Loneliness Quotes

Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone. It 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.

~ Paul Tillich

Like crying wolf, if you keep looking for sympathy as a justification for your actions, you will someday be left standing alone when you really need help.

~ Criss Jami

It's so stupid because all I wanted was space and now that I have it, there's this part of me that's achingly lonely I could die.

~ Hannah Harrington

Solitude is indeed dangerous for a working intelligence. We need to have around us people who think and speak. When we are alone for a long time we people the void with phantoms

~ Guy De Maupassant

Then stirs the feeling infinite, s

~ George Gordon Byron

The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present.

~ Alan Lightman

Are you angry? Punch a pillow. Was it satisfying? Not hardly. These days people are too angry for punching. What you might try is stabbing. Take an old pillow and lay it on the front lawn. Stab it with a big pointy knife. Again and again and again. Stab hard enough for the point of the knife to go into the ground. Stab until the pillow is gone and you are just stabbing the earth again and again, as if you want to kill it for continuing to spin, as if you are getting revenge for having to live on this planet day after day, alone.

~ Miranda July

...sometimes I get tired. Sometimes I get bored. And sometimes all I want, more than anything else in the world, is to go on a freaking date.

~ Kiersten White

Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you.

~ Haruki Murakami

Occasionally, very occasionally, say at four o’clock in the afternoon on a wet Sunday, she feels panic-stricken and almost breathless with loneliness. Once or twice she has been known to pick up the phone to check that it isn’t broken. Sometimes she thinks how nice it would be to be woken by a call in the night: ‘get in a taxi now’ or ‘I need to see you, we need to talk’. But at the best of times she feels like a character in a Muriel Spark novel – independent, bookish, sharp-minded, secretly romantic.

~ David Nicholls

Deep down, the young are lonelier than the old.

~ Anne Frank

What was wrong with me? I had a decent life. I was healthy. I wasn't starving or maimed by a land mine or orphaned. Yet somehow, it wasn't enough. I had a hole in me, and everything I took for granted slipped through it like sand.I felt like I had swallowed yeast, like whatever evil was festering inside me had doubled in size.

~ Jodi Picoult

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

~ Marilynne Robinson

Lonely people have enthusiasms which cannot always be explained. When something strikes them as funny, the intensity and length of their laughter mirrors the depth of their loneliness, and they are capable of laughing like hyenas. When something touches their emotions, it runs through them like Paul Revere, awakening feelings that gather into great armies.

~ Mark Helprin

In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.

~ Aldous Huxley

Half of the time I don't know what they're talking about, their jokes seem to relate to a past that everyone but me has shared. I'm a foreigner in the world and I don't understand the language.

~ Jean Webster

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

~ George Eliot

Lonely was much better than alone.

~ Toni Morrison

Over time, loneliness gets inside you and doesn't go away.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.

~ Tennessee Williams

To forget a friend is sad. Not everyone has had a friend.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

Loneliness in a crowd of people was the worst kind of loneliness, but she couldn't help it.

~ Lauren Kate

[A]t bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise or even help another, a lot must happen, a lot must go well, a whole constellation of things must come right in order once to succeed.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

An ad that pretends to be art is -- at absolute best -- like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.

~ David Foster Wallace

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

~ Sarah Dessen

Oh, the places you'll go! There is fun to be done!There are points to be scored. There are games to be won.And the magical things you can do with that ballwill make you the winning-est winner of all.Fame! You'll be as famous as famous can be,with the whole wide world watching you win on TV.Except when they don'tBecause, sometimes they won't.I'm afraid that some timesyou'll play lonely games too.Games you can't win'cause you'll play against you.

~ Dr. Seuss

There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematician that four is twice two. But two is not twice one, two is two thousand times one.

~ G.k. Chesterton

There’s a loneliness that only exists in one’s mind. The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is blink.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

When I'm in turmoil, when I can't think, when I'm exhausted and afraid and feeling very, very alone, I go for walks. It's just one of those things I do. I walk and I walk and sooner or later something comes to me, something to make me feel less like jumping off a building.

~ Jim Butcher

To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude. The movement from loneliness to solitude, however, is the beginning of any spiritual life because it it is the movement from the restless senses to the restful spirit,l from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward-reaching search, from the fearful clinging to the fearless play.

~ Henri J.m. Nouwen

It was as if the empty nights were made for thinking of him. And sometimes I found myself so vividly aware of him it was as if he had only just left the room and the ring of his voice were still there. And somehow, there was a disturbing comfort in that, and, despite myself, I’d envision his face.

~ Anne Rice

Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness , dear, my happiness will remain,in the moist reflection of a street lamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal's black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness.

~ Vladimir Nabokov

Lingering is so very lonely when one lingers all alone.

~ Mervyn Peake

I decided that maybe we left each other alone too much. Leaving each other alone was killing us.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Like you're riding a train at night across some vast plain, and youcatch a glimpse of a tiny light in a window of a farmhouse. In aninstant it's sucked back into the darkness behind and vanishes. Butif you close your eyes, that point of light stays with you, justbarely for a few moments.

~ Haruki Murakami

I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away — yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit ——————————— and wanted to shoot myself.

~ Søren Kierkegaard

Shrinking in a corner,pressed into the wall;do they know I'm present,am I here at all?Is there a written rule book,that tells you how to be—all the right things to talk about—that everyone has but me?Slowly I am withering—a flowered deprived of sun;longing to belong to—somewhere or someone.

~ Lang Leav

I left the library. Crossing the street, I was hit head-on by a brutal loneliness. I felt dark and hollow. Abandoned, unnoticed, forgotten, I stood on the sidewalk, a nothing, a gatherer of dust. People hurried past me. and everyone who walked by was happier than I. I felt the old envy. I would have given anything to be one of them.

~ Nicole Krauss

But there are other words for privacy and independence. They are isolation and loneliness.

~ Megan Whalen Turner

What is the difference in being alone with another and being alone by one's self?

~ Henrik Ibsen