Richard Deming > Quotes

“Maybe a lonely life keeps resonating, keeps ringing out, until another lonely person turns an ear in that direction, at the exact right moment. Maybe that's what we do to learn the ways of an exquisite loneliness: we listen.”
― Richard Deming, This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativity

“Since in being lonely we feel only the throes of emotional distance, it is through art, books, music, movies, that we can collect our glimpses of others’ lives, that we can collect those fellow travelers.”
― Richard Deming, This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativity

“In the end, the “I” is not enough for most of us. You can come up with stories, but you also need to share them with someone, or else they simply vanish. Memories, thoughts, stories need to be anchored to something.”
― Richard Deming, This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativity

“McLaughlin is a lean, dark man who looks a little like the TV version of Boston Blackie.”
― Richard Deming, Dragnet: The Case of the Courteous Killer

“That direct engagement with the self, with no fear of shame or abandonment, no struggling to please others, is what makes isolation feel restorative and generative when it creates the conditions for solitude. In other words, stories we create with ourselves, for ourselves, can be a way of redeeming loneliness. It’s when we hit the limits of the stories we can invent for ourselves, about ourselves, that we move back into loneliness.”
― Richard Deming, This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativity