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89393a8 Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them. solitude loneliness loner Jodi Picoult
e4a0f6b Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony. loneliness life Douglas Coupland
19ef6ab Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness? loneliness sadness Haruki Murakami
d5e4b6b I'm here. I love you. I don't care if you need to stay up crying all night long, I will stay with you. If you need the medication again, go ahead and take it--I will love you through that, as well. If you don't need the medication, I will love you, too. There's nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than Depression and I am braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me. loneliness healing Elizabeth Gilbert
020eff4 Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all. It just leads to disappointment. loneliness friends friendship life Haruki Murakami
9ef88fa When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives. loneliness George R.R. Martin
f5b4086 "God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering." loneliness Sylvia Plath
b3611f5 I feel too much. That's what's going on.' 'Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel in the wrong ways?' 'My insides don't match up with my outsides.' 'Do anyone's insides and outsides match up?' 'I don't know. I'm only me.' 'Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and outside.' 'But it's worse for me.' 'I wonder if everyone thinks it's worse for him.' 'Probably. But it really is worse for me. loneliness personality people differences emotions Jonathan Safran Foer
f7e3984 We live as we dream--alone.... loneliness Joseph Conrad
9bbfaf6 How we need another soul to cling to. loneliness companionship Sylvia Plath
9867b1c "Will's voice dropped. "Everyone makes mistakes, Jem." "Yes," said Jem. "You just make more of them than most people." "I --" "You hurt everyone," said Jem. "Everyone whose life you touch." "Not you," Will whispered. "I hurt everyone but you. I never meant to hurt you." Jem put his hands up, pressing his palms against his eyes. "Will --" "You can't never forgive me," Will said in disbelief, hearing the panic tinging his own voice. "I'd be --" "Alone?" Jem lowered his hand, but he was smiling now, crookedly. "And whose fault is that?" loneliness jem-carstairs will-herondale mistakes Cassandra Clare
42e4ae1 I don't know what's worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you've always wanted to be, and feel alone. loneliness philosophy melancholy psychology Daniel Keyes
817af1b "So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them." ( )" loneliness shyness Sylvia Plath
678908c It would be too easy to say that I feel invisible. Instead, I feel painfully visible, and entirely ignored. loneliness David Levithan
1627369 Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine. loneliness life sunshine Charlotte Brontë
8ebcece What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured. loneliness daring youth community purpose Kurt Vonnegut
c087b9d "Why aren't you in school? I see you every day wandering around." "Oh, they don't miss me," she said. "I'm antisocial, they say. I don't mix. It's so strange. I'm very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn't it? Social to me means talking to you about things like this." She rattled some chestnuts that had fallen off the tree in the front yard. "Or talking about how strange the world is. Being with people is nice. But I don't think it's social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don't; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film-teacher. That's not social to me at all. It's a lot of funnels and lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it's wine when it's not. They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can't do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people around, break windowpanes in the Window Smasher place or wreck cars in the Car Wrecker place with the big steel ball. Or go out in the cars and race on the streets, trying to see how close you can get to lampposts, playing 'chicken' and 'knock hubcaps.' I guess I'm everything they say I am, all right. I haven't any friends. That's supposed to prove I'm abnormal. But everyone I know is either shouting or dancing around like wild or beating up one another. Do you notice how people hurt each other nowadays?" loneliness lies conform wandering antisocial social peer-pressure hurt society bullying school Ray Bradbury
bec4556 "What is hell? Hell is oneself. Hell is alone, the other figures in it loneliness T.S. Eliot
b0f4b37 It's no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You've got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they've got to come. You can't force them. loneliness philosophy D.H. Lawrence
82d12cb Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly. loneliness relationships lonely-people David Foster Wallace
c11f92a We're all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding. loneliness lies isolation misunderstanding Rudyard Kipling
b4000aa The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend! loneliness kindness friends family insincerity pretense Edith Wharton
b4b7b63 She had become accustomed to being lonely. She was used to walking alone and to being considered 'different.' She did not suffer too much. loneliness suffering comfort inspirational girls Betty Smith
2fe6d8a No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me. mourning loneliness grief loss fear restlessness C.S. Lewis
d6512a4 That initial anger she had felt turned to sadness, and now it had become something else, almost a dullness of sorts. Even though she was constantly in motion, it seemed as if nothing special ever happened to her anymore. Each day seemed exactly like the last, and she had trouble differentiating among them. loneliness Nicholas Sparks
740da48 No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence--that which makes its truth, its meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream--alone. loneliness subjective-experience Joseph Conrad
f41fe86 I couldn't be with people and I didn't want to be alone. Suddenly my perspective whooshed and I was far out in space, watching the world. I could see millions and millions of people, all slotted into their lives; then I could see me--I'd lost my place in the universe. It had closed up and there was nowhere for me to be. I was more lost than I had known it was possible for any human being to be. loneliness sadness Marian Keyes
ba1cfe6 Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you. loneliness science-fiction Haruki Murakami
60df5d3 And he looked lonely enough that she said, 'If you like, you could be my friend'. kids loneliness friendship liitle-dorian little-aelin dorian-havilliard Sarah J. Maas
f0aea5c I was lonely. I felt it deeply and permanently, that this state of being on my own might never disappear. But I welcomed the lonliness, which had everything to do with being anonymous. It's never lonliness that nibbles away at a person's insides, but not having room inside themselves to be comfortably alone. loneliness sadness lonely sad Rachel Sontag
e7c7681 How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next--if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions--you'd be doomed. You'd be as ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to. loneliness sorrow love wisdom ignorance despair insight Margaret Atwood
e30e828 You are never alone. You are eternally connected with everyone. advaita advaita-vedanta eternal-truths everyone-belongs vedanta enlightenment loneliness global-oneness unity spirituality motivational life-lessons life wisdom inspirational non-duality insights interconnectedness awakening eternal oneness aloneness everyone spiritual-quotes spiritual-growth nonduality eternal-life wisdom-quotes alone awareness Amit Ray
c8b61de The strength of a love is always misjudged if we evaluate it by its immediate cause and not the stress that went before it, the dark and hollow space full of disappointment and loneliness that precedes all the great events in the heart's history. loneliness heart love Stefan Zweig
a69c5c9 I can't deceive myself that out of the bare stark realization that no matter how enthusiastic you are, no matter how sure that character is fate, nothing is real, past or future, when you are alone in your room with the clock ticking loudly into the false cheerful brilliance of the electric light. And if you have no past or future which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide. suicide loneliness future Sylvia Plath
dccda48 A young outcast will often feel that there is something wrong with himself, but as he gets older, grows more confident in who he is, he will adapt, he will begin to feel that there is something wrong with everyone else. bullied loneliness pain youth confidence motivational inspirational adaptation attitude confidence-and-attitude encouragement anger growth outcast introvert bully bullying Criss Jami
8955c96 All that he had of her was his memory, where he held every moment, every single moment that she had been his. That was all he had, to keep out the loneliness. loneliness love Juliet Marillier
afbe6b9 Lonely people have enthusiasms which cannot always be explained. When something strikes them as funny, the intensity and length of their laughter mirrors the depth of their loneliness, and they are capable of laughing like hyenas. When something touches their emotions, it runs through them like Paul Revere, awakening feelings that gather into great armies. laughter loneliness lonely-people intensity Mark Helprin
27458e2 A hunted man sometimes wearies of distrust and longs for friendship. loneliness friendship J. R. R. Tolkien
eb3807f What was wrong with me? I had a decent life. I was healthy. I wasn't starving or maimed by a land mine or orphaned. Yet somehow, it wasn't enough. I had a hole in me, and everything I took for granted slipped through it like sand. I felt like I had swallowed yeast, like whatever evil was festering inside me had doubled in size. loneliness Jodi Picoult
84a4a00 The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present. tragedy loneliness Alan Lightman
f733c56 What loneliness is more lonely than distrust? loneliness George Eliot
63be8a0 There's a sorrow and pain in everyone's life, but every now and then there's a ray of light that melts the loneliness in your heart and brings comfort like hot soup and a soft bed. loneliness pain light sorrow life Hubert Selby Jr.
2df2a94 But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape. solitude loneliness escape relationship fear love community Bell Hooks
a6cada3 "Two turtle doves will show thee Where my cold ashes lie loneliness death dead-souls doves whisper crying sad Nikolai Gogol
2430d1b For those who know the value of and exquisite taste of solitary freedom (for one is only free when alone), the act of leaving is the bravest and most beautiful of all. solitude loneliness bravery freedom inspirational Isabelle Eberhardt
0767969 Loneliness is a hard thing to handle. I feel it, sometimes. When I do, I want it to end. Sometimes, when you're near someone, when you touch them on some level that is deeper than the uselessly structured formality of casual civilized interaction, there's a sense of satisfaction in it. Or at least, there is for me. It doesn't have to be someone particularly nice. You don't have to like them. You don't even have to want to work with them. You might even want to punch them in the nose. Sometimes just making that connection is its own experience, its own reward. loneliness harry-dresden Jim Butcher
449a974 Oh, the places you'll go! There is fun to be done! There are points to be scored. There are games to be won. And the magical things you can do with that ball will make you the winning-est winner of all. Fame! You'll be as famous as famous can be, with the whole wide world watching you win on TV. Except when they don't Because, sometimes they won't. I'm afraid that some times you'll play lonely games too. Games you can't win 'cause you'll play against you. loneliness games lonely Dr. Seuss
7a2464e I often stood in front of the mirror alone, wondering how ugly a person could get. loneliness poem poetry people beauty superficial-beauty bukowski appearance superficial superficiality classics self reflection beautiful mirror lonely self-esteem soul ugly classic Charles Bukowski
418ac4b Lingering is so very lonely when one lingers all alone. loneliness Mervyn Peake
6834909 If, by the virtue of charity or the circumstance of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little time around a Substance-recovery halfway facility like Enfield MA's state-funded Ennet House, you will acquire many exotic new facts [...] That certain persons simply will not like you no matter what you do. Then that most nonaddicted adult civilians have already absorbed and accepted this fact, often rather early on [...] That sleeping can be a form of emotional escape and can with sustained effort be abused [...] That purposeful sleep-deprivation can also be an abusable escape. That gambling can be an abusable escape, too, and work, shopping, and shoplifting, and sex, and abstention, and masturbation, and food, and exercise, and meditation/prayer [...] That loneliness is not a function of solitude [...] That if enough people in a silent room are drinking coffee it is possible to make out the sound of steam coming off the coffee. That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt [...] That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness [...] That the effects of too many cups of coffee are in no way pleasant or intoxicating [...] That if you do something nice for somebody in secret, anonymously, without letting the person you did it for know it was you or anybody else know what it was you did or in any way or form trying to get credit for it, it's almost its own form of intoxicating buzz. That anonymous generosity, too, can be abused [...] That it is permissible to want [...] That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels. loneliness kindness alienation David Foster Wallace
25d011a And if I'm alone in bed, I will go to the window, look up at the sky, and feel certain that loneliness is a lie, because the Universe is there to keep me company. universe loneliness Paulo Coelho
3a06451 She had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough! loneliness satisfaction sadness happiness Virginia Woolf
588872b But there are other words for privacy and independence. They are isolation and loneliness. loneliness privacy isolation Megan Whalen Turner
71a8fd6 I had been alone more than I could have been had I gone by myself. loneliness Sylvia Plath
d9bd0d4 Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to. loneliness booksellers Alain de Botton
d40fb6a It's how I fill the time when nothing's happening. Thinking too much, flirting with melancholy. time loneliness sadness melancholy Tim Winton
4e515f6 You do not have to be alone. The world never inflicts loneliness upon us. That is something we choose or reject by ourselves. loneliness Darren Shan
0b246de "Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. You simply say, "Here are the perimeters of our attention. If you prowl around under the windows till the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. If you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it." Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire." loneliness relationships sister friend safety Marilynne Robinson
38de18d And I knew in my bones that Emily Dickinson wouldn't have written even one poem if she'd had two howling babies, a husband bent on jamming another one into her, a house to run, a garden to tend, three cows to milk, twenty chickens to feed, and four hired hands to cook for. I knew then why they didn't marry. Emily and Jane and Louisa. I knew and it scared me. I also knew what being lonely was and I didn't want to be lonely my whole life. I didn't want to give up on my words. I didn't want to choose one over the other. Mark Twain didn't have to. Charles Dickens didn't. loneliness feminism writing gender-roles Jennifer Donnelly
30f3dfb And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies, and itchings that (Hell) contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good. loneliness heaven joy hell C.S. Lewis
ed9a745 Eternity is a long time to spend alone, without others of your kind. loneliness friends city-of-fallen-angels cassandra-clare vampire Cassandra Clare
a9cfd3a Oh to have you with me, to have you here, not to be alone, but to be with you, my beauty, you of all souls! You. loneliness love Anne Rice
64c9310 I left the library. Crossing the street, I was hit head-on by a brutal loneliness. I felt dark and hollow. Abandoned, unnoticed, forgotten, I stood on the sidewalk, a nothing, a gatherer of dust. People hurried past me. and everyone who walked by was happier than I. I felt the old envy. I would have given anything to be one of them. loneliness hollow forgotten Nicole Krauss
ac389d2 Given enough time, you could convince yourself that loneliness was something better, that it was solitude, the ideal condition for reflection, even a kind of freedom. Once you were thus convinced, you were foolish to open the door and let anyone in, not all the way in. You risked the hard-won equilibrium, that tranquility that you called peace solitude loneliness tranquility reflection peace Dean Koontz
e998cb1 I am lonely, sometimes, but I dare say it's good for me... loneliness louisa-may-alcott Louisa May Alcott
1d93905 "It'll be no use their putting their heads down and saying "Come up again, dear!" I shall only look up and say "Who am I then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I'll come up: if not, I'll stay down here till I'm somebody else"--but, oh dear!' cried Alice, with a sudden burst of tears, 'I do wish they WOULD put their heads down! I am so VERY tired of being all alone here!" loneliness identity Lewis Carroll
bea48b2 I didn't let her go. She went. It's not my fault. She did it. She could undo it. This is feeling so fucking famliar. Why do we even bother? Why do we make ourselves so open to such easy damage? Is it all loneliness? Is it all fear? Of is it just to experience those narcotic moments of belonging with someone else? loneliness rant David Levithan
46f592c Will. For a moment her heart hesitated. She remembered when Will had died, her agony, the long nights alone, reaching across the bed every morning when she woke up, for years expecting to find him there, and only slowly growing accustomed to the fact that side of the bed would always be empty. The moments when she had found something funny and turned to share the joke with him, only to be shocked anew that he was not there. The worst moments, when, sitting alone at breakfast, she had realized that she had forgotten the precise blue of his eyes or the depth of his laugh; that, like the sound of Jem's violin music, they had faded into the distance where memories are silent. loneliness loss memories love tessa-gray will-herondale Cassandra Clare
4a0e28b I had gotten so used to being alone, but never entirely used to it. Never used to it enough to stop wanting the alternative. loneliness David Levithan
b841379 A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break through with something that speaks to you, then it isn't all corruption. The movie doesn't have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor's scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense. Sitting there alone or painfully alone because those with you do not react as you do, you know there must be others perhaps in this very theatre or in this city, surely in other theatres in other cities, now, in the past or future, who react as you do. And because movies are the most total and encompassing art form we have, these reactions can seem the most personal and, maybe the most important, imaginable. The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you've seen. You do meet them, of course, and you know each other at once because you talk less about good movies than about what you love in bad movies. loneliness films society movies Pauline Kael
4ff3d54 On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world. loneliness life Cormac McCarthy
a8f1508 "One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said, "We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I'll make one. I'll make a voice like all of time and all of the fog that ever was; I'll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I'll make a sound that's so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and hearths will seem warmer, and being inside will seem better to all who hear it in the distant towns. I'll make me a sound and an apparatus and they'll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life." The Fog Horn blew." loneliness sadness fog Ray Bradbury
6696532 It is a very strange sensation to inexperience youth to feel itself quite alone the world, cut adrift from every connection, uncertain whether the port to which it is bound can be reached, and prevented by many impediments from returning to that it has quitted. The charm of adventure sweetens that sensation, the glow of pride warms it; but then the throb of fear disturbs it; and fear with me became predominant when half an hour elapsed, and still I was alone. loneliness independence youth fear Charlotte Brontë
bd2be9a It is an awful thing to be betrayed by your body. And it's lonely, because you feel you can't talk about it. You feel it's something between you and the body. You feel it's a battle you will never win . . . and yet you fight it day after day, and it wears you down. Even if you try to ignore it, the energy it takes to ignore it will exhaust you. loneliness dysmorphia fighting-yourself dissonance imperfection transgender struggling David Levithan
abb9f32 there's no clarity. there was never meant to be clarity. loneliness poem poetry death life love bukowski clarity nonsense lonely Charles Bukowski
9ee536b Jamie enjoyed solitude, but loneliness was a constant ache. solitude loneliness Sidney Sheldon
508abbf "Must've been hard on your mom," Frank said. "I guess we'll do anything for someone we love." Hazel squeezed his hand appreciatively. Nico stared at the cobblestones. "Yeah," he said bitterly. "I guess we will." loneliness sadness love Rick Riordan
0814ed1 You fall in love, it's intoxicating, an for a little while you feel like you've actually become one with the other person. Merged souls, and so on. You think you'll never be lonely again. Only it doesn't last and soon you realize you can only get so close and you end up brutally disappointed, more alone than ever, because the illusion-the hope you'd held on to all those years-has been shattered. loneliness love Nicole Krauss
81ca917 In his or her own way, everyone I saw before me looked happy. Whether they were really happy or just looked it, I couldn't tell. But they did look happy on this pleasant early afternoon in late September, and because of that I felt a kind of loneliness new to me, as if I were the only one here who was not truly part of the scene. loneliness september outsider Haruki Murakami
0afae40 I'm all alone, but I'm not lonely. loneliness aomame Haruki Murakami
b598b0b I know nothing - nothing in the world - of the hearts of men. I only know that I am alone - horribly alone. loneliness people Ford Madox Ford
1119833 I think it takes an amazing amount of energy to convince oneself that the Forever Person isn't just around the corner. In the end I believe we never do convince ourselves. I know that I found it increasingly hard to maintain the pose of emotional self-sufficiency lying on my bed and sitting at my desk, watching the gulls cartwheeling in the clouds over the bridges, cradling myself in my own arms, breathing warm chocolate-and-vodka breath on a rose I had found on a street corner, trying to force it to bloom. loneliness love melancholy Douglas Coupland
5133c23 From childhood's hour I have not been As others were - I have not seen As others saw - I could not bring My passions from a common spring - loneliness uniqueness Edgar Allan Poe
f1b641a "It made me start to wonder if there were other people so lonely so close. I thought about "Eleanor Rigby." It's true, where do they all come from? And where do they all belong?" loneliness Jonathan Safran Foer
4bf203c . . . clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude. solitude loneliness personality isolation Virginia Woolf
7b4eadb And I'm hoping there's some larger truth about suffering here, or at least my understanding of it - although I've come to realize that the only truths that matter to me are the ones I don't, and can't, understand. What's mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable. What doesn't fit into a story, what doesn't have a story. Glint of brightness on a barely-there chain. Patch of sunlight on a yellow wall. The loneliness that separates every living creature from every other living creature. Sorrow inseparable from joy. loneliness sorrow yellow sunlight Donna Tartt
731c7a1 As the new work fills my notebooks, I've come to realize that the characters in my stories were so real because I really did want to get close to people, I really did want to know them. It was just easier to do it on paper, one step removed. loneliness people Charles de Lint
0ce73e3 The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends, and guarded him. loneliness Victor Hugo
87f2894 I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death. loneliness love fight F. Scott Fitzgerald
d7208e4 I ain't got no people. I seen the guys that go around on the ranches alone. That ain't no good. They don't have no fun. After a long time they get mean. They get wantin' to fight all the time. . . 'Course Lennie's a God damn nuisance most of the time, but you get used to goin' around with a guy an' you can't get rid of him. loneliness John Steinbeck
8c6ced2 Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship. loneliness Doris Lessing
06c3f97 If we are alone, we become more alone. Life is strange loneliness life strange Paulo Coelho
ac1c423 I've noticed that loneliness gets stronger when we try to face it down, but gets weaker when we simply ignore it. loneliness the-witch-of-portobello fighting Paulo Coelho
fd5e0e8 [The modern age] knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will cluck and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh through its changes, a plane will drone over, the nearest freeway will vibrate the air. Red and white lights will pass in the sky, lights will shine along highways and glance off windows. There is always a radio that can be turned to some all-night station, or a television set to turn artificial moonlight into the flickering images of the late show. We can put on a turntable whatever consolation we most respond to, Mozart or Copland or the Grateful Dead. loneliness silence shallowness modern-society stillness isolation peace noise technology Wallace Stegner
7b36239 It's not the job of this town to make me feel happy. It's not this town's fault that I don't feel I fit in. It doesn't matter where you are in the world, because it's about where you are in your head. It's about the other world I inhabit. The world of dreams, hope, imagination, and memories. I'm happy up here, and because of that I'm happy up there too loneliness philosophy-of-life-people Cecelia Ahern
60b4d4e Lying in the bed that had once held two, Lisey thought alone never felt more lonely than when you woke up and discovered you still had the house to yourself. That you and the mice in the walls were the only ones still breathing. loneliness lonely Stephen King
a5e9663 Our society is so fragmented, our family lives so sundered by physical and emotional distance, our friendships so sporadic, our intimacies so 'in-between' things and often so utilitarian, that there are few places where we can feel truly safe. loneliness brokenness society isolation despair Henri J.M. Nouwen
ba057ba I was feeling lonely without her, but the fact that I could feel lonely at all was consolation. Loneliness wasn't such a bad feeling. It was like the stillness of the pin oak after the little birds had flown off. loneliness love Haruki Murakami
f2d56d2 Loneliness becomes a lover, solitude a darling sin. solitude loneliness the-spy-who-loved-me james-bond Ian Fleming
0ccecea She had never before minded being alone. Now she dreaded it. When she was alone now she felt so dreadfully alone. loneliness L.M. Montgomery
9093f5a "For fear you will be alone loneliness Richard Brautigan
098e7d4 I kept staring into the blackness of the woods, drawn into the darkness as I always had been. I suddenly realized how alone I was. (But this is how you travel, the wind whispered back, this is how you've always lived.) loneliness travel wind Bret Easton Ellis
fa736e7 "There are times when you don't belong and you think you're going to kill yourself. Once I went to a hotel. Later that night I made a plan. The plan was I would leave my family when my second child was born. And that's what I did. I got up one morning, made breakfast, went to the bus stop, got on a bus. I'd left a note. I got a job in a library in Canada. It would be wonderful to say you regretted it. It would be easy. But what does it mean? What does it mean to regret when you have no choice? It's what you can bear. There it is. No-one's going to forgive me. It was death. I chose life." -Laura Brown-" hopelessness loneliness spirit life Michael Cunningham
adbe9aa "It's just that you go so crazy being alone like that. Sometimes he'd forget my water or food and I'd cry and cry and cry." She stops talking and looks out the window. "I would try to tell myself stories to pass the time. Fairy tales. Parts of books. But they got used up." -- loneliness trapped hopeless sad Holly Black
e889621 He began to cry, not hysterically or screaming as people cry when concealed rage with tears, but with continuous sobs who has just discovered that he's alone and will be for long. He cried because safety and reason seemed to have left the world. Loneliness was a reality, but in this situation madness was also remotely a possibility. madness loneliness reason Stephen King
cdc446e ...I've come to realize that the only truths that matter to me are the ones I don't, and can't, understand. What's mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable. What doesn't fit into a story, what doesn't have a story. Glint of brightness on a barely-there chain. Patch of sunlight on a yellow wall. The loneliness that separates every living creature from every other living creature. Sorrow inseparable from joy. loneliness mystery Donna Tartt
263c163 She deserved at least one person who saw her and knew how good she was. loneliness love lonely Rick Riordan
60bb1b7 I've been clinging to this world like a discarded shell of an insect stuck to a branch, about to be blown off forever by a gust of wind. hopelessness loneliness life Haruki Murakami
a18016f She was like a lone angel floating above the surface of the earth, laughing with delight because she could fly but crying out of loneliness. loneliness sadness Markus Zusak
78d04f8 In any case, there was only one tunnel, dark and lonely, mine, the tunnel in which I had spent my childhood, my youth, my whole life. And in one of those transparent lengths of the stone wall I had seen this girl and had gullibly believed that she was traveling another tunnel parallel to mine, when in reality she belonged to the broad world, to the world without confines of those who do not live in tunnels; and perhaps she had peeped into one of my strange windows out of curiosity and had caught a glimpse of my doomed loneliness, or her fancy had been intrigued by the mute language, the clue of my painting. And then, while I advanced always along my corridor, she lived her normal life outside, the exciting life of those people who live outside, that strange, absurd life in which there are dances and parties and gaiety and frivolity. And it happened at times that when I walked by one of my windows she was waiting for me, silent and longing (why was she waiting for me? why silent and longing?); but other times she did not get there on time, or she forgot about this poor creature hemmed in, and then I, with my face pressed against the glass wall, could see her in the distance, smiling or dancing carefree, or, what was worse, I could not see her at all and I imagined her in inaccessible or vile places. And then I felt my destiny a far lonelier one than I had imagined. loneliness melancholy Ernesto Sabato
ee300f3 She realized that being starved for words was the same as being starved for food, because both left a hollow place inside you, a place you needed filled to make it through another day. Rachel remembered how growing up she'd thought living on a farm with just a father was as lonely as you could be. (130) words loneliness interraction speach starvation Ron Rash
2f8c530 We have to live without sympathy, don't we? That's impossible of course. We act it to one another, all this hardness; but we aren't like that really, I mean...one can't be out in the cold all the time; one has to come in from the cold...d'you see what I mean? loneliness isolation spying John le Carré
d97dbac I began to get a feeling familiar to me from my bartending days of being the only sane man in a nuthouse. It doesn't make you feel superior but depressed and scared, because there is nobody you can contact. sanity loneliness fear William S. Burroughs
fcfe60c Isolation and loneliness are central causes of depression and despair. loneliness isolation despair Bell Hooks
935fc55 "You want to know what I really learned? I learned that people don't consider time alone as part of their life. Being alone is just a stretch of isolation they want to escape from. I saw a lot of wine-drinking, a lot of compulsive drug use, a lot of sleeping with the television on. It was less festive than I anticipated. My view had always been that I was my most alive when I was totally alone, because that was the only time I could live without fear of how my actions were being scrutinized and interpreted. What I came to realize is that people need their actions to be scrutinized and interpreted in order to feel like what they're doing matters. Singular, solitary moments are like television pilots that never get aired. They don't count. This, I think, explains the fundamental urge to get married and have kids[...]. We're self-conditioned to require an audience, even if we're not doing anything valuable or interesting. I'm sure this started in the 1970s. I know it did. I think Americans started raising offspring with this implicit notion that they had to tell their children, "You're amazing, you can do anything you want, you're a special person." [...] But--when you really think about it--that emotional support only applies to the experience of living in public. We don't have ways to quantify ideas like "amazing" or "successful" or "lovable" without the feedback of an audience. Nobody sits by himself in an empty room and thinks, "I'm amazing." It's impossible to imagine how that would work. But being "amazing" is supposed to be what life is about. As a result, the windows of time people spend by themselves become these meaningless experiences that don't really count. It's filler." loneliness aloneness social sociology human-nature Chuck Klosterman
b7a3843 I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give. loneliness self self-respect self-esteem Charlotte Brontë
7b48bc5 Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness solitude loneliness hate life lonely Kate Atkinson
0558f27 It bothered me that whatever was waiting wasn't waiting for me tragedy loneliness Jean Anouilh
91152c1 Humans are almost always lonely. loneliness Frank Herbert
ead797f No I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be Am an attendant lord one that will do To swell a progress start a scene or two Advise the prince no doubt an easy tool Deferential glad to be of use Politic cautious and meticulous Full of high sentence but a bit obtuse At times indeed almost ridiculous-- Almost at times the Fool. I grow old ... I grow old ... I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind Do I dare to eat a peach I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me. I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black. We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us and we drown. loneliness trousers mermaid regret T. S. Eliot
6c1bc17 He had been for many years, a quiet silent man, associating but little with other men, and used to companionship with his own thoughts. He had never known before the strength of the want in his heart for the frequent recognition of a nod, a look, a word; or the immense amount of relief that had been poured into it by drops through such small means. solitude loneliness sadness Charles Dickens
75b5927 Until then we're going to keep making memories like this, moments when we're the only two people in the whole world. And when we get scared or lonely or confused, we'll pull out these memories and wrap them around us and they'll make us feel safe. And strong. loneliness memories strength safe encouragement scared Laurie Halse Anderson
9a12211 ...nothing remained but loneliness and grief... loneliness louisa-may-alcott little-women Louisa May Alcott
889f191 I stood lonely enough, but to that feeling of isolation I was accustomed: it did not oppress me much. loneliness Charlotte Brontë
20d10e4 Human beings must love something, and, in the dearth of worthier objects of affection, I contrived to find a pleasure in loving and cherishing a faded graven image, shabby as a miniature scarecrow. It puzzles me now to remember with what absurd sincerity I doated on this little toy, half fancying it alive and capable of sensation. I could not sleep unless it was folded in my night-gown; and when it lay there safe and warm, I was comparatively happy, believing it to be happy likewise. loneliness love Charlotte Brontë
2429999 For the first time in years, he felt the deep sadness of exile, knowing that he was alone here, an outsider, and too alert to the ironies, the niceties, the manners, and indeed, the morals to be able to participate. loneliness sadness outsider foreign Colm Tóibín
ecbd6ef I watched the moon alone, unable to share his cold beauty with anyone. metaphor loneliness nature beauty moon beauty-in-nature sad Haruki Murakami
a3e2a11 All my life I have been the sort of person in whom people confide. And all my life I have been flattered by this role - grateful for the frisson of importance that comes with receiving important information. In recent years, however, I have noticed that my gratification is becoming diluted by a certain weary indignation. They tell me because they regard me as safe. All of them, they make their disclosures to me in the same spirit that they might tell a castrato or a priest - with a sense that I am so outside the loop, so remote from the doings of the great world, as to be defused of any possible threat. The number of secrets I receive is in inverse proportion to the number of secrets anyone expects me to have of my own. And this is the real source of my dismay. Being told secrets is not - never has been - a sign that I belong or that I matter. It is quite the opposite: confirmation of my irrelevance. loneliness trust secrecy Zoë Heller
1e10484 Now Doon seemed to care for his new friends more than he did for her. Every time she thought about him she felt a thud of pain, like a bruised place inside her. loneliness sadness friendship city-of-ember jeanne-duprau lef-out people-of-sparks sweet longing Jeanne DuPrau
1b1e195 After listening to a lot of these stories, I began to think that American loneliness is a completely different creature from anything we experience in this country, and it made me glad I was born Japanese. The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different from the sort you know you'll get through if you just hang in there. struggle loneliness life japan Ryū Murakami
e5c43f1 I'm not crazy or dangerous, just a bit eccentric and lonely. loneliness Emma Forrest
a846c04 You're lost in your own world, in the things that happen there, and you've locked all the doors. Sometimes I look at you sleeping. I wake up and look at you and I feel closer to you when you're like that, unguarded, than when you're awake. When you're awake you're like someone with her eyes closed, watching a movie on the inside of your eyelids. I can't reach you anymore. Once upon a time I could, but not now, and not for a long time. loneliness great-house nicole-krauss Nicole Krauss
2534e95 ...he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men [...] In the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I'm outside or is it all America? loneliness inspirational angstrom updike rabbit outside strangeness isolation thought Updike John
8116985 This bed yawns beneath the weight of our absent selves. loneliness drifting-apart yawn bed Maya Angelou
57f15f7 This is what it means to be alone: everyone is connected to everyone else, their bodies are a bright liquid life flowing around you, sharing a single heart that drives them to move all together. If the shark comes they will all escape, and leave you to be eaten. loneliness Barbara Kingsolver
724271b "Can I be honest with you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird? I mean, really, really, really honest? Sometimes I get sooo scared! I'll wake up in the middle of the night all alone, hundreds of miles away from anybody, and it's pitch dark, and I have absolutely no idea what's going to happen to me in the future, and I get so scared I want to scream. Does that happen to you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird? When it happens, I try to remind myself that I am connected to others--other things and other people. I work as hard as I can to list their names in my head. On that list, of course, is you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. And the alley, and the well, and the persimmon tree, and that kind of thing. And the wigs that I've made here with my own hands. And the little bits and pieces I remember about the boy. All these little things (though you're not just another one of those little things, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, but anyhow...) help me to come back "here" little by little." loneliness scared Haruki Murakami
f02246a Being all alone is like the feeling you get when you stand at the mouth of a large river on a rainy evening and watch the water flow into the sea. Have you ever done that? Stand at the mouth of a large river and watch the water flow into the sea? loneliness rain river sea water Haruki Murakami
c3923c8 The Loneliness of the Military Historian Confess: it's my profession that alarms you. This is why few people ask me to dinner, though Lord knows I don't go out of my way to be scary. I wear dresses of sensible cut and unalarming shades of beige, I smell of lavender and go to the hairdresser's: no prophetess mane of mine, complete with snakes, will frighten the youngsters. If I roll my eyes and mutter, if I clutch at my heart and scream in horror like a third-rate actress chewing up a mad scene, I do it in private and nobody sees but the bathroom mirror. In general I might agree with you: women should not contemplate war, should not weigh tactics impartially, or evade the word , or view both sides and denounce nothing. Women should march for peace, or hand out white feathers to arouse bravery, spit themselves on bayonets to protect their babies, whose skulls will be split anyway, or,having been raped repeatedly, hang themselves with their own hair. There are the functions that inspire general comfort. That, and the knitting of socks for the troops and a sort of moral cheerleading. Also: mourning the dead. Sons,lovers and so forth. All the killed children. Instead of this, I tell what I hope will pass as truth. A blunt thing, not lovely. The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner, though I am good at what I do. My trade is courage and atrocities. I look at them and do not condemn. I write things down the way they happened, as near as can be remembered. I don't ask , because it is mostly the same. Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win. In my dreams there is glamour. The Vikings leave their fields each year for a few months of killing and plunder, much as the boys go hunting. In real life they were farmers. The come back loaded with splendour. The Arabs ride against Crusaders with scimitars that could sever silk in the air. A swift cut to the horse's neck and a hunk of armour crashes down like a tower. Fire against metal. A poet might say: romance against banality. When awake, I know better. Despite the propaganda, there are no monsters, or none that could be finally buried. Finish one off, and circumstances and the radio create another. Believe me: whole armies have prayed fervently to God all night and meant it, and been slaughtered anyway. Brutality wins frequently, and large outcomes have turned on the invention of a mechanical device, viz. radar. True, valour sometimes counts for something, as at Thermopylae. Sometimes being right - though ultimate virtue, by agreed tradition, is decided by the winner. Sometimes men throw themselves on grenades and burst like paper bags of guts to save their comrades. I can admire that. But rats and cholera have won many wars. Those, and potatoes, or the absence of them. It's no use pinning all those medals across the chests of the dead. Impressive, but I know too much. Grand exploits merely depress me. In the interests of research I have walked on many battlefields that once were liquid with pulped men's bodies and spangled with exploded shells and splayed bone. All of them have been green again by the time I got there. Each has inspired a few good quotes in its day. Sad marble angels brood like hens over the grassy nests where nothing hatches. (The angels could just as well be described as or , depending on camera angle.) The word figures a lot on gateways. Of course I pick a flower or two from each, and press it in the hotel Bible for a souvenir. I'm just as human as you. But it's no use asking me for a final statement. As I say, I deal in tactics. Also statistics: for every year of peace there have been four hundred years of war. loneliness historian the of military morning house Margaret Atwood
67373e5 I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. How free it is, you have no idea how free - The peacefulness is so big it dazes you, And it asks for nothing. ~ Tulips (1961) loneliness Sylvia Plath
e83aa57 The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy--that is every man's tragedy. tragedy loneliness existence roth Philip Roth
cdb8a41 When I look back at myself at age twenty, what I remember most is being alone and lonely. I had no girlfriend to warm my body or my soul, no friends I could open up to. No clue what I should do every day, no vision for the future. For the most part, I remained hidden away, deep within myself. Sometimes, I'd go a week without talking to anybody. loneliness past haruki-murakami i remembrance lonely Haruki Murakami
4b414cf The problem with making a virtual world of oneself is akin to the problem with projecting ourselves onto a cyberworld: there's no end of virtual spaces in which to seek stimulation, but their very endlessness, the perpetual stimulation without satisfaction, becomes imprisoning. suicide solitude loneliness satisfaction depression cyberworld endlessness facebook-addiction filler first-world-problems virtual solitary stimulation distractions dissatisfaction facebook-quotes david-foster-wallace jonathan-franzen boredom facebook cyber emptiness problems robinson-crusoe empty void lonely Jonathan Franzen
6b0dec4 In my room, in the dark, I understood what I never had before, what no one else seemed to. I understood how a boy could go into the woods with a bullet and a gun and not come out. That there was no conspiracy, no evil influences or secret rituals; that sometimes there was only pain and the need to make it stop. suicide loneliness suicidal-thoughts Robin Wasserman
198f2f1 I was just thoughts, just air. There was nothingness all around me. Was this what it was like to be dead? When you died, did you still sense everything going on around you, only it was happening so far away that you didn't care about it? You were floating through space and time, and nothing that happened to you mattered because nothing really could happen to you because you didn't exist? loneliness floating Melissa Kantor
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