Anneli Rufus
“We do not require company. In varying degrees, it bores us, drains us, makes our eyes glaze over. Overcomes us like a steamroller. Of course, the rest of the world doesn't understand.”
― Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto“Socializing is as exhausting as giving blood. People assume we loners are misanthropes, just sitting thinking, ‘Oh, people are such a bunch of assholes,’ but it’s really not like that. We just have a smaller tolerance for what it takes to be with others. It means having to perform. I get so tired of communicating.”
―“We care. We feel. We think. We do not always miss the absent one. We cannot always come when called. Being friends with a loner requires patience and the wisdom that distance does not mean dislike.”
― Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto“The whole world is a personality cult.”
― Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto“Writing is done alone. People do not talk about the things they do alone.”
― Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto“After what others would call a fun day out together, we feel as if we have been at the Red Cross, donating blood.”
― Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto“Because loners are born everywhere, we end up living everywhere. We do not, have not, tended to single ourselves out as special, elite, requiring rarefied environments. Too often we have done the opposite; lived where we lived because our jobs were there, or families, or because we'd heard the schools were good there, or that we would love a place with changing seasons. Then, no matter what, we put our noses to the grindstone. We take living there as a fait accompli, a fact. Too often we are miserable somewhere without realizing why. We blame ourselves for not buckling down, settling in, fitting in. The problem is the place, but too often we do not see this, we will not allow ourselves to see this. It's the same old thing: This is a friendly town, so what's your problem?
...To the non-loner, or the self-reproaching loner, the fact of being a loner is not comparable to those other determinants. It is not a matter of life and death, we tell ourselves. It its not a matter of breathing or of execution by stoning. But home is the crucible of living...So how can living not be a matter of life and death?”
― Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto“Not that I was incapable of friendship. 'Don't be shy', the teachers coaxed. I was not shy, only extremely choosy. And Denise shone like a diamond. If you had to ask me to define paradise, I would have said a desert island which Denise could visit, on a boat.”
― Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto“And as experienced as I am, it still summons an act of bravery from me, and I like that. I like the idea of setting an example - proving that it is acceptable to be alone in a public place where everyone else is in groups, and to just be sitting there eating, not having to be engrossed in anything else.”
― Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto“Written works do not produce fast reactions as pictures and sculptures and music do. it takes no effort to see or hear. but to read - to grasp what the writer has done - requires commitment. engagement. as is the case with most art, the relationship between the maker and the audience is remote in time and space. the writer is nowhere to be seen when the reader takes up the book, or even dead. but most often, books go unread...thus the writer, knowing this as writers do, is even more alone...yet writers write. and knowing what they know makes their isolation almost a sacrament.”
― Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto“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.”
― Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto“I don’t hate my relatives or those whose names fill my address book. But I do not want to have lunch with any of them. It is not personal. I am not angry. Nor is this about being afraid. I am not shy. I do not have terrible manners.
Do birds hate lips? Do Fijians detest snowplows? Being a loner is not about hate, but need: We need what others dread. We dread what others need.”
― Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto“People say the desert is desolate. Yet for me it's very much alive, full of surprises. As soon as I see those wide-open spaces, I can breathe,”
― Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto“Loners can play well with others-the right others.”
― Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto“They say isolation drives you crazy. Sure it does-when you can't get enough of it.”
― Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto“Some of us have spent our whole lives committing suicide. And some of us survived.”
― Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself“Our true selves are the selves we were before we twisted, bent, and beat ourselves into the shapes we had to take in order to please others: the shapes that we hate. Our true selves are the selves we would have been had no one tried to break or shame or change us. Our true selves are what those who actually love us see in us. Our true selves are who we have always been, even if they have been in hiding all this time. Our true selves are who we will, in that sheer blue zone above self-loathing, always be.”
― Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself“Some in the outside world might call our traumas trivial. Were you gang-raped? Sold into slavery? Imprisoned in a concentration camp? Did you accidentally tweet a naked picture of yourself to twenty million strangers? No? Then stop whining! They would not understand that it is possible to be annihilated by a smirk, a scowl, an empty threat.”
― Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself“The mob thinks we are maladjusted. Of course we are adjusted just fine, not to their frequency. They take it personally.”
― Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto“Is socializing all that great? Riots are socializing. Arguably, more damage is done and time wasted in company with others than alone.”
― Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto“Alone, we are alive.”
― Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto“Often the circumstances in which we lost our self-esteem were relationships distinguished by a steeply unequal power balance.
Our spellcasters were parents. Teachers. Bullies. So-called friends. Strangers. Romantic partners. Cliques. Coworkers. Your spellcaster was the mean first grader. Or the psycho in the dark. Or the town, school, Scout troop, spiritual community, family, neighborhood that did not understand your type, whatever that type was. Your spellcaster could even be society at large, that nameless, faceless "them" with boundless power and a thousand biases.
And it became unbearable to be the bullied one, the hounded one, the outcast and excluded one. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, the old saying goes. Others hated us, or appeared to. We joined 'em.”
― Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself“And yet what has been learned can be unlearned.”
― Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself“The most horrifying thing about art is its honesty,”
― Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto“Writers' closest companions are inside their heads.”
― Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto“Yet introverts and loners are not one and the same thing.”“Loners live among the mob, so the mob mistakes us for its own, presuming and assuming.”
― Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto
― Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto
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