead, she concentrated on doing what she could to keep the fever down and keep him comfortable, dragging a chair over to the side of the bed when she became too weary to stay awake any longer and dozing in it for short respites.

Toward morning, he began to thrash about on the bed, muttering. She bathed his heated skin again and finally climbed into bed beside him. He quieted when she pulled his head against her breasts and stroked his hair soothingly. — Kaitlyn O'Connor

I did a short film at Outfest, 'Where Are the Dolls,' based on an Elizabeth Bishop poem done, where I play this woman who is sort of walking the streets and ends up alone dancing in a club. I have this hot and heavy scene with a very beautiful actress. It became very popular. — Megan Follows

With this book in my hands, reading aloud to my friends, questioning them, explaining to them, I was made clearly to understand that I had no friends, that I was alone in the world. Because in not understanding the meaning of the words, neither I nor my friends, one thing became very clear and that was that there were ways of not understanding and that the difference between the non-understanding of one individual and the non-understanding of another created a world of terra firma even more solid than differences of understanding. — Henry Miller

I said to the German Ambassador that, as long as there was only a dispute between Austria and Serbia alone, I did not feel entitled to intervene; but that, directly it was a matter between Austria and Russia, it became a question of the peace of Europe, which concerned us all. — Edward Grey

I lay there with my mind running amuck, on the brink of madness. And somehow, gradually, early Sunday morning, I became calm. I can't think of any other word for it. I was thinking about the beach poem again, and I started to feel that I was being looked after, that everything was OK. It was strange: if there was ever a time in my life when I had the right to feel alone this was it. But I lost that sense of loneliness. I felt like there was a force in the room with me, not a person, but I had a sense that there was another world, another dimension, and it would be looking after me. It was like, This isn't the only world, this is just one aspect of the whole thing, don't imagine this is all there is. — John Marsden

I mean, what's thematic? How to put it? Going back to, like, 1980, when I started writing poetry. Language itself became an issue. I'd even think about font as an aspect of text, you know, how something looks on a page. A lot of this is the product of a very solitary existence, it's like, language, I mean, you know. A lot of time spent alone in the creation of all of this stuff. — Richard Meltzer

As he grew older, which was mostly in my absence, my firstborn son, Alexander, became ever more humorous and courageous. There came a time, as the confrontation with the enemies of our civilization became more acute, when he sent off various applications to enlist in the armed forces. I didn't want to be involved in this decision either way, especially since I was being regularly taunted for not having 'sent' any of my children to fight in the wars of resistance that I supported. (As if I could 'send' anybody, let alone a grown-up and tough and smart young man: what moral imbeciles the 'anti-war' people have become.) — Christopher Hitchens

The doggy demolition began slowly. Clothes, hairbrushes, dishes, pens, wristwatch, toothbrush (yes, he'd reached it somehow) - anything I came in contact with became an object to chew, maul, consume. Toys, dog chews, or rawhides were scoffed at while he was alone; it had to be something of mine. He ate two remote controls, binoculars, a cherished baseball from high school, two belts, a computer mouse and keyboard, Ray-Ban sunglasses, and too many shoes to count. Even the shifter knob and window cranks in my Civic fell victim to Lou's teeth. Anything I handled eventually became dog food. — Steve Duno

[ ... ] there is one inexorable law of technology, and it is this: when revolutionary inventions become widely accessible, they cease to be accessible. Technology is inherently democratic, because it promises the same services to all; but it works only if the rich are alone using it. When the poor also adopt technology, it stops working. A train used to take two hours to go from A to B; then the motor car arrived, which could cover the same distance in one hour. For this reason cars were very expensive. But as soon as the masses could afford to buy them, the roads became jammed, and the trains started to move faster. Consider how absurd it is for the authorities constantly to urge people to use public transport, in the age of the automobile; but with public transport, by consenting not to belong to the elite, you get where you're going before members of the elite do. — Umberto Eco

I Dwelt alone
In a world of moan,
And my soul was a stagnant tide,
Till the fair and gentle Eulalie became my blushing bride-
Till the yellow-haired young Eulalie became my smiling bride
Ah, less-less bright
The stars of night
Than the eyes of the radiant girl!
And never a flake
That the vapor can make
With the moon-tints of purple and pearl,
Can vie with the modest Eulalie's most unregarded curl-
Can vie compare with the bright-eyed Eulalie's most humble and careless curl

Now Doubt-now Pain
Come never again,
For her soul gives me sigh for sigh,
And all day long
Shine, bright and strong,
Astarte within the sky,
While ever to her dear Eulalie upturns her matron eye-
While ever to her young Eulalie upturns her violet eye. — Edgar Allan Poe

What is it that an artist does when he is left alone in his studio? My conclusion was that if I was an artist and I was in the studio, then everything I was doing in the studio should be art ... From that point on, art became more of an activity and less of a product. — Bruce Nauman

Yet if the Howard years changed little in the law, they had a huge effect on the culture. Most Australians certainly became wealthier, but in the process they became more materialistic and self-centred. Howard constantly held up the ideal of mateship, but in practice he was much more concerned with individuals taking responsibility for themselves than in fostering genuine co-operation within communities, let alone in a wider international context. Indeed, much of his political success derived from setting groups against each other, from bolstering fear and loathing. — Mungo MacCallum

Okay, what in Hades just happened? Stones don't glow blue or any other color and they certainly don't burn circles on you."
The stone wasn't talking.
Alexandra considered herself well grounded, yet here she stood, talking to a stone that glowed, burned circles, and refused to answer.
A thread of sensation pricked at the edges of her mind, then grew stronger. It mirrored an idea then became clear.
Tell no one.
What? Looking from side to side, she backed against the wall. Although it felt like someone whispered in her ear, she stood there alone. The day's trauma must have pushed her over the edge, yet the sensation persisted.
Tell no one.
She froze. Her eyes darted around the room. The muscles in her legs tightened as she prepared to bolt from the room.
Alexandra swallowed and licked her lips. "Who would believe me anyway?" she whispered. — H.H. Laura

Every word he wrote would be strong with that sweet purity and simplicity that was his gift alone, placing him higher than any living poet, secure on his pedestal apart from the world, like a great silent god above the little dwarfs of men tossed hither and thither in the stream of life. From the crystal clearness of his brain the images became words, and the words became magic, and the whole was transcendent of beauty, one thread touching another, alike in their perfection and their certitude of immortality. Thus it seemed to me he was not a living figure of flesh and blood, but a monument to the national pride of his country, his England, and now and then he would bow gravely from his pedestal and scatter to the people a small quantity of his thought, which they would grub for on their poor rough ground, then clasp to their hungry hearts as treasure. — Daphne Du Maurier

My mom's always been a good cook, so I took a lot of stuff from her, but most of the stuff I took from Emeril or Bobby Flay right off the TV and make it. I just loved to cook, so it just became a thing. It's a release. Even if I'm alone, I'll cook a full meal, maybe even a two-course meal, just because I love to cook. It's my secret love! — Christian Kane

Technology offers the illusion of companionship without the demands of intimacy, and communication without emotional risk, while actually making people feel lonelier and more overwhelmed.

"A song that became popular on YouTube in 2010, 'Do You Want to Date My Avatar?' ends with the lyrics 'And if you think I'm not the one, log off, log off, and we'll be done.' "

from a review of Alone Together by S. Turkle — Michiko Kakutani

Francie of course became an outsider shunned by all because of her stench. But she had grown accostumed to being lonely. She was used to walking alone and being considered different. She did not suffer to much. — Betty Smith

As soon as he ceased to be mad he became merely stupid. There are maladies we must not seek to cure because they alone protect us from others that are more serious. — Marcel Proust

He was alone in the darkness once more, but the darkness became brighter and brighter until it was burning like the sun. — Neil Gaiman

Alone with my wine and my misery, I was convinced that life was composed of a string of "if only's" leading from one self-inflicted bungle to the next until at some point, one's final iteration of the excuse became one's final utterance, and one expired. — Andrew Levkoff

Those of us living in the Islamic Republic of Iran grasped both the tragedy and absurdity of the
cruelty to which we were subjected. We had to poke fun at our own misery in order to survive.
We also instinctively recognized poshlust-not just in others, but in ourselves. This was one reason
that art and literature became so essential to our lives: they were not a luxury but a necessity.
What Nabokov captured was the texture of life in a totalitarian society, where you are completely
alone in an illusory world full of false promises, where you can no longer differentiate between
your savior and your executioner. — Azar Nafisi

It had become clear to me, in a flash of illumination, that for me the only possible goal was psychiatry. Here alone the two currents of my interest could flow together and in a united stream dig their own bed. Here was the empirical field common to biological and spiritual facts, which I had everywhere sought and nowhere found. Here at last was the place where the collision of nature and spirit became a reality. — Carl Jung

Old Man At Home Alone in the Morning"

There are questions that I no longer ask
and others that I have not asked for a long time
that I return to and dust off and discover
that I'm smiling and the question
has always been me and that it is
no question at all but that it means
different things at the same time
yes I am old now and I am the child
I remember what are called the old days and there is
no one to ask how they became the old days
and if I ask myself there is no answer
so this is old and what I have become
and the answer is something I would come to
later when I was old but this morning
is not old and I am the morning
in which the autumn leaves have no question
as the breeze passes through them and is gone — W.S. Merwin

Religion was supposed to be a blanket drawn up to your chin to keep you warm, a promise that when it came to the end, you wouldn't die alone - but it could just as easily leave you shivering out in the cold, if WHAT you believed became more important than the fact THAT you believed. — Jodi Picoult

When we decided to have Julie, I couldn't carry her. We sat down and the hard numbers stared back at us. I made twice as much as Fern. We wouldn't have been able to feed ourselves, let alone another mouth, if I'd been the one to hold her. And so we both went for the operation, and they took eggs from the two of us and made them one. And then I squeezed Fern's hand when she went into the theatre, and when she came out again they'd put it inside her. And sheltered by her body, the one cell that was us divided and became two, and then three, and then four hundred million, and then they divided into parts. Lungs, heart, brain, mouth. And finally, when she was ready, Julie divided from Fern and there were three of us. — Lee S. Hawke

If emotions were universal, then in one sense he was not alone, never had been alone, and never could be alone....No pain or happiness was unique. All humanity drank from the same river of emotion; and by drinking, every race, religion, and nationality became one indivisible species. — Dean Koontz

I was fighting with Thoby on the lawn. We were pommelling each other with our fists. Just as I raised my fist to hit him, I felt: why hurt another person? I dropped my hand instantly, and stood there, and let him beat me. I remember the feeling. It was a feeling of hopeless sadness. It was as if I became aware of something terrible; and of my own powerlessness. I slunk off alone, feeling horribly depressed. — Virginia Woolf

When it became clear that nothing of the kind was forthcoming, I took more direct action. I prayed for the city to be cleared of people, for the gift of being alone - a-l-o-n-e: which is the one New York prayer that rarely gets lost or delayed in channels, and in no time at all everything I touched turned to solid loneliness.
- De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period (1952) — J.D. Salinger

While such numbers must always be regarded as broad estimates, one study has shown that each day sees some 78,000 new Christians worldwide and each week some 1,000 new churches are established in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (Wagner 1983:20-21). Since those figures were published it became known that in China alone the decade of the 1980s saw up to 20,000 new Christians per day. — Donald Anderson McGavran

Descending the stairs from her room, I was tempted to go outside and find out if the shivering gut-wrench I'd felt as I came in really meant what I thought it did. But I stayed in the warmth of the house. I felt like I knew something about myself that I hadn't before, a bit of knowledge so new that if I became a wolf now, I might lose it and not remember it whenever I became Cole again.
I wandered down the main stairs, mindful that her father was somewhere in the house's depths while Isabel stayed up in her tower alone.
What would it be like, growing up in a house that looked like this? If I breathed too hard it would knock some decorative bowl off the wall or cause the perfectly arranged dried flowers to weep petals. Sure, my family had been affluent growing up - successful mad scientists generally are - but it never looked like this. Our lives had looked ... lived in. — Maggie Stiefvater

It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made. — Wallace Stevens

Yes, you can feel very alone as a poet and you sometimes think, is it worth it? Is it worth carrying on? But because there were other poets, you became part of a scene. Even though they were very different writers, it made it easier because you were together. — Roger McGough

Harry had not expected Hermione's anger to abate overnight, and was therefore unsurprised that she communicated mainly by dirty looks and pointed silences the next morning. Ron responded by maintaining an unnaturally somber demeanor in her presence as an outward sign of continuing remorse. In fact, when all three of them were together Harry felt like the only non-mourner at a poorly attended funeral. During those few moments he spent alone with Harry, however (collecting water and searching the undergrowth for mushrooms), Ron became shamelessly cheery. — J.K. Rowling

Most of us have felt barriers between ourselves and our fathers and had thought that going it alone was part of what it meant to be a man. We tried to get close to our children when we became fathers, and yet the business of practicing masculinity kept getting in the way. We men have begun to talk about that. — Frank Pittman

He humbled himself and became obedient unto death. - Phil. 2:8 Humility is the path to death, because in death it gives the highest proof of its perfection. Humility is the blossom, of which death to self is the perfect fruit. Jesus humbled himself unto death, and opened the path in which we too must walk. As there was no way for him to prove his surrender to God to the very uttermost, or to give up and rise out of our human nature to the glory of the Father, but through death, so with us too. Humility must lead us to die to self: so we prove how wholly we have given ourselves up to it and to God; so alone we are freed from fallen nature, and find the path that leads to life in God, to that full birth of the new nature, of which humility is the breath and the joy. — Andrew Murray

You seem to be under the misconception that if you perform one brave deed, that alone makes you a samurai. Well it doesn't! you let that one act of loyalty convince you of your righteousness. The more convinced you became, the more harm you caused yourself and everyone else. — Eiji Yoshikawa

If you were alone and suddenly became blind, and even so you keep walking forward. — Ayumi Hamasaki