But it doesn't happen that way, I keep telling myself knowingly and sadly. Only in our fraternity pledges and masonic inductions, our cowboy movies and magazine stories, not in our real-life lives. For, the seventeenth-century humanist to the contrary, each man is an island complete unto himself, and as he sinks, the moving feet go on around him, from nowhere to nowhere and with no time to lose. The world is long past the Boy Scout stage of its development; now each man dies as he was meant to die, and as he was born, and as he lived: alone, all alone. Without any God, without any hope, without any record to show for his life.("New York Blues")
About This Quote
About Cornell Woolrich
Cornell Woolrich was a 20th-century American novelist. Cornell George Hopley Woolrich was an American novelist and short story writer. He sometimes used the pseudonyms William Irish and George Hopley. Read more on Wikipedia →
Themes
- Alone — Solitude, independence, and the experience of being alone