Loners Quotes

“In other people's company I felt I was dull, gloomy, unwelcome, at once bored and boring...”
― André Gide

“Maybe this is who I really am.

Not a loner, exactly.

But someone who can be alone.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Little Failure

“Starting this day, she was no longer going to be quiet, a wallflower no more.”
― Magenta Periwinkle

“I wanted so badly to be seen, yet my pride prevented me from obviously asking to be seen. I did not want to be seen by demand, but rather by their choosing.”
― Magenta Periwinkle

“Loners live among the mob, so the mob mistakes us for its own, presuming and assuming. When the mob gets too close, the truth is revealed. Running or walking away, chased or free, any which way, we tell the mob in effect I don't need you.”
― Anneli Rufus, Party of One: The Loner's Manifesto

“You may say you won’t interfere with another person’s soul, but you do—merely by existing. The snag about it is the practical difficulty, so to speak, of not existing.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“The man who is too isolated grows timid, abstracted, a little odd: He stumbles along amid realities like a sailor who has just come off his ship; he has lost the sense of the human lot; he seems to look on you as if you were a "proposition" to be inserted in a syllogism, or an example to be put down in a notebook.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods

“I often wish I could just passively watch people without being expected to participate myself, like television.”
― M.E. Thomas, Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight

“One of the things that confirmed Hyacinth’s suspicion that America was an evil, lonely place was that people were islands unto themselves. And so when Avril drifted away, there was no friend or neighbor or pastor or coworker to reach out to and ask after her child.”
― Naomi Jackson, The Star Side of Bird Hill

“Whenever one speaks of lonely people one takes too much for granted. One thinks people all know what they're dealing with. No, they do not. They've never seen a lonely person, they've simply hated him without knowing him. They've been his neighbours who've used him up, they were the voices in the next room who tempted him. They roused things up against him, getting them to make a din and drown him out. Children ganged up against him when he was a tender child, and at every stage of his growing up he grew hostile to grown-ups . They tracked him to his hiding-place like an animal of chase and throughout his long youth there was no closed season. And when he didn't allow himself to be worn out so that he got away they yelled about what came forth from him and called it ugly and were suspicious of it. And as he didn't stop they grew more obvious and gobbled up his food and breathed up his air and spat into his poverty so that he himself became disgusted at it. They brought him into disrepute as if he were a contagion and threw stones at him to speed his departure. And they were right to follow their age-old instinct: because he really was their enemy. But then when he didn't look up they had second thoughts. They suspected that in all of this they had acted as he had willed them to act; they had strengthened him in his solitude and had helped him separate himself from them for ever.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Um, you don’t have to join me, but if you’re looking for a table, there are a couple good seats over there.” He nodded toward the far end.”
― J.M. Richards, Tall, Dark Streak of Lightning

“the code of a world he'd never been invited to join.”
― Andrew Kaufman, The Waterproof Bible

“It was this situation that led mathematician Chris Hauert and his colleagues to consider another possibility in an important evolutionary model published in Science in 2002. In Axelrod's study and in most previous theoretical models, individuals were forced to interact with each other. But what if they could choose not to interact? Rather than attempting to cooperate and risking being taken advantage of, a person could fend for herself. In other words, she could sever her connections to others in the network. Hauert called the people who adopt this strategy "loners."

Using some beautiful mathematics, Hauert and his colleagues showed that in a world full of loners it is easy for cooperation to evolve because there are no people to take advantage of the cooperators that appear. The loners fend for themselves, and the cooperators form networks with other cooperators. Soon, the cooperators take over the population because they always do better together than the loners. But once the world is full of cooperators, it is very easy for free riders to evolve and enjoy the fruits of cooperation without contributing (like parasites). As the free riders become the dominant type in the population, there is no one left for them to take advantage of; then, the loners once again take over -- because they want nothing to do, as it were, with those bastards. In short, cooperating can emerge because we can do more together than we can apart. But because of the free-rider problem, cooperation is not guaranteed to succeed.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis