Loneliness Quotes

......and not out of fear or loneliness, but only to find myself again... for we have come too far my Life, to turn back now...

~ John Geddes

...across the snowy field the barn light gleams - it's the loneliness of November twilight...

~ John Geddes

She has that voraciousness about children. She swoops in on them. Even I, in public was a beloved child. She'd parade me into town, smiling and teasing me, tickling me as she spoke with people on the sidewalks. When we got home, she'd trail off to her room like an unfinished sentence, and I would sit outside with my face pressed against her door, and replay the day in my head, searching for clues to what I had done to displease her.I have one memory that catches in me like a nasty clump of blood. Marian was dead about two years, and my mother had a cluster of friends come over for afternoon drinks. For hours, the child was cooed over, smothered with red lipstick kisses, tidied up with tissues, then lipstick smacked again. I was suppose to be reading in my room, but I sat at the top of the stairs watching. My mother finally was handed the baby, and she cuddled it ferociously. Oh, how, wonderful it is to hold a baby again! Adora jiggled it on her knee, walked it around the rooms, whispered to it, and I looked down from above like a spiteful little god, the back of my hand placed against my face, imagining how it felt to be cheek to cheek with my mother.

~ Gillian Flynn

I had gotten so used to being alone, but never entirely used to it. Never used to it enough to stop wanting the alternative.

~ David Levithan

Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.

~ Doris Lessing

It's not the job of this town to make me feel happy. It's not this town´s fault that I don't feel I fit in. It doesn't matter where you are in the world, because it's about where you are in your head. It's about the other world I inhabit. The world of dreams, hope, imagination, and memories. I'm happy up here, and because of that I'm happy up there too

~ Cecelia Ahern

I now understood that real secrets were lonely. They planted themselves inside of you and expanded, until you felt like that was all you were-a lonely little secret, isolated in your experiences.

~ Yvonne Woon

When we learn to speak, we learn to translate.

~ Octavio Paz

You’re lost in your own world, in the things that happen there, and you’ve locked all the doors. Sometimes I look at you sleeping. I wake up and look at you and I feel closer to you when you’re like that, unguarded, than when you’re awake. When you’re awake you’re like someone with her eyes closed, watching a movie on the inside of your eyelids. I can’t reach you anymore. Once upon a time I could, but not now, and not for a long time.

~ Nicole Krauss

I stood lonely enough, but to that feeling of isolation I was accustomed: it did not oppress me much.

~ Charlotte Brontë

I don’t think that loneliness is necessarily a bad or unconstructive condition. My own skill at jamming time may actually be dependent on some fluid mixture of emotions, among them curiosity, sexual desire, and love, all suspended in a solvent medium of loneliness. I like the heroes or heroines of books I read to be living alone, and feeling lonely, because reading is itself a state of artificially enhanced loneliness. Loneliness makes you consider other people’s lives, makes you more polite to those you deal with in passing, dampens irony and cynicism. The interior of the Fold is, of course, the place of ultimate loneliness, and I like it there. But there are times when the wish for others’ voices, for friendliness returned, reaches unpleasant levels, and becomes a kind of immobilizing pain. That was how it felt as I finished packing up the box of sex machines.

~ Nicholson Baker

I have become convinced that the more wealth a country accumulates, the more isolated and lonely its people become. The loneliest are usually the children and the elderly. Children learn what they live, and isolation in the ‘village’ is one of the most destructive messages we daily write on the tablets of their hearts.

~ Wess Stafford

There is a horrifying loneliness at work in this time. No, listen to me. We lived six and seven to a room in those days, when I was still among the living. The city streets were seas of humanity; and now in these high buildings dim-witted souls hover in luxurious privacy, gazing through the television window at a faraway world of kissing and touching. It is bound to produce some great fund of common knowledge, some new level of human awareness, a curious skepticism, to be so alone.

~ Anne Rice

When you're young, you think it's going to be solved by love. But it never is. Being close-as close as you can get-to another person only makes it clear the impassable distance between you.

~ Nicole Krauss

Loneliness can make you feel that you have a kingdom in darkness.

~ Mrk Ontim

I invented adventures for myself and made up a life, so as at least to live in some way.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

How was it possible to be with someone and yet feel so utterly alone? How was it possible to be with someone as wonderful, warm and kind as Andrew and yet still wonder if love would ever find you?

~ Chris Manby

So this blessing of loneliness was not really loneliness. Real loneliness was something unendurable. What one wanted when exhausted by the noise and impact of physical bodies was not no people but disembodied people; all those denizens of beloved books who could be taken to one's heart and put away again, in silence, and with no hurt feelings.

~ Elizabeth Goudge

The last thing Farinoush did on several nights just before she went to bed was to rummage through her cardboard box of old things looking for him. And there he invariably remained, nestled forever between a copy of ‘Jana Aranya’ and ‘The Hours’. She read about thirty pages of his still incomprehensible stage-directions before passing out from exhaustion and hoping that the morning would bring him back to her; yearning to be yanked out of bed by him, devoured by him again. But he never returned.

~ Kunal Sen

My fear of loneliness is like a disease.

~ Irene Tomkinson

how much he loved being alone except when he didn't, except when it got to be too much?

~ Elizabeth Graver

This is what it means to be alone: everyone is connected to everyone else, their bodies are a bright liquid life flowing around you, sharing a single heart that drives them to move all together. If the shark comes they will all escape, and leave you to be eaten.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

Outside the hospital, I squinted in the harsh morning sunlight. I could hear birds chirping in the tree, but even though I searched for them, they remained hidden from me.

~ Nicholas Sparks

If our greatest fear is to sink away alone and unremembered, the brutality that time will inflict upon each of us will always run stronger than any river's murky waves.

~ Miguel Syjuco

A whole planet of worlds, and not one of them—not one—has a soul. They wander through their lives separate and alone, unable even to communicate except through grunts and tokens: as if the essence of a sunset or a supernova could ever be contained in some string of phonemes, a few linear scratches of black on white. They've never known communion, can aspire to nothing but dissolution. The paradox of their biology is astonishing, yes; but the scale of their loneliness, the futility of these lives, overwhelms me.

~ Peter Watts

Too much self-centered attitude, you see, brings, you see, isolation. Result: loneliness, fear, anger. The extreme self-centered attitude is the source of suffering.

~ Dalai Lama

A blank wall of social and professional antagonism faces the woman physician that forms a situation of singular and painful loneliness, leaving her without support, respect or professional counsel.

~ Elizabeth Blackwell

As far as loneliness, I feel Los Angeles and its layout, having to drive everywhere - it is a lonely place. It's an isolated city in that respect because you're driving to places alone listening to the radio.

~ Jason Schwartzman

There is no loneliness greater than the loneliness of a failure. The failure is a stranger in his own house.

~ Eric Hoffer

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

~ Hilaire Belloc

I said it's a cold universe and I don't mean that metaphorically. If you go out into space, it's cold. It's really cold and we don't know what's up there. We happen to be in this little pocket where there's a sun. What have we got except love and each other to guard against all that isolation and loneliness?

~ David Chase

In my adolescence, I think I felt very outcast; I felt lonely. I felt great loneliness, and sometimes I wouldn't partake in Christmas, and I would go off and wander in the streets of Melbourne.

~ Michael Leunig

The loneliest ebb of my life came on that Christmas eve, only one day after my arrival in New York. The abyss of loneliness. I ate a solitary dinner in a small cafe, and the very food tasted bitter with my unshed tears. One doesn't dare cry in America. It is unmanly here.

~ Rudolph Valentino

I also wanted to express the strength of cinema to hide reality, while being entertaining. Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness.

~ Pedro Almodóvar

I don't fear death so much as I fear its prologues: loneliness, decrepitude, pain, debilitation, depression, senility. After a few years of those, I imagine death presents like a holiday at the beach.

~ Mary Roach

Feelings such as loneliness, longing or love are sometimes hard to put into words; maybe that's why we all love music, because it resonates with something we can't share.

~ Agnes Obel

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

~ Lawrence Durrell

Our uniqueness makes us special, makes perception valuable - but it can also make us lonely. This loneliness is different from being 'alone': You can be lonely even surrounded by people. The feeling I'm talking about stems from the sense that we can never fully share the truth of who we are. I experienced this acutely at an early age.

~ Amy Tan

The surest sign of age is loneliness.

~ Annie Dillard

I wanted Jesus in 'A.D.' to be very, very, very human - to have those qualities of vulnerability and doubt and pain and sadness and loneliness. Once the resurrection happens and we see that Jesus has risen, it's almost complete, right? It's all about the joy and the smile and the happiness and the closeness to the disciples.

~ Juan Pablo Di Pace