Loneliness Quotes

There's not one good thought in that place. There's nothing but waste and want. I can feel his selfish cravings and an abyss of secrets I hope to never know.

~ Steve V. Cypert

To deprive a gregarious creature of companionship is to maim it, to outrage its nature. The prisoner and the cenobite are aware that the herd exists beyond their exile; they are an aspect of it. But when the herd no longer exists, there is, for the herd creature, no longer entity, a part of no whole; a freak without a place. If he cannot hold on to his reason, then he is lost indeed; most utterly, most fearfully lost, so that he becomes no more than the twitch in the limb of a corpse.

~ John Wyndham

alone doesn't mean lonely. It just means alone. It just means that for now, you're on your own, and that's not a terrible thing.

~ Hemal Jhaveri

To be a human being means to be lonely.To go on becoming a person means exploring new modes of resting in our loneliness.

~ Robert Hobson

My reputation is largely the creature of the kindly imaginings of my flock, whom I chose not to disillusion, in part because the truth had the kind of pathos in it that would bring on sympathy in its least bearable forms.

~ Marilynne Robinson

I've shepherded a good many people through their lives, I've baptized babies by the hundred, and all that time I have felt as though a great part of life was closed to me. Your mother says I was like Abraham. But I had no old wife and no promise of a child. I was just getting by on books and baseball and fried-egg sandwiches.

~ Marilynne Robinson

It seems perverse that we can be more social than anyone would have thought possible when we are at our most anti-social, locked away from the world and silently staring at a computer screen, but that, as psychologists will tell you is the way we operate. When we are at the maximum of our disconnect we also are ready to connect and feel the need for interaction.

~ David Amerland

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

Yes, I guess you could say I am a loner, but i feel more lonely in a crowded room with boring people then i feel on my owm.

~ Henry Rollins

She didn't want to go far, just out of the trees so she could see the stars. They always eased her loneliness. She thought of them as beautiful creatures, burning and cold; each solitary, and bleak, and silent like her.

~ Kristin Cashore

I’ll be honest with you. I’m a little bit of a loner. It’s been a big part of my maturing process to learn to allow people to support me. I tend to be very self-reliant and private. And I have this history of wanting to work things out on my own and protect people from what’s going on with me.

~ Kerry Washington

Sometimes we don't need to eat or drink as much as we do, but it has become a kind of addiction. We feel so lonely. Loneliness is one of the afflictions of modern life. It is similar to the Third and Fourth Precpets--we feel lonely, so we engage in conversation, or even in a sexual relationship, hoping that the feeling of loneliness will go away. Drinking and eating can also be the result of loneliness. You want to drink or overeat in order to forget your loneliness, but what you eat may bring toxins into your body. When you are lonely, you open the refrigerator, watch TV, read magazines or novels, or pick up the telephone to talk. But unmindful consumption always makes things worse (68).

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Orpheus never liked words. He had his music. He would get a funny look on his face and I would say what are you thinking about and he would always be thinking about music.If we were in a restaurant sometimes Orpheus would look sullen and wouldn't talk to me and I thought people felt sorry for me. I should have realized that women envied me. Their husbands talked too much.But I wanted to talk to him about my notions. I was working on a new philosophical system. It involved hats.This is what it is to love an artist: The moon is always rising above your house. The houses of your neighbors look dull and lacking in moonlight. But he is always going away from you. Inside his head there is always something more beautiful.Orpheus said the mind is a slide ruler. It can fit around anything. Show me your body, he said. It only means one thing.

~ Sarah Ruhl

There was a real sense of comfort but at the same time it felt oddly tense. The feeling that every little things we said, these conversations, at any moment, they could stop being possible, and so they were precious, it was that feeling, and the sense of the miracle of this shared moment, here and now. Why were we so far apart, even when we are together? It was anice loneliness, like th sensation of washing your face with cold water.

~ Banana Yoshimoto

In this passionately social world, loneliness dogged the spirit. People were constantly “getting together,” but they never really got there. Everyone was terrified of being alone with himself; yet in company, in spite of the universal assumption of comradeship, these strange beings remained as remote from one another as the stars. For everyone searched his neighbour’s eyes for the image of himself, and never saw anything else. Or if he did, he was outraged and terrified.

~ Olaf Stapledon

Everyone is a lonely victim of life's complexity.

~ Ted Dekker

No one ever said aloud any of the kinds of things he was so constantly thinking, because no one in the parish, not Alice, not Lady Higgs, not anybody, ever seemed to see the things he saw. If they thought as he did, if they saw what he did, they never mentioned it; and to have things which are precious to one eternally unmentioned makes one, he had long discovered, lonely. These August nights, for instance--quite remarkably and unusually beautiful, warm and velvety as he had never known them, ushered in each evening by the most astonishing variety of splendid sunsets--nobody had said a single word about them. They might have been February ones, for all the notice they got. Sometimes he climbed up to the top of Burdon Down towards evening, and stood staring in amazement at what looked like heaven let loose in flames over England; but always he stood alone, always there was no one but himself up there, and no one afterwards, when he descended from his heights, seemed to be aware that anything unusual had been going on.

~ Elizabeth Von Arnim

It is one of life's great ironies that most people's only connection to success is their attachment to the pain of not having achieved it.

~ Stephen Smoke

My aloneness had never bothered me, I hadn't even been aware of it. But now it overwhelmed me. The awareness washed over me with painful sharpness and deep grief. Now that I had company.

~ Linda Olsson

It felt as if I’d been teleported to the dark side of the moon, forced to gaze out at the stars and wonder which one I’d come from.

~ Heather Heffner

Among all the wisdom and facts I learned from Giannon, I also learned the loneliness of incarnation, in which there is inevitably a separation of souls because of the uniqueness of our faces and our experiences. And I learned also the moments when the current of my life joins the current of another life, and I can glimpse for a moment the one flowing body of water we all compose.

~ Kate Horsley

He stopped, feeling lonely in his long speech.

~ John Steinbeck

Looking at her, thinking of her transported him, which struck him as vile because now it was hard for him not to despise the icy serenity of their earlier relations. And he knew that he should not love her, for she had been someone else whom he was supposed to love differently. -What is loneliness? Does the lonely space between two rocks vanish when spanned by a spider web?

~ William T. Vollmann

You are the architect of your own loneliness.

~ Adam Shankman

When the chips are down, you are alone, and loneliness can be terrifying. Fortunately, I've always had a chum I could call. And I love to be alone. It doesn't bother me one bit. I’m my own company.

~ Audrey Hepburn

You know that saying about how you don’t know what you have until it’s gone? I already did know what I had, and now that she’s gone, I know even more.

~ A.s. King

Sometimes I think the loneliness inside of me is going to explode through my skin and sometimes im not sure if crying or screaming or laughing through the hysteria will solve anything at all

~ Tahereh Mafi

I am a lonely man,' Sensei said. 'And so I am glad that you come to see me. But I am also a melancholy man, and so I asked you why you should wish to visit me so often.

~ Sōseki Natsume

The loneliest days are the ones where you keep company with someone you love who can’t hear you.

~ Holly Robinson

Lonely’s a different kind of pain, it doesn’t hurt as bad as heartbreak. I preferred it and embraced it ‘cause I reckoned it was one or the other.

~ Kristen Ashley

I've never had any summer lovin'. And I've never had any school year lovin', either. I've never had a boyfriend. I've never hooked up with a guy. And this morning, on my Internet browser, an article popped up about women marrying themselves. Even my wireless connection knows I'm alone.

~ Flynn Meaney

The emptiness made her insides ache.

~ Anna Mcpartlin

What a difference having a friend makes.

~ Richard Paul Evans

Loneliness is a failure to appreciate others.

~ Marty Rubin

I am not alone, in my aloneness.

~ T. Scott Mcleod

Madoka: Won't anyone notice that Mami-san is dead?Homura: Mami Tomoe's only relatives are distant relations. It will be quite some time before anyone files a missing persons report. When one dies on that side of the wards, not even a body is left behind. She'll wind up forever a missing person... That is what happens to magical girls in the end.Madoka: ...That's too cruel! Mami-san has been fighting all alone for a long time for everyone's sake! For no one to even notice that she's gone... That's just too lonely a fate...Homura: It is just that kind of contract that gives us the power in the first place. It isn't for anyone else's sake. We fight on for the sake of our own prayer. So for no one to notice... for the world to forget us... That is just something we have to accept.

~ Magica Quartet

Brianna peered through the large window into the sea of plexiglass cradles. Each infant, so small and precious, belonged to someone. Someone who cared for them. Someone who loved them. Brianna sniffled and turned away, unable to bear the thought that she had no one.

~ J.e.b. Spredemann

I’m alone, stumbling through the city in the dark, trying not to let the night freeze my blood.

~ Isaac Marion

I suppose I'd had, by the standards of that pre-permissive time, a good deal of sex for my age. Girls, or a certain kind of girl, liked me; I had a car-not so common among undergraduates in those days-and I had some money. I wasn't ugly; and even more important, I had my loneliness, which, as every cad knows, is a deadly weapon with women. My 'technique' was to make a show of unpredictability, cynicism, and indifference. Then, like a conjurer with his white rabbit, I produced the solitary heart.

~ John Fowles

I've chosen a life that's so different from everybody else's that it cuts me off from them. Practically everybody I know treats me like a guest celebrity. Of course it's my own fault. I feel so damn alone sometimes, I feel like I could just float away into the stratosphere and everybody would stand there looking up at me and not one would haul me back down to earth. No ropes.

~ Jordan Mechner