Quotes about loneliness
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“But there are other words for privacy and independence. They are isolation and loneliness.”

Megan Whalen Turner The King of Attolia

Source: The King of Attolia

“Isolation and loneliness are central causes of depression and despair.”

Bell Hooks book All About Love: New Visions

Source: All About Love: New Visions

Despair

“My despair is less despair than boredom and loneliness.”

Anthony Swofford book Jarhead

Source: Jarhead

Despair

“At our age, loneliness can seem so permanent.”

Jonathan Tropper (1970) American writer

This is Where I Leave You

Age

“The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

“There is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock. People so tired, mutilated either by love or no love.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Love, People, World

“Why do we even bother? Why do we make ourselves so open to such easy damage? Is it all loneliness? Is it all fear? Or is it just to experience those narcotic moments of belonging with someone else?”

David Levithan (1972) American author and editor

Source: Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist

Fear

“I HIDE myself within my flower
That wearing on your breast,
You, unsuspecting, wear me too—
And angels know the rest.

I hide myself within my flower,
That, fading from your vase,
You, unsuspecting, feel for me
Almost a loneliness…”

Emily Dickinson book The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

Source: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

Angels, Feeling, Flowers

“I had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness and time - those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything.”

Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer

Source: Bitter Lemons of Cyprus

Time, Night

“Loneliness will sit over our roofs with brooding wings.”

Bram Stoker book Dracula

Source: Dracula

“Jamie enjoyed solitude, but loneliness was a constant ache.”

Sidney Sheldon Master of the Game

Source: Master of the Game

Solitude

“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.”

Haruki Murakami book A Wild Sheep Chase

Source: A Wild Sheep Chase

Feeling, Bird

“The opposite of loneliness, it's not togetherness. It is intimacy.”

Richard Bach book The Bridge Across Forever

The Bridge Across Forever (1984)

“As with many people, Charles, who could not talk, wrote with fullness. He set down his loneliness and his perplexities, and he put on paper many things he did not know about himself.”

John Steinbeck book East of Eden

Source: East of Eden

People

“Loneliness and darkness have just robbed me of my valuables.”

Sigmund Freud book Introduction to Psychoanalysis

Source: Introduction à la psychanalyse

“I've noticed that loneliness gets stronger when we try to face it down, but gets weaker when we simply ignore it.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Source: The Witch Of Portobello

“There in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning.”

Toni Morrison book Sula

Source: Sula

Death, Silence, Time

“I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don't know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. In reality those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my ''idea of them.”

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

People, Idea, Reality

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

Margaret Mitchell (1900–1949) American author and journalist

Penalty

“From where I sat, Peter and Wendy were the two loneliest figures in the world. But Peter was somehow the lonelier of the two.”

Jodi Lynn Anderson American children's writer

Source: Tiger Lily

World

“The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness”

Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) English historian and Member of Parliament

Thinking

“People cannot win against their loneliness because loneliness is this world’s worst kind of pain.”

Masashi Kishimoto (1974) Japanese manga artist

Pain, People, World

“The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!”

Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence

Source: The Age of Innocence

People

“Seeing the water birds on the lake increase in number day by day, I thought to myself how nice it would be if it snowed before we got back to the Palace—the garden would look so beautiful; and then, two days later, while I was away on a short visit, lo and behold, it did snow. As I watched the rather drab scene at home, I felt both depressed and confused. For some years now I had existed from day to day in listless fashion, taking note of the flowers, the birds in song, the way the skies change from season to season, the moon, the frost and snow, doing little more than registering the passage of time. How would it all turn out? The thought of my continuing loneliness was unbearable, and yet I had managed to exchange sympathetic letters with those of like mind—some contacted via fairly tenuous connections—who would discuss my trifling tales and other matters with me; but I was merely amusing myself with fictions, finding solace for my idleness in foolish words. Aware of my own insignificance, I had at least managed for the time being to avoid anything that might have been considered shameful or unbecoming; yet here I was, tasting the bitterness of life to the very full.”

Murasaki Shikibu book The Diary of Lady Murasaki

trans. Richard Bowring (Penguin Books, 1996)
The Diary of Lady Murasaki

Life, Beauty, Way, Home

“There may be a rationalist who has never wavered in his conviction of the mortality of the soul, and there may be a vitalist who has never wavered in his faith in immortality; but at the most this would prove that just as there are natural monstrosities, so there are those who are stupid as regards heart and feeling, however great their intelligence, and those who are stupid intellectually, however great their virtue. But, in normal cases, I cannot believe those who assure me that never, not in a fleeting moment, not in the hours of direst loneliness and grief, has this murmur of uncertainty breathed upon their consciousness.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VI : In the Depths of the Abyss

Stupidity, Faith, Feeling, Soul

“I was not meant to be alone. I am not good at it. The years since Ruth's passing have ticked by with the kind of desparate silence known only to the elderly. It is a silence underscored by loneliness and the knowledge that the good years are already in the past, coupled with the complications of old age itself.
The body is not meant to survive nearly a century. I speak from experience when I say this…”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Ira Levinson, Chapter 28, p. 320-321
2009, The Longest Ride (2013)

Age, Knowledge, Silence, Past

“It would be a mistake to think…that by what we are doing tonight we are giving a vote of confidence or congratulation to homosexuality. Those who suffer from this disability carry a great weight of loneliness, guilt and shame. The crucial question, which we are nearly at the end of answering decisively, is, should we add to those disadvantages the full rigour of the criminal law? By its overwhelming decisions, the House has given a fairly clear answer, and I hope that the Bill will now make rapid progress towards the Statute Book. It will be an important and civilising Measure.”

Roy Jenkins (1920–2003) British politician, historian and writer

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1967/jul/03/clause-8-restrictions-on-prosecution in the House of Commons in favour of the Bill decriminalising homosexuality (3 July 1967). <br class="br">1960s

Books, Law, Hope, Confidence

“You can walk away from your mistakes
You can turn your back on what you do
Just a little smile is all it takes
And you can have your cake and eat it too.
Loneliness will get to you somehow
But ev'rybody loves you now.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

Everybody Loves You Now
Song lyrics, Cold Spring Harbor (1971)

Love, Smile

“There are few lonelier sights than a good comedian being funny in a movie that doesn't know what funny is.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/wedding-crashers-2005 of Wedding Crashers (14 July 2005) <br class="br">Reviews, Two star reviews

“What we tried to do, out of mutual loneliness, was make more out of the relationship than it could support. Then it becomes pretend, and you are both saying things cribbed from half-forgotten books and plays. So the structure slowly topples over, like vanilla ice cream piled too high. And the end of it there was an obscure impulse to shake hands.”

John D. MacDonald (1916–1986) writer from the United States

Travis McGee series, (1985)

Books, Support

“Lonely people, in talking to each other can make each other lonelier.”

Lillian Hellman The Autumn Garden

The Autumn Garden (1951)

People

“I am, I must confess, suspicious of those who denounce others for having "too much" sex. At what point does a "healthy" amount become "too much"? There are, of course, those who suffer because their desire for sex has become compulsive; in their cases the drive (loneliness, guilt) is at fault, not the activity as such.”

Edmund White (1940) American novelist and LGBT essayist

San Francisco (p. 37).
States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980)

Sex, Suffering

“Rarely will you meet anyone so jealous as a teacher. Year after year students tumble along like the waters of a river. They flow away, and only the teacher is left behind, like some deeply buried rock at the bottom of the current. Although he may tell others of his hopes, he doesn't dream of them himself. He thinks of himself as worthless and either falls into masochistic loneliness or, failing that, ultimately becomes suspicious and pious, forever denouncing the eccentricities of others. He longs so much for freedom and action that he can only hate people.”

Kóbó Abe book The Woman in the Dunes

Part 2, Ch. 11
The Woman in the Dunes (1962)

Hate, People, Dreams, Hope

“As seen in my loneliness, there was this difference between the Bible and the newspapers. The one reminded one that, apart from God, my life was but a bubble of air, and it bade me remember my Creator; the other fostered arrogance and loneliness.”

Henry Morton Stanley (1841–1904) Welsh journalist and explorer

Source: Quotes:, Autobiography of Sir Henry Morton Stanley (1909), p. 254

Life, God

“I know the dark delight of being strange,
The penalty of difference in the crowd,
The loneliness of wisdom among fools”

Claude McKay (1889–1948) Jamaican American writer, poet

Complete Poems, University of Illinois Press, 2004, p. 348

Wisdom, Penalty, Fools

“I no longer think being in love is the polar opposite of being alone, however. I say that because I used to want to be in love again as I assumed this was the opposite of loneliness. I think being in love is an opposite of loneliness, but not the opposite. There are other things I now crave when I am lonely, like community, like friendship, like family. I think our society puts too much pressure on romantic love, and that is why so many romances fail. Romance can't possibly carry all that we want it to.”

Donald Miller book Blue Like Jazz: nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality

Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)

Love, Friendship, Family, Communication

“There is a recent photo of Pope Francis doing the rounds on social media that shows him walking alone, without security people or a private secretary, across a Vatican courtyard. In the early days of his pontificate, it would have been seen as Francis breaking through the stuffy conventions of the Vatican: being his own man. Five years on, it is instead viewed as symbolic of Francis’s loneliness. Here is a man struggling to find allies or support from the Catholic faithful in his stalled efforts to reform the church and failing attempts to tackle the abuse crisis.”

Catherine Pepinster (1959)

Pope Francis has utterly failed to tackle the church’s abuse scandal https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/26/pope-francis-catholic-church-abuse-scandal-failed (26 July 2018), The Guardian.

People, Faith, Photo, Support

“I'm going through a strange period now. Maybe the most serious of all my short life. I can see that my goals are becoming more and more remote from those of the family, and that you and they will be less and less inclined to approve of them... And still I must go on. I must not retreat. I struggle forward, just as all of you do, but I'm doing it within my own mind, my own skin, and in the way I think is right. I'm little frightened by my loneliness in my unguarded hours. But personally those are the very hours that help me along toward my goal. You needn't show this letter to our parents.”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

In a letter to her sister Milly, 21 September 1899; as quoted in Voicing our visions, – Writings by women artists; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 199
1899

Life, Family, Way, Thinking

“Marriage is like a war. There are moments of chivalry and gallantry that attend the victorious advances and strategic retreats, the birth or death of children, the momentary conquest of loneliness, the sacrifice that ennobles him who makes it. But mostly there are the long dull sieges, the waiting, the terror and boredom. Women understand this better than men; they are better able to survive attrition.”

Helen Hayes (1900–1993) actress

Source: On Reflection (1968), Ch. 12

Death, Women, Men, Marriage

“…I had no love for politics. I treasured the privacy of my family life. My mother respected both these sentiments. Then my brother, Sanjay was killed in the prime of his life. It broke a mother’s heart. It did not break a Prime Minister’s will. Without even a day’s break, she carried on her noble task single-minded in fulfilling her pledge to her people
There is a loneliness that only a bereaved mother can know…she called to me in her loneliness. I went to her side. At her instance, I left my love for flying at her instance I joined her as a political aide. From her I learned my first political lessons. It was she who urged me to respond to the insistent demand from the constituency and the part to take my brother’s place as Member of Parliament for Amethi. With her blessings I was made General Secretary of my party asking me to accept the challenge of stepping into her shoes.
In accepting this challenge I fulfilled a national duty and a filial duty of a son to a mother.”

Rajiv Gandhi (1944–1991) sixth Prime Minister of India

In Memorable Quotes from Rajiv Gandhi and on Rajiv Gandhi (2009) http://books.google.co.in/books?id=L5bTCgLM1lYC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false, Quote 37 <br class="br">Quote

Love, Life, People, Family

“We would be much better off getting rid of the psychology that is causing so much misery than looking for chemicals that make us feel better but do nothing to solve our loneliness.”

William Glasser (1925–2013) American psychiatrist

Source: Choice Theory (1997), p. 88

Feeling

“That's the way it must have been a hundred or two hundred years ago. Hardly any people and hardly any loneliness. I'm undoubtedly over-generalizing, but if the proper qualifications were introduced it would be true.”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29

People, Way

“The start of work means the end to freedom, but also to doubt, intensity and wayward desires. The accountant’s ten thousand possibilities have been reduced to an agreeable handful. She has a business card which she hands over in meetings and which tells other people—and, more meaningfully perhaps, reminds her—that she is a Business Unit Senior manager, rather than a vaporous transient consciousness in an incidental universe. How satisfying it is to be held in check by the assumptions of colleagues, instead of being forced to contemplate, in the loneliness of the early hours, all that one might have been and now never will be. … Life is no longer mysterious, sad, haunting, touching, confusing or melancholy; it is a practical stage for clear-eyed action.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), p. 238.

Life, People, Sadness, Business

“Jesus does not want us floating through space or sitting in front of our televisions. Jesus wants us interacting, eating together, laughing together, praying together. Loneliness is something that came with the fall.”

Donald Miller book Blue Like Jazz: nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality

Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)

“Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

"Healing".
What Are People For? (1990)

“It crept upon me--the restlessness, the loneliness. What was the matter…Then it came to me like crashing and thunder, like death and destruction. I got up from the counter and walked away in fear, walking fast down the boardwalk, passing people who seemed strange and ghostly: the world seemed a myth, a transparent plane, and all things upon it were here for only a little while…”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Death, People, World, Fear

“Rossini was gentle with her. "In one way or another, we all have to cope with the essential solitude of being human, whether we're celibate or married."
"If you're a good person, doesn't God fill your loneliness?"
"He fills it, I think, with a divine discontent."”

Morris West (1916–1999) Australian writer

Cardinal Luca Rossini and his daughter Luisa Ortega in Ch. 7
Eminence (1998)

God, Way, Thinking, Solitude

“I'm exactly the opposite of religious, I'm anti-religious. I find religious people hideous. I hate the religious lies. It's all a big lie. … I have such a huge dislike. It's not a neurotic thing, but the miserable record of religion. I don't even want to talk about it, it's not interesting to talk about the sheep referred to as believers. When I write, I'm alone. It's filled with fear and loneliness and anxiety - and I never needed religion to save me.”

Philip Roth (1933–2018) American novelist

Interview for Martin Krasnik of the Guardian, (14 December 2005) http://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/dec/14/fiction.philiproth

Hate, People, Lie, Fear

“At least the mentor’s point was made: loneliness was psychological, not statistical.”

Brian W. Aldiss (1925–2017) British science fiction author

“Old Hundredth” p. 163
Short fiction, Who Can Replace a Man? (1965)

“And Christ himself, who preached the life of love, was yet as lonely as any man that ever lived. Yet I could not say that he was mistaken because he preached the life of love and fellowship, and lived and died in loneliness; nor would I dare assert his way was wrong because a billion men have since professed his way and never followed it.”

Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938) American writer

The Anatomy of Loneliness (1941)

Love, Life, Men, Way

“I used to dislike the Whigs but in my years of loneliness I have come to the conclusion that they governed England better than anybody else. They thought our their measures carefully and adapted them to their times and generation. They were not heroic but they were wise. In modern days we see much heroism but little wisdom.”

Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery (1847–1929) British politician

Letter to Strachey (19 October 1921), quoted in Leo McKinstry, Rosebery: Statesman in Turmoil (John Murray, 2006), p. 526.

Wisdom, Time

“She had come long ago to understand that loneliness was the curse of those who were free, even of all those who rose a little above the level of ordinary humanity.”

Louis Bromfield (1896–1956) American author and conservationist

Early Autumn : A Story of a Lady (1926)

Understanding

“If there was a problem connected with my being a lesbian, even after I became aware of it, it was the loneliness, the fact that I didn't know anybody else like me.”

Elsa Gidlow (1898–1986) Canadian-American poet

Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives (1977), as cited in Palmer, Chris, October 6, 1978, "' Word is Out' an important film on gays http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=we08AAAAIBAJ&sjid=Yi4MAAAAIBAJ&pg=3700%2C2698575", Bangor Daily News.

Problem

“Everyone in Boston of a certain age knows the story of Rosie Ruiz, the marathoner who crossed the Boston finish line in 1980 at 2:31.56, flabby thighs and all, having barely broken a sweat. Despite mounting skepticism, she basked in the glory of having run the third-fastest female marathon in history – for a few days, that is, until a couple of students remembered seeing her jump out of the crowd half a mile from the finish.
Something of the sort has been going on recently with the shade of Friedrich von Hayek. The Austrian economist, who died in 1992 just short of what would have been his ninety-third birthday, never made false claims for himself – far from it: he knew all too well the loneliness of the long distance runner. And scrupulous work as editor by the late W. W. Bartley, interpreter Bruce Caldwell, and biographer Alan Ebenstein, have made it possible to see the man clear.
But the claims conservatives are making about the role he played as an economist are beginning to smack of Ruizismus. That is, they have jumped a caricature out of the bushes late in the day and claim that their guy ran a great race.”

David Warsh (1944) American journalist

"Ruizismus among the Austrians," 4 December 2011

Age, Guy, History, Birthday

“Along with the loss of the sense of self has gone a loss of our language for communicating deeply personal meanings to each other. This is one important side of the loneliness now experienced by people in the Western world.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: Man’s Search for Himself (1953), p. 56

People, World, Communication, Sense

“Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Mere Christianity

Book III, Chapter 4, "Morality and Psychoanalysis"
Mere Christianity (1952)

Life, God, War, Peace

“The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.”

Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938) American writer

The Anatomy of Loneliness (1941)

“Now and then, especially at night, solitude loses its soft power and loneliness takes over. I am grateful when solitude returns.”

Donald Hall (1928–2018) American writer

"Between Solitude and Loneliness," The New Yorker, October 15, 2016

Solitude, Night

“No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization's oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.”

Anthony Kennedy (1936) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U. S. ____, (2015), majority opinion.

Love, Death, Women, Men

“When you grow older a dreadful, horrible sensation will come over you. It's called loneliness, and you think you know what it is now, but you don't. Here is a list of the symptoms, and don't worry - loneliness is the most universal sensation on the planet. Just remember one fact - loneliness will pass. You will survive and you will be a better human for it.”

Douglas Coupland book Shampoo Planet

Shampoo Planet (1992)

Thinking, Universe

“No radiant angel came across the gloom with a clear message for her. In those times, as now, there were human beings who never saw angels or heard perfectly clear messages. Such truth as came to them was brought confusedly in the voices and deeds of men not at all like the seraphs of unfailing wing and piercing vision—men who believed falsities as well as truths, and did the wrong as well as the right. The helping hands stretched out to them were the hands of men who stumbled and often saw dimly, so that these beings unvisited by angels had no other choice than to grasp that stumbling guidance along the path of reliance and action which is the path of life, or else to pause in loneliness and disbelief, which is no path, but the arrest of inaction and death.”

George Eliot book Romola

Volume II, Chapter XVI
Romola (1863)

Life, Death, Men, Truth

“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 4 o'clock in the morning.”

Haruki Murakami book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994-1995)

Books, World, Feeling, Drink

“What do you care? You always liked loneliness better than you liked people. No offence — liking yourself’s the beginning of all love.”

Fritz Leiber book The Wanderer

Source: The Wanderer (1964), Chapter 42 (p. 340).

Love, People

“Friendship needs no words — it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.”

Dag Hammarskjöld (1905–1961) Swedish diplomat, economist, and author

Variant translation: Friendship needs no words — it is a loneliness relieved of the anguish of loneliness.
Markings (1964)

Friendship, Solitude

“With the loneliness
of you mighty men,
with your mighty kiss
that might never, never end,
while, so far away,
in the seat of the West,
burns the fount
of the heat
of that loneliness.”

Joanna Newsom (1982) American musician

Go Long
Have One On Me (2010)

Men, Kiss

“I was not more than thirteen years old, when in my loneliness and destitution I longed for some one to whom I could go, as to a father and protector. The preaching of a white Methodist minister, named Hanson, was the means of causing me to feel that in God I had such a friend. He thought that all men, great and small, bond and free, were sinners in the sight of God: that they were by nature rebels against His government; and that they must repent of their sins, and be reconciled to God through Christ. I cannot say that I had a very distinct notion of what was required of me, but one thing I did know well: I was wretched and had no means of making myself otherwise. I consulted a good old colored man named Charles Lawson, and in tones of holy affection he told me to pray, and to 'cast all my care upon God'. This I sought to do; and though for weeks I was a poor, broken-hearted mourner, traveling through doubts and fears, I finally found my burden lightened, and my heart relieved. I loved all mankind, slaveholders not excepted, though I abhorred slavery more than ever. I saw the world in a new light, and my great concern was to have everybody converted. My desire to learn increased, and especially, did I want a thorough acquaintance with the contents of the Bible”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

Source: 1880s, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881), pp. 110–111.

Love, Men, God, World

“Man can never know the kind of loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in a woman's womb only to gather strength, he nourishes himself from this fusion, and then he rises and goes into the world, into his work, into battle, into art. He is not lonely. He is busy. The memory of the swim in amniotic fluid gives him energy, completion. The woman may be busy too, but she feels empty. Sensuality for her is not only a wave of pleasure in which he has bathed, and a charge of electric joy at contact with another. When man lies in her womb, she is fulfilled, each act of love is a taking of man within her, and act of birth and rebirth, of child bearing and man bearing. Man lies in her womb and is reborn each time anew with a desire to act, to BE. But for a woman, the climax is not in the birth, but in the moment when man rests inside of her.”

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

May 25, 1932
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Love, Pleasure, World, Art

“To see and feel one’s beloved naked for the first time is one of life’s pure, irreducible epiphanies. If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include that truth of contact or be forever hollow. To make love to the one true person who deserves that love is one of the few absolute rewards of being a human being, balancing all of the pain, loss, awkwardness, loneliness, idiocy, compromise, and clumsiness that go with the human condition. To make love to the right person makes up for a lot of mistakes.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 18 (pp. 348-349)

Love, Life, Pain, Truth

“When my mother left us, he [Stalin] was left completely alone. And I think what came next, in the late 30s and after the war in the 40s - I think that was a result of his complete loneliness on top of the world. Nobody would argue with him anymore.”

Svetlana Alliluyeva (1926–2011) daughter of Joseph Stalin

Stalin's daughter Lana Peters dies in US of cancer http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-15931683, BBC News, (29 November, 2011).

War, World, Thinking

“Apropos of the "The Lifted Veil," I think it will not be judicious to reprint it at present. I care for the idea which it embodies, and which justifies its painfulness. A motto which I wrote on it yesterday perhaps is a sufficient indication of that idea: —
"Give me no light, great heaven, but such as turns
To energy of human fellowship;
No powers save the growing heritage
That makes complete manhood."
But it will be well to put the story in harness with some other productions of mine, and not send it forth in its dismal loneliness. There are many things in it which I would willingly say over again, and I shall never put them in any other form. But we must wait a little. The question is not in the least one of money, but of care for the best effect of writing, which often depends on circumstances, much as pictures depend on light and juxtaposition.”

George Eliot (1819–1880) English novelist, journalist and translator

Comments on The Lifted Veil with a motto for it used in the "Cabinet Edition" of her works (1878), in a letter to John Blackwood (28 February 1873), published in George Eliot's Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals (1885), Vol. 4

Money, Pain, Idea, Question

“He liked the vast openness of sky and prairie, and found loneliness a pleasure with so immense a domain to be alone in.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, City of Illusions (1967), Chapter 3

Pleasure

“A genuine faith lifts us above the bitterness of grief; a sense of Christ's living presence takes away all unbearable loneliness even when we are most alone. In our darkest hours, to know that our lost friend is still living, still loving us, still ours, in the highest and best sense, must be unspeakably consoling.”

Arthur Kenney (1776–1855) Irish dean

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 27.

Love, Faith, Sense, Christ

“Through a marvelous law of natural compensation, he who gives of himself grows, and he who turns inward and lives from small pleasures, is afraid to share them with others, and only thinks avariciously of cultivating his appetites loses his humanity and becomes loneliness itself. He carries in his breast all the dreariness of winter. He becomes in fact and appearance an insect.”

José Martí (1853–1895) Poet, writer, Cuban nationalist leader

Martí : Thoughts/Pensamientos (1994)

Pleasure, Law, Nature, Thinking

“The professional and financial interest in continuing animal experimentation helps to explain at least some resistance to the notion that animals have a complex emotional life and are capable of experiencing the higher emotions, such as love, compassion, altruism, disappointment and nostalgia. To acknowledge such a possibility implies certain moral obligations. If chimpanzees can experience loneliness and mental anguish, it becomes more wrong to use them for experiments in which they are isolated and anticipate daily pain.”

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson book When Elephants Weep

Preface, p. 15
When Elephants Weep (1994)

Love, Life, Pain, Disappointment

“The whole problem of life, then, is this: how to break out of one's own loneliness, how to communicate with others.”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

Life, Communication, Problem

“Wolf-spider, crouch in your funnel nest.
If I knew you, once,
now I know you less.
In the sinking sand,
where we've come to rest,
have I had a hand in your loneliness?”

Joanna Newsom (1982) American musician

Have One On Me (2010)

Wolf

“And the eternal paradox of it is that if a man is to know the triumphant labor of creation, he must for long periods resign himself to loneliness, and suffer loneliness to rob him of the health, the confidence, the belief and joy which are essential to creative work.”

Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938) American writer

The Anatomy of Loneliness (1941)

Health, Confidence, Suffering, Joy

“I don't intend to share fate,
Fate which is a universal loneliness.”

Chairil Anwar (1922–1949) Indonesian poet

"Pemberian Tahu" ["A Proclamation"] (1946), p. 184
The Complete Poetry and Prose of Chairil Anwar (trans. Burton Raffel)

Fate, Universe

“Why?’ My mother’s question hangs in the still air of memory. The loneliness I have felt many mornings, however, has not made me forget that I am engaged in a highly public activity. I sit here in silence writing this small volume of words, and it seems to me the most public thing I ever have done. My mother’s letter has served to remind me: I am making my personal life public. Probably I will never try to explain my motives to my mother and father. My mother’s question will go unanswered to her face.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)

Life, Motivation, Question, Silence

“The woods eats the woman and dumps her honey-body in the mud,
Her dress floats down the well and it assumes the shape of the body of a little girl,
Yeah, I recognize that girl,
She stumbled in some time last loneliness,
But I could not stand to touch her now,
My one and only onlyness.”

Nick Cave (1957) Australian musician

Song lyrics, The Bad Seed EP (1993), Deep in the Woods

Girl, Time

“We're not a family. We're the opposite of a family. We're people so lonely that when we're together we make a black hole of loneliness and everything else gets sucked down into it and is never seen again.”

Orson Scott Card book Homebody

Homebody (1998)

People, Family

“Here's the way I wrote in one of the things I wrote a while back: "But since he had been in the army, he had come to understand his ungraspable longing and his phantasmal and belly-shrinking dissatisfaction: there were such things he wanted to be, to do, to write: He wanted to be the voice that shrieked out the agony of frustration and lostness and despair and loneliness, that all men feel, yet cannot understand; the voice that rolled forth the booming, intoxicating laughter of men's joy; the voice that richly purred men's love of good hot food and spicy strong drink; men's love of thick, moist, pungent tobacco smoke on a full belly; men's love of woman: voluptuous, throaty voiced, silken-thighed, and sensual."”

James Jones (1921–1977) American author

I suppose that sounds an awful lot like Wolfe, but if it does, it's exactly the way I feel.
Letter to his brother Jeff, from Hawaii (7 April 1941); p. 13
To Reach Eternity (1989)

Love, Men, Food, Way

“When friendship disappears then there is a space left open to that awful loneliness of the outside which is like the cold of space between the planets. It is an air in which men perish utterly. Absolute dereliction is the death of the soul.”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

Source: The Four Men: A Farrago (1911), p. 27

Death, Men, Friendship, Soul

“It was not knowing that was the seed of madness, loneliness, fear. But there were ways to solve all this. Clarity had made her knowable to the world, and had made her better, had brought her close, she hoped, to perfection. Now the world would follow. Full transparency would bring full access, and there would be no more not-knowing. Mae smiled, thinking about how simple it all was, how pure. Bailey shared her smile.”

Dave Eggers book The Circle

Source: The Circle (2013), p. 470

World, Fear, Smile, Hope

“What makes loneliness an anguish
Is not that I have no one to share my burden,
But this:
I have only my own burden to bear.”

Dag Hammarskjöld (1905–1961) Swedish diplomat, economist, and author

Markings (1964)

“Yet gazed MANDALLA on the square
As she he sought still glided there,—
Oh that fond look, whose eyeballs’ strain,
And will not know its look is vain!
At length he turned,—his silent mood
Sought that impassioned solitude,
The Eden of young hearts, when first
Love in its loneliness is nurst.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Improvisatrice (1824)

Love, Mood, Solitude, Heart

“It was this event that shattered my faith in my religion and my country. I had spent the mid-'60s as a successful student in a virtually white environment. I had learned Latin, physics and chemistry. I had accepted the loneliness that came with being "the integrator," the first and the only. But this event, this trauma I could not take, especially when one of my fellow seminarians, not knowing that I was standing behind him, declared that he hoped the S. O. B. died. This was a man of God, mortally stricken by an assassin's bullet, and one preparing for the priesthood had wished evil upon him.”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

1990s, I Am a Man, a Black Man, an American (1998)

God, Faith, Religion, Hope

“People were infected with the concept that happiness was something outside themselves, and a new and powerful form of loneliness was born. Mix loneliness with stress and enervation, and all sorts of madness can occur. Anxiety increases, and in order to obliterate the anxiety, people turn to extreme sex, violence, and even murder.”

Ryū Murakami book Audition

Source: Audition (1997), Chapter One

Happiness, People, Sex, Madness

“My loneliness was born when men praised my talkative faults and blamed my silent virtues.”

Khalil Gibran (1883–1931) Lebanese artist, poet, and writer

Sand and Foam (1926)

Men

“Tony the Beat Poet says the words alone, lonely and loneliness are three of the most powerful words in the English language. I agree with Tony. Those words say that we are human; they are like the words hunger and thirst. But they are not words about the body, they are words about the soul.”

Donald Miller book Blue Like Jazz: nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality

Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)

Hunger, Soul

“Already into the last week of October! The dying fall holds only loneliness. In the garden the chrysanthemums bloom, beautiful, peaceful, as they did a year ago, but the autumn leaves, falling one by one, only make me sad.”

Park Chung-hee (1917–1979) Korean Army general and the leader of South Korea from 1961 to 1979

Diary entry (October 1974), as quoted in The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History Revised and Updated http://books.google.com/books?id=yJZKpYXh2SAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+Two+Koreas:+A+Contemporary+History+revised+updated&hl=en&sa=X&ei=X-xvU5TRFPOisQSa34CIBA&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=already%20into%20the%20last%20week&f=false (2001), by Don Oberdorfer, p. 55. <br class="br">1970s

Sadness, Peace, Beauty, Autumn

“SOLON CR is indicated for the short-term treatment of psychological unease grounded in obsession with thinking about the near and distant future. By severing the link between the present moment and a patient’s perceived future state, researchers have found a pronounced and significant drop in all forms of anxiety. As well, researchers have found that disengagement with “the future” has allowed many patients complaining of persistent loneliness to live active and productive single lives with no fear or anxiety.”

Douglas Coupland book Generation A

Source: Generation A (2009), p. 95

Fear, Thinking, Distant, Future

“Desire was only another weapon, like hunger, loneliness, and cold arrayed against him by his tormentors”

Alice Borchardt book The Dragon Queen

The Dragon Queen

Hunger

“I rail against writers who talk about the loneliness of it all — what do they want, a crowd looking over their typewriters? Or those who talk about having to stare at a blank page — do they want someone to write on it?”

Wilfrid Sheed (1930–2011) English-American novelist and essayist

"Come on, Big Boy — Let Me See Your Manuscript," review and interview by Herbert Gold, The New York Times (1987-08-02)

“A sense of utter loneliness—loneliness inevitable, crushing, eternal, the loneliness of existence, encompassed by the infinite void of unconsciousness—enfolded him as a pall. Life lay like an incubus on his bosom. He shuddered at the thought that death might overlook him, and deny him its refuge.”

Edward Bellamy (1850–1898) American author and socialist

Source: Dr. Heidenhoff's Process http://www.gutenberg.org/files/7052/7052-h/7052-h.htm (1880), Ch. 2.

Life, Death, Sense

“Obama’s manner in dealing with other people and acting in the world fully exemplifies the cheerful impersonal friendliness—the middle distance—that marks American sociability. (Now allow me to speak as a critic. Remember Madame de Staël’s meetings that deprive us of solitude without affording us company? Or Schopenhauer’s porcupines, who shift restlessly from getting cold at a distance to prickling one another at close quarters, until they settle into some acceptable compromise position?) The cheerful impersonal friendliness serves to mask recesses of loneliness and secretiveness in the American character, and no less with Obama than with anyone else. He is enigmatic—and seemed so as much then as now—in a characteristically American way…. Moreover, he excelled at the style of sociability that is most prized in the American professional and business class and serves as the supreme object of education in the top prep schools: how to cooperate with your peers by casting on them a spell of charismatic seduction, which you nevertheless disguise under a veneer of self-depreciation and informality. Obama did not master this style in prep school, but he became a virtuoso at it nevertheless, as the condition of preferment in American society that it is. As often happens, the outsider turned out to be better at it than the vast majority of the insiders…. Together with the meritocratic educational achievements, the mastery of the preferred social style turns Obama into what is, in a sense, the first American elite president—that is the first who talks and acts as a member of the American elite—since John Kennedy …. Obama's mixed race, his apparent and assumed blackness, his non-elite class origins and lack of inherited money, his Third-World childhood experiences—all this creates the distance of the outsider, while the achieved elite character makes the distance seem less threatening.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Quoted in David Remnick, The Bridgeː The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (2010), p. 185-6
On Barack Obama

Money, People, Secret, World

“Why should it be my loneliness,
Why should it be my song,
Why should it be my dream
deferred
overlong?”

Langston Hughes (1902–1967) American writer and social activist

"Tell Me"
Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951)

Dreams

“Yet again - visible and invisible. The panic of loneliness - not physical, far more moral - arises from the fact that every lonely person is wearing a tarnkappe, a magic hood, (in German fairy tales, a magic cap which makes the wearer invisible) against his will: which is tantamount to saying: "If people don't bother about me, it's because nobody is seeing me - seeing me. I'm just a piece of furniture in their eyes." … Newcomers in a strange world suffer this fate especially, what's more in a doubly unpleasant way: first because no one takes any notice of them since they don't belong, i. e. they're nobodies, yet at the same time they're conspicuous, in the way, a nuisance, desperately conscious of being just awkward lumps of furniture.”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights Diaries 1957-59

Fate, People, World, Way

“Franz Kafka is dead.He died in a tree from which he wouldn't come down. "Come down!" they cried to him. "Come down! Come down!" Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. "I can't," he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. "Why?" they cried. Stars spilled across the black sky. "Because then you'll stop asking for me." The people whispered and nodded among themselves. […] They turned and started for home under the canopy of leaves. Children were carried on their fathers' shoulders, sleepy from having been taken to see who wrote his books on pieces of bark he tore off the tree from which he refused to come down. In his delicate, beautiful, illegible handwriting. And they admired those books, and they admired his will and stamina. After all: who doesn't wish to make a spectacle of his loneliness? One by one families broke off with a good night and a squeeze of the hands, suddenly grateful for the company of neighbors. Doors closed to warm houses. Candles were lit in windows. Far off, in his perch in the trees, Kafka listened to it all: the rustle of the clothes being dropped to the floor, or lips fluttering along naked shoulders, beds creaking along the weight of tenderness. That night a freezing wind blew in. When the children woke up, they went to the window and found the world encased in ice.”

Nicole Krauss The History of Love

Source: The History of Love (2005), P. 187

Children, People, Books, World

“We cannot know what John of Leyden felt
Under the Bishop's tongs – we can only
Walk in temperate London, our educated city,
Wishing to cry as freely as they did who died
In the Age of Faith. We have our loneliness
And our regret with which to build an eschatology.”

Peter Porter (1929–2010) British poet

"The Historians Call Up Pain", first collected in Once Bitten, Twice Bitten (1961); cited from Edward Lucie-Smith and Philip Hobsbaum (eds.) A Group Anthology (London: Oxford University Press, 1963) p. 83.

Age, Education, Faith, Cry

Quotes about loneliness page 3

Quotes about loneliness
page 3