Quotes About Loneliness

John Grady looked at the table. The paper cat stepped thin and slant among the shapes of cats thereon. He looked up again. Yessir, he said. Just me and him.

On Gay Street the traffic lights are stilled. The trolleyrails gleam in their beds and a late car passes with a long slish of tires. In the long arcade of the bus station footfalls come back like laughter. He marches darkly toward his darkly marching shape in the glass of the depot door. His fetch come up from life's other side like an autoscopic hallucination, Suttree and Antisuttree, hand reaching to the hand.

There had to be a last man standing. And it wasnt the cuate in the Bronco begging for water.

Where did everybody go? And that's how it will be. What's wrong with that?

It would take a hell of a wife to beat no wife at all.

He built no fire. He lay listening to the horse crop the grass at his stakerope and he listened to the wind in the emptiness and watched stars trace the arc of the hemisphere and die in the darkness at the edge of the world and as he lay there the agony in his heart was like a stake.

Ultimo hombre. Last man standing, must've been one. Where'd he go?

dwindling slowly on the road behind him like some storybook peddler from an antique time, dark and bent and spider thin and soon to vanish forever.

When they brought Blevins back he sat in the corner and didnt speak. John Grady talked with the old man. His name was Orlando. He didnt know what crime he was accused of. He'd been told he could go when he signed the papers but he couldnt read the papers and no one would read them to him. He didnt know how long he'd been here. Since sometime in the winter. While they were talking the guards came again and the old man shut up.

The ragged sparks blew down the wind. The prairie about them lay silent. Beyond the fire it was cold and the night was clear and the stars were falling. The old hunter pulled his blanket about him. I wonder if there's other worlds like this, he said. Or if this is the only one.

The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth.

like some scurrilous king stripped of his vestiture and driven together with his fool into the wilderness to die.

He is sinking into a darkness he cannot even comprehend. Darkness and immobilizing cold.

There was nothing along the road save the country it traversed and there was nothing in the country at all.

Quién está? he said, but no one spoke back. There was someone there and they had been there. There was no one there. There was someone there and they had been there and they had not left but there was no one there.

He talked to her a long time and as the boy tending the wolf could not understand what it was he said he said what was in his heart. He made her promises that he swore to keep in the making. That he would take her to the mountains where she would find others of her kind. She watched him with her yellow eyes and in them was no despair but only that same reckonless deep of loneliness that cored the world to its heart.

The moon was already a quarter ways up. All but day bright. He felt like something in a jar.

He was trudging out across the field with his chin down so that withdrawing in the firelight he looked like a headless revenant turned away from the warmth of men's gatherings.

Dark and cold and no wind and a thin gray reef beginning along the eastern rim of the world. He walked out on the prairie and stood holding his hat like some supplicant to the darkness over them all and he stood there for a long time.

Suttree eased himself down on the arm of the sofa and sipped his beer. He patted J-Bone on the back. The voices seemed to fade. He waved away the whiskeybottle with a smile. In this tall room, the cracked plaster sootstreaked with the shapes of laths beneath, this barrenness, this fellowship of the doomed. Where life pulsed obscenely fecund. in the drift of voices and the laughter and the reek of stale beer the Sunday loneliness seeped away.

Recurrences of dreams he'd had in the mountains came and went and the second night he woke from uneasy sleep and lay in the world alone.

I know certain days of your childhood. All but weeping with loneliness. Coming upon a certain book in the library and clutching it to you. Carrying it home. Some perfect place to read it. Under a tree perhaps. Beside a stream. Flawed youths of course. To prefer a world of paper. Rejects.

John Grady rode through the willows and down the arroyo following the occasional bare footprint in the rain spotted loam until he came upon Blevins crouched under the roots of a dead cottonwood in a caveout where the arroyo turned and fanned out onto the plain. He was naked save for an outsized pair of stained undershorts. What the hell are you doin? said John Grady. Blevins sat gripping his thin white shoulders in either hand. Just settin here, he said.

He walked out on the prairie and stood holding his hat like some supplicant to the darkness over them all and he stood there for a long time.