I feel like I'm at the bottom of a well. I feel like I'm way down this deep, deep hole and I'm looking up and all there is is this little dot of light and I have to shout at the top of my lungs for anyone to hear me and even when I do, I say the wrong thing or they don't really listen or they're just humouring me.

It sometimes feels as if I had shouted a deeply cherished message out into an empty chasm and nobody heard me.

What you are shouts so loudly in my ears I cannot hear what you say.

Sometimes I can’t even see out of my eyes because I’ve gone to a very dead drop space. Well, you could call it dead but maybe it’s actually very much alive. People get uncomfortable when you’re really listening, when you’re really paying attention, because we’re not used to that anymore. But now I can really see you. I can see all of you

For it is difficult to speak, even any old rubbish, and at the same time focus one's attention on another point, where one's true interest lies, as fitfully defined by a feeble murmur seeming to apologize for not being dead. And what it seemed to me I heard then, concerning what I should do, and say, in order to have nothing further to do, nothing further to say, it seemed to me I only barely heard it, because of the noise I was engaged in making elsewhere, in obedience to the unintelligible terms of an incomprehensible damnation.

I'm so tired of trying to say things to people and having them not listen. That's probably the reason why a lot of people think that I'm either depressed or sullen or shy because I just simply will not talk to you unless that I think that you're listening to me. I just simply won't. I can't.

When one is not understood one should as a rule lower one's voice, because when one really speaks loudly enough and is not heard, it is because people do not want to hear. One had better begin to mutter to oneself, then they get curious.

I want to scream and shout, "Stop! We are all human beings!"...but I don't think anybody will hear it.

Who you are is speaking so loudly that I can't hear what you're saying

…Why am I even whispering? It's not like they're actually gonna hear me.

I can’t listen to you. I can’t listen to your voice. It’s as though I’d drunk a bottle of anise and fallen asleep wrapped in a quilt of roses. It pulls me along – and I know I’m drowning – but I go on down.