Loneliness Quotes

Loneliness is a state of feeling that can be changed.People may still feel lonely even among the crowd.

~ Toba Beta

Loneliness is the prison of the human spirit. When we are lonely, we pace back and forth in small, shut-in worlds.

~ John Powell

Where are the men?” the little prince at last took up the conversationagain. “It is a little lonely in the desert. . . ”“It is also lonely among men,” the snake said.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

He would say her name over and over until it devolved into meaningless sounds - mah REI kuh, mah REI kuh - it became an entry in a dictionary of loneliness.

~ Audrey Niffenegger

Loneliness is a funny disease. You don’t realize how badly you’re infected until someone gives you a shot of contentment—and then it wears off

~ Brigid Kemmerer

If only I had something to take the edge off the loneliness. If only lonely were a more accurate word. It should sound much less pretty.

~ Nina Lacour

Loneliness is like being the only person left alive in theuniverse, except that everyone else is still here.

~ Simon Van Booy

From childhood's hour I have not beenAs others were - I have not seenAs others saw - I could not bringMy passions from a common spring -

~ Edgar Allan Poe

Only boxers can understand the loneliness of tennis players - and yet boxers have their corner men and managers. Even a boxer's opponent provides a kind of companionship, someone he can grapple with and grunt at. In tennis you stand face-to-face with the enemy, trade blows with him, but never touch him or talk to him, or anyone else. The rules forbid a tennis player from even talking to his coach while on the court. People sometimes mention the track-and-field runner as a comparably lonely figure, but I have to laugh. At least the runner can feel and smell his opponents. They're inches away. In tennis you're on an island. Of all the games men and women play, tennis is the closest to solitary confinement....

~ Andre Agassi

There's a special quality to the loneliness of dusk, a melancholy more brooding even than the night's.

~ Ed Gorman

When loneliness is a constant state of being, it harkens back to a childhood wherein neglect and abandonment were the landscape of life.

~ Alexandra Katehakis

Rats! There goes the bell... oh, how I hate lunch hours! I always have to eat alone because nobody likes me... Peanut butter again... I wish that little red haired girl would come over, and sit with me. Wouldn’t it be great if she’d walk over here, and say, “May I eat lunch with you, Charlie Brown?” I’d give anything to talk with her... she’d never like me, though... I’m so blah and so stupid... she’d never like me... I wonder what would happen if I went over and tried to talk to her! Everyone would probably laugh... she’d probably be insulted someone as blah as I am tried to talk to her. I hate lunch hour... all it does is make me lonely... during class it doesn’t matter... I can’t even eat... Nothing tastes good... Rats! Nobody is ever going to like me... Lunch hour is the loneliest hour of the day!

~ Charles M. Schulz

All we had was her room, her stories, and the quiet that settled in as we tried in vain to spread ourselves out and fill the space she'd left behind.

~ Sarah Dessen

There were people everywhere but no one was mine, and I was no one's.

~ Gregory Maguire

I wanted to tell him then how loneliness can become a tangible thing, after a while. It’s something that you carry with you on your shoulder, hold up like a friend with a twisted ankle. It sits with you and walks the streets with you. It’s a selfish thing and it refuses to let go or even split its attention. Of course, like a particularly annoying itch, you can convince yourself for a while that it’s not there. You can go to libraries and sit with friends and drink more coffee than your body can handle and you can feel surrounded and happy. But eventually you have to scratch it. Loneliness steals you away from the world, as if you’ve been cut loose and you’re lost, untethered, somewhere far above everyone else. Just you and this feeling that you just need someone to put a hand on your shoulder and turn you around, to look at you and tell you the three words that matter most: You’re not alone. Don’t be scared. I am here. It’s not about love or lust or any other inadequate word; it’s about being touched and realising that you are no longer by yourself.

~ Chloe Rattray

Why were we so far apart, even when we were together? It was a nice loneliness, like the sensation of washing your face in cold water.

~ Banana Yoshimoto

Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.

~ John Fowles

The American appetite for loneliness impressed me, and there was something about this solitude that freed conversation. One night at a bar, I met a man, and within five minutes he explained that he had just been released from prison. Another drinker told me that his wife had passed away, and he had recently suffered a heart attack, and now he hoped that he would die within the year. I learned that there's no reliable small talk in America; at any moment a conversation can become personal.

~ Peter Hessler

The more books you read, the less topics you have in common with most of the people, that´s the price you pay for reading.

~ Martina Tutková

Anyone who knows how scary it is to be alone, can't help loving others. ~Rin Sohma

~ Natsuki Takaya

Eventually, I’ll grow sick and perish. Die on the floor, a young girl—who even when in the presence of company, still feels the loneliness that looms over her heart.

~ R.j. Gonzales

It was bad enough not having a boyfriend for New Year's Eve. Now I had to cope with Valentine datelessness, feeling consummate social pressure from every retailer in America who stuck hearts and cupids on their windows by January second to rub it in. (Thwonk)

~ Joan Bauer

you’re ignoring me so loud that it’s deafening. This silence is so deep that it’s echoing.

~ Anna Jae

Loneliness is painful. But suffering is not wrong in and of itself. It's part of the human experience, and in a way brings us closer to all people.

~ Juliette Fay

Hoyt was by himself right under one of the portable lights rigged up for the occasion. He had his hands thrust in his pockets, and he looked more serious than I’d ever seen him. There was something strange about the sight, and after a second I figured out why.It was one of the few times I’d ever seen Hoyt alone.

~ Charlaine Harris

A gem, like you, is made beautiful by being polished. It's not an easy undertaking, but a stone that exists undisturbed among others just is...but the most beautiful stand out because they face being alone, endure hardships and learn from what challenges them. Suffering purifies and makes beautiful, but only if the gem can shine.

~ Donna Lynn Hope

I can go years thinking that it seems impossible that I will ever satisfy that appetite again and then it is easy to satisfy and no one notices or cares, nor does it make me happy, when loneliness surrounds me like water I've already drowned in without dying.

~ Francisco Goldman

She's never really wanted to be the only person, she's never been such a fan of being alone.

~ Alison Pace

There is no living being on earth at this moment except myself. I could walk down the halls, and empty rooms would yawn mockingly at me from every side. God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of 'parties' with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter — they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship — but the loneliness of the soul in it's appalling self-consciousness, is horrible and overpowering.

~ Sylvia Plath

Was it really some other person I was so anxious to discover...or was it only my own solitude that I could not abide?

~ David Markson

You and I share the same DNA.Is there anything more lonely than that?

~ Charlie Kaufman

It bothered me that whatever was waiting wasn't waiting for me

~ Jean Anouilh

On those nights, the words were for me alone. They came up unbidden from my heart. They spilled over my tongue and spilled out my mouth. And because of them, I, who was nothing and nobody, was a prince of Denmark, a maid of Verona, a queen of Egypt. I was a sour misanthrope, a beetling hypocrite, a conjurer's daughter, a mad and murderous king.

~ Jennifer Donnelly

I brought the birdcages to the windows.I opened the windows, and opened the birdcages.I poured the fish down the drain.I took the dogs and cats downstairs and removed their collars.I released the insects onto the street.And the reptiles.And the mice.I told them, Go.All of you.Go.And they went.And they didn’t come back

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

To break the silence the old man said the first thing that came to his mind: Loneliness is a type of violence.

~ Jonathan Messinger

You think of outside your room, of the streets of the town, the lonely little squares over by the station, of those winter Saturdays all alike.

~ Marguerite Duras

Though she’d begun to get a bit fat that winter, it was in February, around when her father found a toy poodle (sitting there, in the side yard, watchful and waiting as a person), and adopted it, that a weightlessness entered into Chelsea’s blood—an inside ventilation, like a bacteria of ghosts—and it was sometime in the fall, before her 23rd birthday, that her heart, her small and weary core, neglected now for years, vanished a little, from the center out, took on the strange and hollowed heaviness of a weakly inflated balloon.

~ Tao Lin

Yes, after all, this by now was his customary loneliness: there was little else he desired for the present than the hospitality of the dark.

~ Walter De La Mare

When you are 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 clear that impassable distance between you.[…]I don't know. If being in love only made people more lonely, why would everyone want it so much?Because of the illusion. You fall in love, it's intoxicating, and for a little while you feel like you've actually become one with the other person. Merged souls, and so on. You thing you'll never be lonely again. Only it doesn't last and soon you realize you can only get so close, and you end up brutally disappointed, more alone that ever, because the illusion - the hope you'd held on to all those years - has been shattered. […] But see, the incredible thing about people is that we forget. Ray continued. Time passes and somehow the hope creeps back and sooner or later someone else comes along and we think this is the one. And the whole thing starts all over again. We go through our lives like that, and either we just accept the lesser relationship - it may not be total understanding, but it's pretty good - or we keep trying for that perfect union, trying and failing, leaving behind us a trail of broken hearts, our own included. In the end, we die as alone as we were born, having struggled to understand others, to make ourselves understood, but having failed in what we once imagined was possible.

~ Nicole Krauss

People claim that love is the deepest feeling, but don't you believe it. Loneliness is the most affecting of human emotions. Nothing makes life more vivid. If you wish to live in the moment, I recommend intense loneliness.

~ Seth