Giovanni's Room quotes about loneliness

Somebody, your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour—and in the oddest places!—for the lack of it.

You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

You play it safe long enough, and you’ll end up trapped in your own dirty body, forever and forever and forever—like me.

But what I mean about being a woman is, we might get married now and stay married for fifty years and I might be a stranger to you every instant of that time and you might never know it.

Giovanni looked at me. And this look made me feel that no one in my life had ever looked at me directly before.

I stared at absurd Paris, which was as cluttered now, under the scalding sun, as the landscape of my heart. I wondered what I was going to do.

It’s like putting an electric plug in a dead socket. Touch, but no contact. All touch, but no contact and no light.

And no matter what I was doing, another me sat in my belly, absolutely cold with terror over the question of my life.

I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.

You have never really been here. I do not think you have ever lied to me but I know that you have never told me the truth—why?

From a great height, where the air all around me was colder than ice, I watched my body in a stranger’s arms.

I looked at Giovanni’s face, which did not help me. He belonged to this strange city, which did not belong to me.

Giovanni knew that I was going to leave him but he did not dare accuse me for fear of being corroborated. I did not dare tell him.