Loneliness Quotes

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


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

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

How we need another soul to cling to.

~ Sylvia Plath

Will’s voice dropped. “Everyone makes mistakes, Jem.”“Yes,” said Jem. “You just make more of them than most people.”“I —”“You hurt everyone,” said Jem. “Everyone whose life you touch.”“Not you,” Will whispered. “I hurt everyone but you. I never meant tohurt you.”Jem put his hands up, pressing his palms against his eyes. “Will —”“You can’t never forgive me,” Will said in disbelief, hearing thepanic tinging his own voice. “I’d be —”“Alone?” Jem lowered his hand, but he was smiling now, crookedly. “Andwhose fault is that?

~ Cassandra Clare

If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.

~ Aldous Huxley

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

I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

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

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

~ Sylvia Plath

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

It would be too easy to say that I feel invisible. Instead, I feel painfully visible, and entirely ignored.

~ David Levithan

They cannot scare me with their empty spacesBetween stars—on stars where no human race is.I have it in me so much nearer homeTo scare myself with my own desert places.

~ Robert Frost

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

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 only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.

~ Mitch Albom

Sometimes I feel so- I don’t know - lonely. The kind of helpless feeling when everything you’re used to has been ripped away. Like there’s no more gravity, and I’m left to drift in outer space with no idea where I’m going’Like a little lost Sputnik?’I guess so.

~ Haruki Murakami

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

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.

~ Sandy Welch

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

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

It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know.

~ David Foster Wallace

Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better.

~ Henry Rollins

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

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

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

~ Poppy Z. Brite

Loneliness is the poverty of self, solitude is richness of self.

~ May Sarton

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

A joker is a little fool who is different from everyone else. He's not a club, diamond, heart, or spade. He's not an eight or a nine, a king or a jack. He is an outsider. He is placed in the same pack as the other cards, but he doesn't belong there. Therefore, he can be removed without anybody missing him.

~ Jostein Gaarder

Karou wished she could be the kind of girl who was complete unto herself, comfortable in solitude, serene. But she wasn't. She was lonely, and she feared the missingness within her as if it might expand and... cancel her. She craved a presence beside her, solid. Fingertips light at the nape of her neck and a voice meeting hers in the dark. Someone who would wait with an umbrella to walk her home in the rain, and smile like sunshine when he saw her coming. Who would dance with her on her balcony, keep his promises and know her secrets, and make a tiny world wherever he was, with just her and his arms and his whisper and her trust.

~ Laini Taylor

But nothing makes a room feel emptier than wanting someone in it.

~ Calla Quinn

I am alone, I thought, and they are everybody.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

If you smile when you are alone, then you really mean it.

~ Andy Rooney

The pain of being alone is completely out of this world, isn't it? I don't know why, but I understand your feelings so much, it actually hurts.

~ Masashi Kishimoto

That initial anger she had felt turned to sadness, and now it had become something else, almost a dullness of sorts. Even though she was constantly in motion, it seemed as if nothing special ever happened to her anymore. Each day seemed exactly like the last, and she had trouble differentiating among them.

~ Nicholas Sparks

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

...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

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.

~ T.s. Eliot

Be good and you will be lonesome.

~ Mark Twain

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

~ Kahlil Gibran