Quotes about loneliness
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“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.”

Paulo Coelho book Manuscript Found in Accra

Source: Manuscript Found in Accra (2012), Our fate

Lie, Feeling, Universe

“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.”

Arturo Pérez-Reverte book The Fencing Master

Source: The Fencing Master

Travel

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

Eva Ibbotson A Company of Swans

Source: A Company of Swans

Books, Dead

“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.”

Yōko Ogawa book The Diving Pool: Three Novellas

Source: The Diving Pool: Three Novellas

Children, World, Fear, Way

“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.”

Matt Haig book Reasons to Stay Alive

Source: Reasons to Stay Alive

People, World, Thinking, Personality

“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…”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher

Personality

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

Marilynne Robinson book Housekeeping

Source: Housekeeping

“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.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

Hunger, Heart

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

Haruki Murakami book 1Q84

Source: 1Q84

“In solitude, we lose our loneliness.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Solitude

“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.”

Gregory David Roberts book Shantaram

Source: Shantaram

Pain, Truth, Sadness, Feeling

“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.”

Francesca Lia Block book Dangerous Angels

Source: Dangerous Angels

Dreams, Flying

“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.”

Paulo Coelho book Eleven Minutes

Source: Eleven Minutes

Food, Suffering, Water

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

Rick Warren (1954) Christian religious leader

Time

“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.”

Joseph Conrad book Under Western Eyes

Pt. I, ch. 2
Under Western Eyes (1911)

Memory

“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.”

Ayn Rand book Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

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

Sarah Dessen (1970) American writer

Source: Saint Anything

Feeling

“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")”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Source: The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

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

Patti Smith Just Kids

Source: Just Kids

Time

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

Love, Life, Death, Fight

“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.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

Source: Clockwork Princess

Feeling, Imagination, Parent, Reading

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

Thomas Harris The Silence of the Lambs

Source: The Silence of the Lambs

“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.”

Douglas Coupland book Miss Wyoming

Source: Miss Wyoming

World, Religion, Sex, Failure

“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.”

Benjamin Hoff book The Tao of Pooh

Source: The Tao of Pooh

People, Silence, Water

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

John Fante book Full of Life

Source: Full of Life

Men, Beauty, Tear

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

Life, Night

“Loneliness is about the scariest thing out there.”

Joss Whedon (1964) American director, writer, and producer for television and film

“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.”

Benjamin Britten (1913–1976) English composer, conductor, and pianist

Love, Pain, Beauty, Music

“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.”

Karen Blixen (1885–1962) Danish writer

Men, Feeling, Courage, Envy

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

Haruki Murakami book Sputnik Sweetheart

Source: Sputnik Sweetheart

Sea

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

Nicole Krauss The History of Love

Source: The History of Love

“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.”

Germaine Greer (1939) Australian feminist author

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

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Art

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

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: Through the Zombie Glass

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

Poppy Z. Brite (1967) Novelist, short story writer, food writer

Night, Good Night

“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.”

Kristin Hannah book The Nightingale

Source: The Nightingale

Fear, Drink

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

Sarah Dessen book This Lullaby

Source: This Lullaby

Feeling

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

Haruki Murakami book Sputnik Sweetheart

Source: Sputnik Sweetheart

Sad

“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.”

Robin Hobb (1952) American fiction writer (pseudonym)

Source: Golden Fool

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

Robin Hobb book Assassin's Apprentice

Source: Assassin's Apprentice

“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.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Source: Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne

Love, Smile, Dreams, Lovers

“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.”

Cecelia Ahern (1981) Irish novelist

Source: How to Fall in Love

Love, Pain, Change

“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.”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Source: The Ladies of the Corridor

Fear, Learning

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

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

People

“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 (1964) American television writer and producer

People

“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…”

Mary Stewart book Nine Coaches Waiting

Source: Nine Coaches Waiting

“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.”

Sabrina Ward Harrison (1975) Canadian writer

Quoted by Katherine Martin in Women of Courage: Inspiring Stories from the Women Who Lived Them, p. 268 (1999)

People, World, Fear, Way

“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.”

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer

Hunger, Dreams, Art, Sleep

“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.”

Jean Vanier (1928–2019) Canadian humanitarian

From books
Source: Jean Vanier, Becoming Human, 2001

Death, Pain, People, Feeling

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

Henry Miller book Tropic of Cancer

Source: Tropic of Cancer

“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.”

Dean Koontz book The Darkest Evening of the Year

Source: The Darkest Evening of the Year

Love, People

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

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

Cute, Romantic, For Her, love

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

Christopher Moore (1957) American writer of comic fantasy

Life, God, Friendship

“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 book Birth of a Killer

Source: Birth of a Killer

World

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

Maxwell Maltz (1889–1975) Plastic surgeon, self-help author

Life

“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 (1964) American writer

Source: Sugar Daddy

Happiness, Personality

“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.”

Mark Millar Kick-Ass

Source: Kick-Ass

Parent, Perfection, Despair

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

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

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.”

Janette Rallison (1966) American writer

Source: Just One Wish

People, Heart, Selfishness

“Every loneliness is a pinnacle”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

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

Mitch Albom (1958) American author

Source: The Time Keeper

“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.”

Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter

"Sisters of Mercy"
Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967)
Context: Yes, you who must leave everything that you cannot control,
It begins with your family, and soon it comes round to your soul.
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.

Feeling, Thinking

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

Ayn Rand book Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

World, Nature