Quotes about loneliness

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“Actually loneliness has a kind of fascination; it's a state of egotistical, inner grace that you can achieve only by standing guard on old, forgotten roads that no one travels anymore.”

“Loneliness had taught Harriet that there was always someone who understood - it was just so often that they were dead, and in a book.”

“When we grow up, we find ways to hide our anxieties, our loneliness, our fear and sorrow. But children hide nothing, putting everything into their tears, which they spread liberally about for the whole world to see.”

“If you are the type of person who thinks too much about stuff then there is nothing lonelier in the world than being surrounded by a load of people on a different wavelength.”

“What a person is for himself, what abides with him in his loneliness and isolation, and what no one can give or take away from him, this is obviously more essential for him than everything that he possesses or what he may be in the eyes of others…”

“Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.”

“I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.”

“Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you.”

“In solitude, we lose our loneliness.”

“Some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. Some things are so sad that only your soul can do the crying for them.”

“If you want to find the trail, if you want to find yourself, you must explore your dreams alone. You must grow at a slow pace in a dark cocoon of loneliness so you can fly like wind, like wings, when you awaken.”

“Human beings can withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness. It is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings.”

“You can use your time to build bridges or walls. The latter is not only unChristlike, it limits impact & creates loneliness.”

“Who knows what true loneliness is — not the conventional word, but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.”

“Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own - they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal - for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire.”

“It was a weird kind of loneliness, feeling that some of my closest friends didn’t actually know I existed.”

“Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation.
(pg.99, "The Body and the Earth")”

“I understood that in this small space of time we had mutually surrendered our loneliness and replaced it with trust.”

“I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.”

“She felt as if she bled her regret and loneliness from her very pores, and yet she could not shape those feelings into any sentiment she could imagine her parents could bear reading.”

“Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness except greed.”

“If he'd learned one thing while he'd been away, it was that loneliness is the most taboo subject in the world. Forget sex or politics or religion. Or even failure. Loneliness is what clears out a room.”

“Like silence after noise, or cool, clear water on a hot, stuffy day, Emptiness cleans out the messy mind and charges up the batteries of spiritual energy. Many people are afraid of Emptiness, however, because it reminds them of Loneliness.”

“I felt his hot tears and the loneliness of man and the sweetness of all men and the aching haunting beauty of the living”

“I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.”

“Loneliness is about the scariest thing out there.”

“It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature and everlasting beauty of monotony.”

“It's an odd feeling-farewell-there is some envy in it. Men go off to be tested for courage and if we're tested at all, it's for patience, for doing without, for how well we can endure loneliness.”

“Who can really distinguish between the sea and what's reflected in it? Or tell the difference between the falling rain and loneliness?”

“After all who doesn't wish to make a spectacle of their loneliness”

“Many a housewife staring at the back of her husband's newspaper, or listening to his breathing in bed is lonelier than any spinster in a rented room.”

“Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”

“Sometimes, the loneliness probably got to be too much and anyone seemed better than no one.”

“Some nights are made for torture, or reflection, or the savoring of loneliness.”

“She wanted to bottle how safe she felt in this moment, so she could drink of it later when loneliness and fear left her parched.”

“I knew this feeling, the 2 a. m. loneliness that I'd practically invented.”

“Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?”

“To recognize you are the source of your own loneliness is not a cure for it. But it is a step toward seeing that it is not inevitable, and that such a choice is not irrevocable.”

“Utter loneliness was planted in me then, and sent its deep roots down into me.”

“Closer of lovely eyes to lovely dreams,
Lover of loneliness, and wandering,
Of upcast eye, and tender pondering!
Thee must I praise above all other glories
That smile us on to tell delightful stories.”

“But where pain was, healing could come; where loneliness was, new relationships could be formed; where rejection was, new love could be found. It was a moment. And moments changed. She would have to live through the moment to get to the next.”

“I'm quite all right. I'm not even scared. You see, I've learned from looking around, there is something worse than loneliness--and that's the fear of it.”

“I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness.”

“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.”

“Perhaps loneliness had nothing to do with place or circumstance; perhaps it was in you; yourself. Perhaps, wherever you were, you took your little circle of loneliness with you…”

“What we don't let out traps us. We think, "No one else feels this way, I must be crazy." So we don't say anything. And we become enveloped by a deep loneliness, not knowing where our feelings come from or what to do with them. "Why do I feel this way? Last week, I was on top of the world and now my feelings don't make sense." Voicing it, getting it out and letting it other people hear it, helps to dissipate it. The fears and self-criticisms begin to leak. And we begin to heal.”

“So therefore I dedicate myself, to my art, my sleep, my dreams, my labors, my suffrances, my loneliness, my unique madness, my endless absorption and hunger because I cannot dedicate myself to any fellow being.”

“To be lonely is to feel unwanted and unloved, and therefor unloveable. Loneliness is a taste of death. No wonder some people who are desperately lonely lose themselves in mental illness or violence to forget the inner pain.”

“An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.”

“Bad people succeed and good people fail, but that's not the end of the story. Miracles happen that nobody sees, and among us walk heroes who are never recognized, and people live in loneliness because they cannot believe they are loved.”

“I am stronger than depression and I am braver than loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.”

“Life is loneliness, broken only by the gods taunting us with friendship and the odd bonk”

“You do not have to be alone. The world never inflicts loneliness upon us. That is something we choose or reject by ourselves.”

“Loneliness is caused by an alienation from life. It is a loneliness from your real self.”

“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?”

“It didn't take a trauma to make you wear a mask. It didn't take your parents getting shot… or cosmic rays or a power ring… Just the perfect combination of loneliness and despair.”

“Loneliness, when accepted, becomes a gift that will lead us to find a purpose in life.”

“At first it upset me to realize how many people are, at heart, selfish. Now I take that in stride, but people's loneliness still gets to me.”

“Every loneliness is a pinnacle”

“When we are most alone is when we embrace another's loneliness.”

“Well I've been where you're hanging, I think I can see how you're pinned:
When you're not feeling holy your loneliness says that you've sinned.”

“She did not know the nature of her loneliness. The only words that named it were: This is not the world I expected.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Thirty — the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair.”

“We wander, question. But the answer waits in each separate heart - the answer of our own identity and the way by which we can master loneliness and feel that at last we belong.”

“Like dry ground welcoming the rain, he let the solitude, silence, and loneliness soak in.”

“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.”

“I hate loneliness, but it loves me.”

“Real loneliness is not necessarily limited to when you are alone.”

“I think she ate a salad and some soup.
And loneliness.
She ate that, too.”

“I felt the kind of loneliness that can happen in a roomful of people when everyone but you seems to be in on the good time.”

“If we don't have each other, we go crazy with loneliness. When we do, we go crazy with togetherness.”

“Loneliness is not being alone, It's loving others to no avail.”

“There is in certain living souls a quality of loneliness unspeakable, so great it must be shared as company is shared by lesser beings. Such a loneliness is mine; so know by this that in immensity there is one lonelier than you.”

“Yes, I want money more than anything else in the world.”

“Then you’ve made the only choice. But there’s a penalty attached, as there is to most things you want. It’s loneliness.”

“Why were we so far apart, even when we were together? It was a nice loneliness, like the sensation of washing your face in cold water.”

“… The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different than the sort you know you'll get through if you just hang in there”

“Like all strong people, she suffered always a measure of loneliness; she was a marginal outsider, a secret infidel of a certain sort.”

“The cure for loneliness is solitude.”

“For an instant I think I saw. I saw the loneliness of man as a gigantic wave which had been frozen in front of me, held back by the invisible wall of a metaphor.”

“She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the menace of familiar objects lying still.”

“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.”

“Loneliness is a mirror, and recognizes itself.”

“We’re always alone. You can be in a crowded room and still feel the bite of loneliness. Personally, I find that it bites deepest whenever others are around.”

“There's a special quality to the loneliness of dusk, a melancholy more brooding even than the night's.”

“If you've ever had that feeling of loneliness, of being an outsider, it never quite leaves you. You can be happy or successful or whatever, but that thing still stays within you.”

“The loneliness you feel with another person, the wrong person, is the loneliest of all.”

“People living alone get used to loneliness.”

“the way i need you is a loneliness i cannot bear.”

“Everything you do makes my body scream with loneliness.”

“we use TV as we use tranquilizers- to even things out, to blot out unpleasantness, to dilute confusion, distress, unhappiness, loneliness.”

“Any human face is a claim on you, because you can't help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it. But this is truest of the face of an infant. I consider that to be one kind of vision, as mystical as any.”

“… real loneliness is having no one to miss. Think yourself lucky you've known something worth missing.”

“What was the point in such loneliness among people. At least if you were by yourself, you had a good reason to be lonely.”

“… loneliness is not a function of solitude.”

“She stays in the same spot, anchored by the profound, desperate loneliness of a bad relationship.”

“Loneliness is a kind of prison.
[Vincent Van Gogh]”

“Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.”