Loneliness Quotes

There are people who haven't any gift for happiness at all and are painfully and ruthlessly aware of the fact. Such people don't seek happiness, only to get a little form and style into their unhappiness

~ Hjalmar Söderberg

You know something, you never know what lonely is until you are really alone, alone all day, alone all night, with no one to talk to.

~ Michael Morpurgo

Had I been screaming, screaming, in some way? I with my life so separate and well-ordered in the company of my green things and my sky and the animals of the hillside? I shouted - it was a demand - I shouted and shook him: Godbody! And as usual he understood me perfectly: 'You was lonesome,' he said.

~ Theodore Sturgeon

I had chosen to play the detective—and if there is one thing that unites all the detectives I've ever read about, it's their inherent loneliness. The suspects know each other. They may well be family or friends. But the detective is always the outsider. He asks the necessary questions but he doesn't actually form a relationship with anyone. He doesn't trust them, and they in turn are afraid of him. It's a relationship based entirely on deception and it's one that, ultimately, goes nowhere. Once the killer has been identified, the detective leaves and is never seen again. In fact, everyone is glad to see the back of him.

~ Anthony Horowitz

If I can teach myself the art of loneliness, then perhaps the art of writing will come more easily to me.

~ Nell Stevens

If you think it ain’t dismal and lonesome out in a fog that way, by yourself, in the night, you try it once – you’ll see.

~ Mark Twain

People talked about loneliness as if it were something alive and it could get you. But loneliness is something dead, it's deadness. Lonely people are slowly dying people.

~ Sofia Samatar

Dream big and dream of a beautiful world where the sun always shines; where everyone sports a smile; where sorrow doesn’t come knocking on any one’s door; where there is plenty of love and where time stands still to watch you enjoy life.Dream of a peaceful world, a world where children retain their innocence and are not violated even before they bloom; where love exists in its true form and breakups are never heard of; where families grow instead of shrinking; where loneliness doesn’t exist and old age is spent enjoying the fruits of love that you sowed.Dream of a world where unselfishness and selflessness rule the roost; where we are not divided on the basis of colour or creed, instead we treat each other with love and respect; where there is equality in everything and the line between the haves and have not's doesn’t exist. Such a world will bring Heaven on Earth.Fly out on the wings of imagination to build such a world and let not even the sky be your limit.

~ Latika Teotia

I always come here when I can't sleep [. . .] every night.

~ Faith Erin Hicks

He really is alone in whatever hell this is.Completely and utterly alone.'It isn't,' he thinks, as he trudges back toward his house, 'the most unfamiliar feeling in the world.

~ Patrick Ness

Loneliness is the endless disease that eats at our soul.

~ Jacob Baylis

She spent the first half of her life alone. For the second half, she longed for a man of dignity to rescue her.

~ Terry A O'neal

She didn’t care if the world thought she was pretty. All she wanted was that special someone to reach beyond the surface and discover her heart.

~ Terry A O'neal

When the silence and the aloneness press down and around me, crushing me, carving through me like ice, I need to speak aloud sometimes, if only for proof of life.

~ Gail Honeyman

It's a dark place, not knowing. It's difficult to surrender to. But I guess it's where we live most of the time. I guess it's where we all live, so maybe it doesn't have to be so lonely. Maybe I can settle into it, cozy up to it, make a home inside uncertainty.

~ Nina Lacour

He thought of night coming on. He thought of the loneliness of tonight, this first night in the ground. This, he thought, was the moment when the dead must first feel truly alone. This was the moment when the dead, in loneliness, feel the first stirrings of the long penance of decay. This was the moment when the dead realize the truth: This is it, it will never be different.To be dead, he thought, that was to know that nothing would ever be different.

~ Robert Penn Warren

But before that day it felt like at least I had an ally on this boat. Now I have nothing. Well, I have a fat baby sea monster. But Bao doesn't tell jokes, and somehow I need that.I hate how I need that.

~ Emily Skrutskie

Together we were something less, which felt like such a relief, to not be ourselves for a while.

~ Ben Marcus

Sometimes I felt so alone that I wish there were a bigger, longer word for alone. I tried to tell Grandma about this feeling, about my suspicion that life was nicking away pieces of me.

~ J.r. Moehringer

How did men make themselves loved, I wondered. I had passed all my life with men who were loved but I seemed never to have learnt the lesson.

~ Maria Mccann

Maybe the point of life is to teach us that we aren’t always going to be our past mistakes. Maybe the point of life is to open ourselves up to the things that we fear most—like love.Maybe the whole point of my life was to simply find you, even if it wasn’t meant to be forever.And that thought alone is enough to get me through each night of loneliness.

~ Brittainy C. Cherry

The place was a truck stop town. Large 18 wheelers lined the sidewalks and cafes. Giant diesel motors roaring their exhaust into the cloudy night skies. Wearied looking truckers climbed into the cabs like captains of gigantic steel ships. She could not imagine anyone trying to maneuver such large metallic beasts all over the roads of the nation. While the idea of being behind the wheel with nothing but the comfort of the radio, and the isolation were appealing. The thought of fighting all the congested traffic in smog infested industrial waters of choking vapors killed any pleasant dreams of the occupation.

~ Jaime Allison Parker

Most of her friends owned laptops and seemed to spend more time with their phones than anything else. Steffy kept her latest playlists and apps updated frequently. She was a member of what Peter called, The Gadget Generation. She could not imagine what it must have been like before such a time. The unbearable isolation that must have been present. How did people deal with it? When she asked a few older people in the town, they simply said she had too much spare time on her hands. It appeared thinking was a crime in the world she lived

~ Jaime Allison Parker

Thinking, existentially speaking, is a solitary but not a lonely business; solitude is that human situation in which I keep myself company. Loneliness comes about when I am alone without being able to split up into the two-in-one, without being able to keep myself company.

~ Hannah Arendt

i could go if i wantedshare the floorboards with someonein a place less haunted but i like it hereand i’m happy to stay in this mess on my ownin this home i have built for myself in my bones

~ Savannah Brown

I felt lonely, and in full possession of my loneliness. It was the first time I had owned anything of value.

~ Ben Greenman

He lived on, miserable and misunderstood, as before, and increasingly lonely. One cannot write those words too often: Maurice’s loneliness: it increased.

~ E.m. Forster

Yes it’s me, I myself, what I turned out to be, (…) I’m the one here in myself, it’s me. (…) Whatever I was, whatever I wasn’t—it’s all in what I am. Whatever I wanted, whatever I didn’t want—all of this has shaped me. Whatever I loved, or stopped loving—in me it’s the same nostalgia (Álvaro de Campos)

~ Fernando Pessoa

I walk across the park to her flat. It is over-heated and there is a great deal of pink. This used not to unnerve me. Now when I step into the bathroom I recoil.Pink bath, pink basin, pink toilet, pink bidet, pink tiles, pink wallpaper, pink rug. Brushes, soap, tooth brush, silk flowers, toilet paper: all pink. Even the little foot-operated waste-bin is pale pink. I know this little waste-bin well. Every time I sleep here I wonder what I am doing with my time and hers. She is sixteen years younger than I am. She is not the woman with whom I want to share my life. But, having begun, what we have continues. She wants it to, and I go along with it, through lust and loneliness, I suppose; and laziness, and lack of focus.

~ Vikram Seth

I look and I look...I must have come to the wrong planet.It's so strange here.

~ Sigbjørn Obstfelder

Connor was....getting farther and farther ahead of me. I was frozen. And sometimes I feel like I haven't quite thawed.

~ Debra Dockter

No one is ever alone and silence does not equate defeat.

~ Joan Ambu

Fighting the good fight is not as easy when you’re fighting alone.

~ Joan Ambu

When one is just sad one should just be alone.

~ Will Advise

It is good to be alone, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult should be one more reason to do it.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

I’m . . . accustomed to being alone. There are times when alone is the best place to be. I enjoy my own company.

~ Sara Naveed

I crave stillness,And yet I fear the momentStillness turns into boredom,And the moment boredomTurns into loneliness.

~ Chris Mc Geown

There must be different kinds of loneliness, or at least different degrees of loneliness, but the most terrifying loneliness is not experienced by everyone and can be understood by only a few. I compare the panic in this kind of loneliness to the dog we see running frantically down the road pursuing the family car. He is not really being left behind, for the family knows it is to return, but for that moment in his limited understanding, he is being left alone forever, and he has to run and run to survive. It is no wonder that we make terrible choices in our lives to avoid loneliness.

~ Charles M. Schulz

I am a lonely figure when I run the roads. People wonder how far I have come, how far I have to go. They see me alone and friendless on a journey that has no visible beginning or end. I appear isolated and vulnerable, a homeless creature. It is all they can do to keep from stopping the car and asking if they can take me wherever I'm going.I know this because I feel it myself. When I see the runner I have much the same thoughts. No matter how often I run the roads myself, I am struck by how solitary my fellow runner appears. The sight of a runner at dusk or in inclement weather makes me glad to be safe and warm in my car and headed for home. And at those times, I wonder how I can go out there myself, how I can leave the comfort and warmth and that feeling of intimacy and belonging, to do this distracted thing.But when finally I am there, I realise it is not comfort and warmth I am leaving, not intimacy and belonging I am giving up, but the loneliness that pursues me this day and every day. I know that the real loneliness, the real isolation, the real vulnerability, begins long before I put on my running shoes.

~ George Sheehan

An overcrowded world is the ideal place in which to be lonely.

~ Brian W. Aldiss