“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.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
“Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony.”
― Douglas Coupland, Shampoo Planet
“I've never been lonely. I've been in a room -- I've felt suicidal. I've been depressed. I've felt awful -- awful beyond all -- but I never felt that one other person could enter that room and cure what was bothering me...or that any number of people could enter that room. In other words, loneliness is something I've never been bothered with because I've always had this terrible itch for solitude. It's being at a party, or at a stadium full of people cheering for something, that I might feel loneliness. I'll quote Ibsen, "The strongest men are the most alone." I've never thought, "Well, some beautiful blonde will come in here and give me a fuck-job, rub my balls, and I'll feel good." No, that won't help. You know the typical crowd, "Wow, it's Friday night, what are you going to do? Just sit there?" Well, yeah. Because there's nothing out there. It's stupidity. Stupid people mingling with stupid people. Let them stupidify themselves. I've never been bothered with the need to rush out into the night. I hid in bars, because I didn't want to hide in factories. That's all. Sorry for all the millions, but I've never been lonely. I like myself. I'm the best form of entertainment I have. Let's drink more wine!”
― Charles Bukowski
“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
― Arthur C. Clarke
“Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.”
― Maya Angelou
“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. 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.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
“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?”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
“Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.”
― John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men
“When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
“All I ever wanted was to reach out and touch another human being not just with my hands but with my heart.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me
“I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.”
― Edgar Allan Poe
“being alone never felt right. sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.”
― Charles Bukowski, Women
“The trouble is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely.”
― Charlotte Brontë
“ Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander
“All great and precious things are lonely.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden
“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay
“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.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“I'm lonely. And I'm lonely in some horribly deep way and for a flash of an instant, I can see just how lonely, and how deep this feeling runs. And it scares the shit out of me to be this lonely because it seems catastrophic.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Dry
“When you're surrounded by all these people, it can be lonelier than when you're by yourself. You can be in a huge crowd, but if you don't feel like you can trust anyone or talk to anybody, you feel like you're really alone.”
― Fiona Apple
“We live as we dream--alone....”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and the Congo Diary
“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.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
“How we need another soul to cling to.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“there is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock”
― Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell
“When you have nobody you can make a cup of tea for, when nobody needs you, that's when I think life is over.”
― Audrey Hepburn
“When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
“I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
“I'll never forget how the depression and loneliness felt good and bad at the same time. Still does.”
― Henry Rollins, The Portable Henry Rollins
“I realize, for the first time, how very lonely I've been in the arena. How comforting the presence of another human being can be.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
“I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.”
― Simone de Beauvoir
“The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.”
― Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven - Meniti Bianglala
“We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being.”
― Hermann Hesse
“If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“Are you upset little friend? Have you been lying awake worrying? Well, don't worry...I'm here. The flood waters will recede, the famine will end, the sun will shine tomorrow, and I will always be here to take care of you.”
― Charles M. Schulz
“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."
(Initiation)”
― Sylvia Plath, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts
“Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
“Where are the people?” resumed the little prince at last. “It’s a little lonely in the desert…” “It is lonely when you’re among people, too,” said the snake.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
“Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better.”
― Henry Rollins
“Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe. The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover
“A great fire burns within me, but no one stops to warm themselves at it, and passers-by only see a wisp of smoke”
― Vincent van Gogh
“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.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage
“I wish I could tell you how lonely I am. How cold and harsh it is here. Everywhere there is conflict and unkindness. I think God has forsaken this place. I believe I have seen hell and it's white, it's snow-white.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South
“I'm not much but I'm all I have.”
― Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip
“DeWitt: Loneliness leads to nothing good, only detachment. And sometimes the people who most need to reach out are the people least capable of it.”
― Jane Espenson, Maurissa Tancharoen & Jed Whedon
“If a man cannot understand the beauty of life, it is probably because life never understood the beauty in him.”
― Criss Jami
“If you are alone you belong entirely to yourself. If you are accompanied by even one companion you belong only half to yourself or even less in proportion to the thoughtlessness of his conduct and if you have more than one companion you will fall more deeply into the same plight.”
― Leonardo da Vinci
“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.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover
“Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.”
― May Sarton
“People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
“There is the solitude of suffering, when you go through darkness that is lonely, intense, and terrible. Words become powerless to express your pain; what others hear from your words is so distant and different from what you are actually suffering.”
― John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
“I think we are and will always
be lonely people in a lonely
world under lonely stars.
We can never starve our loneliness.
We can only hope that by the
company of others,
it doesn't devour us.”
― Testy McTesterson
“Depression on my left, Loneliness on my right. They don't need to show me thier badges. I know these guys very well.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert
“Friends are a strange, volatile, contradictory, yet sticky phenomenon. They are made, crafted, shaped, molded, created by focused effort and intent. And yet, true friendship, once recognized, in its essence is effortless.
Best friends are formed by time.
Everyone is someone's friend, even when they think they are all alone.
If the friendship is not working, your heart will know. It's when you start being less than perfectly honest and perfectly earnest in your dealings. And it's when the things you do together no longer feel right.
However, sometimes it takes more effort to make it work after all.
Stick around long enough to become someone's best friend.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
“If you smile when you are alone, then you really mean it.”
― Andy Rooney
“The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
“Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony.”
― Douglas Coupland, Shampoo Planet
“I've never been lonely. I've been in a room -- I've felt suicidal. I've been depressed. I've felt awful -- awful beyond all -- but I never felt that one other person could enter that room and cure what was bothering me...or that any number of people could enter that room. In other words, loneliness is something I've never been bothered with because I've always had this terrible itch for solitude. It's being at a party, or at a stadium full of people cheering for something, that I might feel loneliness. I'll quote Ibsen, "The strongest men are the most alone." I've never thought, "Well, some beautiful blonde will come in here and give me a fuck-job, rub my balls, and I'll feel good." No, that won't help. You know the typical crowd, "Wow, it's Friday night, what are you going to do? Just sit there?" Well, yeah. Because there's nothing out there. It's stupidity. Stupid people mingling with stupid people. Let them stupidify themselves. I've never been bothered with the need to rush out into the night. I hid in bars, because I didn't want to hide in factories. That's all. Sorry for all the millions, but I've never been lonely. I like myself. I'm the best form of entertainment I have. Let's drink more wine!”
― Charles Bukowski
“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
― Arthur C. Clarke
“Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.”
― Maya Angelou
“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. 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.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
“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?”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
“Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.”
― John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men
“When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
“All I ever wanted was to reach out and touch another human being not just with my hands but with my heart.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me
“I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.”
― Edgar Allan Poe
“being alone never felt right. sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.”
― Charles Bukowski, Women
“The trouble is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely.”
― Charlotte Brontë
“ Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander
“All great and precious things are lonely.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden
“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay
“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.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“I'm lonely. And I'm lonely in some horribly deep way and for a flash of an instant, I can see just how lonely, and how deep this feeling runs. And it scares the shit out of me to be this lonely because it seems catastrophic.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Dry
“When you're surrounded by all these people, it can be lonelier than when you're by yourself. You can be in a huge crowd, but if you don't feel like you can trust anyone or talk to anybody, you feel like you're really alone.”
― Fiona Apple
“We live as we dream--alone....”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and the Congo Diary
“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.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
“How we need another soul to cling to.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“there is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock”
― Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell
“When you have nobody you can make a cup of tea for, when nobody needs you, that's when I think life is over.”
― Audrey Hepburn
“When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
“I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
“I'll never forget how the depression and loneliness felt good and bad at the same time. Still does.”
― Henry Rollins, The Portable Henry Rollins
“I realize, for the first time, how very lonely I've been in the arena. How comforting the presence of another human being can be.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
“I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.”
― Simone de Beauvoir
“The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.”
― Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven - Meniti Bianglala
“We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being.”
― Hermann Hesse
“If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“Are you upset little friend? Have you been lying awake worrying? Well, don't worry...I'm here. The flood waters will recede, the famine will end, the sun will shine tomorrow, and I will always be here to take care of you.”
― Charles M. Schulz
“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."
(Initiation)”
― Sylvia Plath, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts
“Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
“Where are the people?” resumed the little prince at last. “It’s a little lonely in the desert…” “It is lonely when you’re among people, too,” said the snake.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
“Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better.”
― Henry Rollins
“Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe. The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover
“A great fire burns within me, but no one stops to warm themselves at it, and passers-by only see a wisp of smoke”
― Vincent van Gogh
“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.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage
“I wish I could tell you how lonely I am. How cold and harsh it is here. Everywhere there is conflict and unkindness. I think God has forsaken this place. I believe I have seen hell and it's white, it's snow-white.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South
“I'm not much but I'm all I have.”
― Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip
“DeWitt: Loneliness leads to nothing good, only detachment. And sometimes the people who most need to reach out are the people least capable of it.”
― Jane Espenson, Maurissa Tancharoen & Jed Whedon
“If a man cannot understand the beauty of life, it is probably because life never understood the beauty in him.”
― Criss Jami
“If you are alone you belong entirely to yourself. If you are accompanied by even one companion you belong only half to yourself or even less in proportion to the thoughtlessness of his conduct and if you have more than one companion you will fall more deeply into the same plight.”
― Leonardo da Vinci
“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.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover
“Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.”
― May Sarton
“People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
“There is the solitude of suffering, when you go through darkness that is lonely, intense, and terrible. Words become powerless to express your pain; what others hear from your words is so distant and different from what you are actually suffering.”
― John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
“I think we are and will always
be lonely people in a lonely
world under lonely stars.
We can never starve our loneliness.
We can only hope that by the
company of others,
it doesn't devour us.”
― Testy McTesterson
“Depression on my left, Loneliness on my right. They don't need to show me thier badges. I know these guys very well.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert
“Friends are a strange, volatile, contradictory, yet sticky phenomenon. They are made, crafted, shaped, molded, created by focused effort and intent. And yet, true friendship, once recognized, in its essence is effortless.
Best friends are formed by time.
Everyone is someone's friend, even when they think they are all alone.
If the friendship is not working, your heart will know. It's when you start being less than perfectly honest and perfectly earnest in your dealings. And it's when the things you do together no longer feel right.
However, sometimes it takes more effort to make it work after all.
Stick around long enough to become someone's best friend.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
“If you smile when you are alone, then you really mean it.”
― Andy Rooney
“The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
“Some people are just not meant to be in this world. It's just too much for them.”
“Don’t try to hog loneliness and keep it all to yourself. Share it with a special someone.
”
― Jarod Kintz, The Titanic would never have sunk if it were made out of a sink.
― Jarod Kintz, The Titanic would never have sunk if it were made out of a sink.
“She had become accustomed to being lonely. She was used to walking alone and to being considered 'different.' She did not suffer too much.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
“If loneliness was a choice, what was the other option? To settle for second-best and try to be happy with that? And was that fair to the person you settled for?”
― Lisa Kleypas, Sugar Daddy
― Lisa Kleypas, Sugar Daddy
“When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.”
― Tennessee Williams, Camino Real
― Tennessee Williams, Camino Real
“A lonely day is God's way of saying that he wants to spend some quality time with you.”
― Criss Jami
― Criss Jami
“i felt her absence. it was like waking up one day with no teeth in your mouth. you wouldn't need to run to the mirror to know they were gone”
― James Dashner, The Scorch Trials
― James Dashner, The Scorch Trials
“My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin
― Ursula K. Le Guin
“Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt
In solitude, where we are least alone.”
― George Gordon Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
In solitude, where we are least alone.”
― George Gordon Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
“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.”
― Jim Butcher, White Night
“Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
“What is hell? Hell is oneself.
Hell is alone, the other figures in it
Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from
And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.”
― T.S. Eliot
“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.”
― Rachel Sontag, House Rules
“Loneliness is about the scariest thing out there.”
― Joss Whedon
“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.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
“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.”
― Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale
“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.”
― Isabelle Eberhardt, The Nomad: The Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt
“there is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along....”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“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.”
― Hubert Selby Jr., Requiem for a Dream
“She was stronger alone…”
― Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
“In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.”
― Aldous Huxley
“That's what Jamie didn't understand: it was never just sex. Even the fastest, dirtiest, most impersonal screw was about more than sex. It was about connection. It was about looking at another human being and seeing your own loneliness and neediness reflected back. It was recognising that together you had the power to temporarily banish that sense of isolation. It was about experiencing what it was to be human at the basest, most instinctive level. How could that be described as just anything?”
― Emily Maguire, Taming the Beast
“Maybe reading was just a way to make her feel less alone, to keep her company. When you read something you are stopped, the moment is stayed, you can sometimes be there more fully than you can in your real life.”
― Helen Humphreys, Coventry
“People accuse me of falling in love easily. It just means that I'm able to see the beauty in most of the people who cross paths with me and I appreciate it for what it is and also for what it isn't. Love is imperfect. Falling for someone's flaws is just as necessary as falling for their strengths. And people like myself, who fall into love easily, are sometimes the loneliest souls around at the end of the day.”
― Ashly Lorenzana
“Companionship is a foreign concept to some people. They fear it as much as the majority of people fear loneliness.”
― Criss Jami
“The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present.”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams
“Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.”
― Wendell Berry, A Place on Earth
“If you learn to really sit with loneliness and embrace it for the gift that it is…an opportunity to get to know YOU, to learn how strong you really are, to depend on no one but YOU for your happiness…you will realize that a little loneliness goes a LONG way in creating a richer, deeper, more vibrant and colorful YOU.”
― Mandy Hale, The Single Woman: Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass
“I had been alone more than I could have been had I gone by myself.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“Loneliness is the unloneliest feeling in the world, as everyone has experienced it.”
― Jarod Kintz, This Book is Not for Sale
“...I also believe that introversion is my greatest strength. I have such a strong inner life that I’m never bored and only occasionally lonely. No matter what mayhem is happening around me, I know I can always turn inward.”
― Susan Cain
“People Die...
Beauty Fades...
Love Changes...
And You Will Always Be Alone”
― L.J. Smith, Night World, No. 3
“You do not have to be alone. The world never inflicts loneliness upon us. That is something we choose or reject by ourselves.”
― Darren Shan, Birth of a Killer
“We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist
“To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude. The movement from loneliness to solitude, however, is the beginning of any spiritual life because it it is the movement from the restless senses to the restful spirit,l from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward-reaching search, from the fearful clinging to the fearless play.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life
“I am lonely, sometimes, but I dare say it's good for me…”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
“I hope somebody cares because I sure don't. I sure don't. Not anymore. I'm ashamed to go around my family. I'm too embarrassed to confide in my friends. Outside of work I don't have a life.”
― Mary B. Morrison
“It's only natural to feel lonely after the enjoyable moments pass. But as you experience new joys those feelings of sorrow will start to fade.”
― Mizu Sahara
“I barely noticed loneliness anymore; it was my normal condition, by necessity if not by nature.”
― Rachel Hartman, Seraphina
“Language ... has created the word 'loneliness' to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word 'solitude' to express the glory of being alone.”
― Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now
“When we cannot bear to be alone, it means we do not properly value the only companion we will have from birth to death - ourselves.”
― Eda J. LeShan
“Only on the Internet can a person be lonely and popular at the same time.”
― Allison Burnett, Undiscovered Gyrl
“When was it I realized that, on this truly dark and solitary path we all walk, the only way we can light is our own? Although I was raised with love, I was always lonely.
Someday, without fail, everyone will disappear, scattered into the blackness of time.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen
“Throwing herself into learning helped Miri ignore the painful chill of solitude around her.”
― Shannon Hale, Princess Academy
“Perhaps there are those who are able to go about their lives unfettered by such concerns. But for those like us, our fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents. There is nothing for it but to try and see through our missions to the end, as best we can, for until we do so, we will be permitted no calm.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, When We Were Orphans
“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?”
― David Levithan, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist
“To be alone with yourself is to be alone. To be in the company of others is to be alone together.
The only time you are not alone is when you forget yourself and reach out in love -- the lines of self blur, and just for a wild, flickering moment you experience the miracle of other.
And now you know the secret.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
“Loneliness watches and sights, then climbs into my bed and pulls the covers over... himself, fully dressed, shoes and all. He’s going to make me sleep with him again tonight, i just know it.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
“Solitude is where one discovers one is not alone.”
― Marty Rubin
“She understood how a world jammed with phones, email, and faxes could still leave you feeling utterly alone.”
― Jodi Picoult, Salem Falls
“She imagined herself as some sort of vessel to be filled up with love. But it wasn't like that. The love was within her all the time, and its only renewal came from giving it away.”
― Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper's Daughter
“Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
“Deep down, the young are lonelier than the old.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
“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.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions
“Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.”
― John Fowles, The Magus
“People run away to be alone,' he said. Some people had to be alone.”
― William Trevor, Love and Summer
“Are the dead as lonesome as the living?”
― Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms
“Anyone who knows how scary it is to be alone, can't help loving others." ~Rin Sohma”
― Natsuki Takaya, Fruits Basket, Volume 14
“Loneliness is the prison of the human spirit. When we are lonely, we pace back and forth in small, shut-in worlds.”
― John Powell, Will the Real Me Please Stand Up?: 25 Guidelines for Good Communication
“Loneliness is painful. But suffering is not wrong in and of itself. It's part of the human experience, and in a way brings us closer to all people.”
― Juliette Fay, Shelter Me
“A lonely, quiet person has observations and experiences that are at once both more indistinct and more penetrating than those of one more gregarious; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. . . . Loneliness fosters that which is original, daringly and bewilderingly beautiful, poetic. But loneliness also fosters that which is perverse, incongruous, absurd, forbidden.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice
“I am never alone wherever I am. The air itself supplies me with a century of love. When I breathe in, I am breathing in the laughter, tears, victories, passions, thoughts, memories, existence, joys, moments, and the hues of the sunlight on many tones of skin; I am breathing in the same air that was exhaled by many before me. The air that bore them life. And so how can I ever say that I am alone?”
― C. JoyBell C.
“When a man is one of a kind, he will be lonely wherever he is.”
― Louis L'Amour, The Lonesome Gods
“There were people everywhere but no one was mine, and I was no one's.”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz
― Jim Butcher, White Night
“Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
“What is hell? Hell is oneself.
Hell is alone, the other figures in it
Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from
And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.”
― T.S. Eliot
“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.”
― Rachel Sontag, House Rules
“Loneliness is about the scariest thing out there.”
― Joss Whedon
“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.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
“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.”
― Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale
“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.”
― Isabelle Eberhardt, The Nomad: The Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt
“there is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along....”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“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.”
― Hubert Selby Jr., Requiem for a Dream
“She was stronger alone…”
― Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
“In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.”
― Aldous Huxley
“That's what Jamie didn't understand: it was never just sex. Even the fastest, dirtiest, most impersonal screw was about more than sex. It was about connection. It was about looking at another human being and seeing your own loneliness and neediness reflected back. It was recognising that together you had the power to temporarily banish that sense of isolation. It was about experiencing what it was to be human at the basest, most instinctive level. How could that be described as just anything?”
― Emily Maguire, Taming the Beast
“Maybe reading was just a way to make her feel less alone, to keep her company. When you read something you are stopped, the moment is stayed, you can sometimes be there more fully than you can in your real life.”
― Helen Humphreys, Coventry
“People accuse me of falling in love easily. It just means that I'm able to see the beauty in most of the people who cross paths with me and I appreciate it for what it is and also for what it isn't. Love is imperfect. Falling for someone's flaws is just as necessary as falling for their strengths. And people like myself, who fall into love easily, are sometimes the loneliest souls around at the end of the day.”
― Ashly Lorenzana
“Companionship is a foreign concept to some people. They fear it as much as the majority of people fear loneliness.”
― Criss Jami
“The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present.”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams
“Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.”
― Wendell Berry, A Place on Earth
“If you learn to really sit with loneliness and embrace it for the gift that it is…an opportunity to get to know YOU, to learn how strong you really are, to depend on no one but YOU for your happiness…you will realize that a little loneliness goes a LONG way in creating a richer, deeper, more vibrant and colorful YOU.”
― Mandy Hale, The Single Woman: Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass
“I had been alone more than I could have been had I gone by myself.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“Loneliness is the unloneliest feeling in the world, as everyone has experienced it.”
― Jarod Kintz, This Book is Not for Sale
“...I also believe that introversion is my greatest strength. I have such a strong inner life that I’m never bored and only occasionally lonely. No matter what mayhem is happening around me, I know I can always turn inward.”
― Susan Cain
“People Die...
Beauty Fades...
Love Changes...
And You Will Always Be Alone”
― L.J. Smith, Night World, No. 3
“You do not have to be alone. The world never inflicts loneliness upon us. That is something we choose or reject by ourselves.”
― Darren Shan, Birth of a Killer
“We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”
― Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist
“To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude. The movement from loneliness to solitude, however, is the beginning of any spiritual life because it it is the movement from the restless senses to the restful spirit,l from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward-reaching search, from the fearful clinging to the fearless play.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life
“I am lonely, sometimes, but I dare say it's good for me…”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
“I hope somebody cares because I sure don't. I sure don't. Not anymore. I'm ashamed to go around my family. I'm too embarrassed to confide in my friends. Outside of work I don't have a life.”
― Mary B. Morrison
“It's only natural to feel lonely after the enjoyable moments pass. But as you experience new joys those feelings of sorrow will start to fade.”
― Mizu Sahara
“I barely noticed loneliness anymore; it was my normal condition, by necessity if not by nature.”
― Rachel Hartman, Seraphina
“Language ... has created the word 'loneliness' to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word 'solitude' to express the glory of being alone.”
― Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now
“When we cannot bear to be alone, it means we do not properly value the only companion we will have from birth to death - ourselves.”
― Eda J. LeShan
“Only on the Internet can a person be lonely and popular at the same time.”
― Allison Burnett, Undiscovered Gyrl
“When was it I realized that, on this truly dark and solitary path we all walk, the only way we can light is our own? Although I was raised with love, I was always lonely.
Someday, without fail, everyone will disappear, scattered into the blackness of time.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen
“Throwing herself into learning helped Miri ignore the painful chill of solitude around her.”
― Shannon Hale, Princess Academy
“Perhaps there are those who are able to go about their lives unfettered by such concerns. But for those like us, our fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents. There is nothing for it but to try and see through our missions to the end, as best we can, for until we do so, we will be permitted no calm.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, When We Were Orphans
“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?”
― David Levithan, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist
“To be alone with yourself is to be alone. To be in the company of others is to be alone together.
The only time you are not alone is when you forget yourself and reach out in love -- the lines of self blur, and just for a wild, flickering moment you experience the miracle of other.
And now you know the secret.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
“Loneliness watches and sights, then climbs into my bed and pulls the covers over... himself, fully dressed, shoes and all. He’s going to make me sleep with him again tonight, i just know it.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
“Solitude is where one discovers one is not alone.”
― Marty Rubin
“She understood how a world jammed with phones, email, and faxes could still leave you feeling utterly alone.”
― Jodi Picoult, Salem Falls
“She imagined herself as some sort of vessel to be filled up with love. But it wasn't like that. The love was within her all the time, and its only renewal came from giving it away.”
― Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper's Daughter
“Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
“Deep down, the young are lonelier than the old.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
“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.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions
“Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.”
― John Fowles, The Magus
“People run away to be alone,' he said. Some people had to be alone.”
― William Trevor, Love and Summer
“Are the dead as lonesome as the living?”
― Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms
“Anyone who knows how scary it is to be alone, can't help loving others." ~Rin Sohma”
― Natsuki Takaya, Fruits Basket, Volume 14
“Loneliness is the prison of the human spirit. When we are lonely, we pace back and forth in small, shut-in worlds.”
― John Powell, Will the Real Me Please Stand Up?: 25 Guidelines for Good Communication
“Loneliness is painful. But suffering is not wrong in and of itself. It's part of the human experience, and in a way brings us closer to all people.”
― Juliette Fay, Shelter Me
“A lonely, quiet person has observations and experiences that are at once both more indistinct and more penetrating than those of one more gregarious; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. . . . Loneliness fosters that which is original, daringly and bewilderingly beautiful, poetic. But loneliness also fosters that which is perverse, incongruous, absurd, forbidden.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice
“I am never alone wherever I am. The air itself supplies me with a century of love. When I breathe in, I am breathing in the laughter, tears, victories, passions, thoughts, memories, existence, joys, moments, and the hues of the sunlight on many tones of skin; I am breathing in the same air that was exhaled by many before me. The air that bore them life. And so how can I ever say that I am alone?”
― C. JoyBell C.
“When a man is one of a kind, he will be lonely wherever he is.”
― Louis L'Amour, The Lonesome Gods
“There were people everywhere but no one was mine, and I was no one's.”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz
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