Benedict Wells Quotes

I couldn't have expressed it clearly at the time, but in my heart I sensed I'd lost my way. The problem was that I didn't know when and where. I didn't even know which way it was I'd lost.

At home, silence awaited me, a sound I'd been familiar with for years. How I had come to loathe this hermit‐like existence, this inability to participate in life. Always just dreaming, never truly awake. Look at you, I thought: why do you so often long for solitude in company when you can scarcely bear to be alone anymore?

For a long time now I'd been able to tell from the set of her shoulders if she was tense; but the way she'd left the door ajar indicated that she wanted company. There was a familiarity between us that seemed infinite, like two mirrors reflecting one another.

To find your true self you need to question everything you encountered at birth. And lose some of it, too, because often it's only in pain that we discover what really belongs to us . . . It's in the breaches that we recognize ourselves.

All these nihilists and cynics are really just cowards. They act as if everything's meaningless because that means ultimately there's nothing to lose. Their attitude seems unassailable and superior, but inside it's worthless.

The antidote to loneliness isn't just being around random people indiscriminately, the antidote to loneliness is emotional security.

It's . . . From the moment we're born we're on the Titanic. We're going down, we won't survive this, it's already been decided. Nothing can change that. But we can choose whether we're going to run around screaming in panic, or whether we're like the musicians who play on, bravely and with dignity, although the ship is sinking.

As I walked into the garden, I nodded at my brother. A difficult childhood is like an invisible enemy, I thought. You never know when it will strike.

Even more than my siblings, I wondered to what extent the events of my childhood and adolescence had defined me, and it was only very late that I understood that I myself am the sole architect of my existence. This is what I am when I allow my past to influence me, and, conversely, just as much when I resist it.

The alternative to the concept of life and death is the void. Would it really be better if this world didn't exist at all? Instead, we live, make art, love, observe, suffer, laugh and are happy. We all exist in a million different ways so that there is no void, and the price we pay for that is death.

And as soon as someone developed feelings for her, she quickly rejected him. As if something inside her had shattered, and anyone who got too close to her cut themselves on the shards.