
“In loneliness, the lonely one eats himself; in a crowd, the many eat him. Now choose.”
A Tale of Three Lions (1887), CHAPTER I, THE INTEREST ON TEN SHILLINGS
“In loneliness, the lonely one eats himself; in a crowd, the many eat him. Now choose.”
"Come on, Big Boy — Let Me See Your Manuscript," review and interview by Herbert Gold, The New York Times (1987-08-02)
Complete Poems, University of Illinois Press, 2004, p. 348
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29
Context: It's paradoxical that where people are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest. Back where people were so spread out in western Oregon and Idaho and Montana and the Dakotas you'd think the loneliness would have been greater, but we didn't see it so much.
The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance, and in Montana and Idaho the physical distances are big but the psychic distances between people are small, and here it's reversed.
“Loneliness feels like prison.”
From New Year's Eve (23 March 1956)
“Birth is the start of loneliness and loneliness the start of poetry…”
Becoming Light: Poems New and Selected (1991)
“Even loneliness is not absolute loneliness because the contents of the universe are in him.”
Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p. 121
“Loneliness is caused by an alienation from life. It is a loneliness from your real self.”