"I mean one of the things about being alone is that you've no people to define yourself off, I mean, people are like all-round mirrors, because let's face it, we don't often see ourselves all round in a mirror anyway, do we"
About this Quote
Aloneness, in Diana Wynne Jones's hands, isn’t romantic solitude; it’s a perceptual problem. The line tumbles forward in that conversational, self-correcting way ("I mean... I mean...") that feels like a mind trying to catch a moving target: identity. Jones’s intent is less to lament loneliness than to pinpoint what vanishes when other people vanish - not company, but angles. Without a social world, you lose the incidental feedback that tells you what your face looks like when you’re tired, what your humor sounds like when it cuts too close, what your kindness costs. You lose the ordinary friction that makes a self legible.
The mirror metaphor is slyly precise. A standard mirror offers one flattering, controllable plane; other people are "all-round mirrors", reflecting the parts you can’t curate: the profile, the posture, the habits you don’t know you have because you never watch yourself living. Jones also sneaks in a critique of self-knowledge as a modern obsession. We like to imagine identity as something you excavate privately, as if introspection were a flashlight. Her subtext suggests the opposite: the self is partly a social artifact, constructed through response, misreading, correction, and recognition.
Context matters: Jones, a fantasy writer obsessed with the mechanics of character and transformation, treats identity as mutable and relational. The quote reads like a quiet argument against the myth of the fully self-made person. Alone, you may be freer - but you’re also less real to yourself, because you’re missing the only reflective surface that moves with you.
The mirror metaphor is slyly precise. A standard mirror offers one flattering, controllable plane; other people are "all-round mirrors", reflecting the parts you can’t curate: the profile, the posture, the habits you don’t know you have because you never watch yourself living. Jones also sneaks in a critique of self-knowledge as a modern obsession. We like to imagine identity as something you excavate privately, as if introspection were a flashlight. Her subtext suggests the opposite: the self is partly a social artifact, constructed through response, misreading, correction, and recognition.
Context matters: Jones, a fantasy writer obsessed with the mechanics of character and transformation, treats identity as mutable and relational. The quote reads like a quiet argument against the myth of the fully self-made person. Alone, you may be freer - but you’re also less real to yourself, because you’re missing the only reflective surface that moves with you.
Quote Details
| Topic | Loneliness |
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