Loneliness Quotes

I feel like I could disappear because I'm not real to other people.

~ Miranda Emmerson

Each day was very much like any other day, because they were alone so much that nothing ever disturbed them.

~ Carson Mccullers

Something happens when you are alone most of the time, when there are no distractions. Your mind grows more powerful--muscular, even. It takes over and starts to carry you.

~ Amanda Lindhout

A box sits empty,wanting to hold and protect.Hollow tears it cries.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Outwardly I was all confidence and openness, inwardly I was spiteful and lonely and unaware of how to relate to the world. I wanted so much to be good but only knew how to appear that way by being bad.

~ M.e. Thomas

Most of us are so enthralled with the scary tigers in our minds--our stories of loneliness, rejection, grief--that we don't realize they are in the past. They can't hurt us anymore.

~ Geneen Roth

She sits there and feels the loneliness and the lack of him

~ Maggie O'farrell

Embracing human frailty, fallibility, and heartbreaking aloneness is crucial for any person seeking to attain self-actualization and self-realization.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man's untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitude--utter solitude without a policeman--by the way of silence--utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion? These little things make all the great difference. When they are gone you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness

~ Joseph Conrad

Give me wildflowers instead of your heart, for I’d rather have them wither than the latter.

~ Dandelionlady96

Loneliness was a full-body sensation, an anti-exhilaration, from his core outward.

~ Charlie Jane Anders

Loneliness is a strange sort of thing.It creeps up on you, quiet and still, sits by your side in the dark, strokes your hair as you sleep. It wraps itself around your bones,squeezing so tight you almost can’t breathe. It leaves lies in your heart, lies next to you at night, leaches the light out from every corner.It’s a constant companion, clasping your hand only to yank you down when you’re struggling to stand up.You wake up in the morning and wonder who you are. You fail to fall asleep at night and tremble in your skin.

~ Tahereh Mafi

I may be too young to be lonely, but I am too lonely to be young.

~ Caroline Yawn

And he looked at me then, and with real kindness on his face, and I see now that he recognized what I did not: that in spite of my plenitude, I was lonely. Lonely was the first flavor I had tasted in my life, and it was always there, hidden inside the crevices of my mouth, reminding me.

~ Elizabeth Strout

...very lonely and, often, very unhappy, with the poignant misery that comes to lonely people who long to be social and cannot, somehow, step naturally and unselfconsciously into some friendly group

~ Shirley Jackson

Modern life seems set up so that we can avoid loneliness at all costs, but maybe it's worthwhile to face it occasionally. The further we push aloneness away, the less we are able to cope with it, and the more terrifying it gets. Some philosophers believe that loneliness is the only true feeling there is.

~ Michael Finkel

Although one curious thing that might sooner or later cross the woman's mind would be that she had paradoxically been practically as alone before all of this had happened as she was now, incidentally. Well, this being an autobiographical novel I can categorically verify that such a thing would sooner or later cross her mind, in fact. One manner of being alone simply being different from another manner of being alone, being all that she would finally decide that this came down to, as well. Which is to say that even when one's telephone still does function one can be as alone as when it does not.

~ David Markson

The walls of hell are coated with arrogance, and the floor is covered with pride.

~ T.a. Cline

No one has ever properly understood me, I have never fully understood anyone; and no one understands anyone else

~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

A teacher I once had told me that the older you get, the lonelier you become and the deeper the love you need. Loneliness creates an appetite for deeper love, and the entire predicament deepens. And as a result of suffering, your capacity to love deeply increases.

~ Leonard Cohen

An echo from the past when, innocentWe looked upon the present with delightAnd doubted not the future would be kinderAnd never knew the loneliness of night.

~ Noël Coward

And though, truly, she sometimes felt like something inside her had disappeared, it seemed that must be a natural part of growing up. Standing out too much made one feel too alone to do it forever.

~ Jodi Lynn Anderson

People are so lonely, they spend their birthdays on the Internet, thanking people for wishing them a happy birthday, people who only know it’s their birthday because Facebook told them.

~ Caroline Kepnes

What she did learn from all the books was something else, something she hadn't really been expecting, which was that the story of loneliness is much longer than the story of life. In the sense of what most people mean by living, she said. Without children or partner, without meaningful family or a home, a day can last an eternity: a life without those things is a life without a story, a life in which there is nothing - no narrative dramas - to alleviate the cruelly meticulous passing of time.

~ Rachel Cusk

Loneliness is better than bad company.

~ Maryum Ahsam

Of course, the spectacle of two people's happiness is always something of a magnet for the unclaimed.

~ Anita Brookner

Zel so often put himself outside of where he wanted to be and then looked in dumbly through the window of his longing, hurt and beaten and knowing that he had hurt and beaten himself but still he did it, over and over.

~ Jeanette Winterson

A number of years ago I had some experience with being alone. For two succeeding years I was alone each winter for eight months at a stretch in the Sierra Nevada mountains on Lake Tahoe. I was the caretaker on a summer estate during the winter months when it was snowed in. And I made some observations then. As time went on I found that my reactions thickened. Ordinarily I am a whistler. I stopped whistling. I stopped conversing with my dogs, and I believe that the subtleties of feeling began to disappear until finally I was on a pleasure-pain basis. Then it occurred to me that the delicate shades of feeling, of reaction, are the result of communication, and without such communication they tend to disappear. A man with nothing to say has no words. Can its reverse be true- a man who has no one to say anything to has no words as he has no need for words? ... Only through imitation do we develop toward originality.

~ John Steinbeck

It was the first time she had ever felt the kind of loneliness that couldn't be cured with just any available company.

~ Lisa Kleypas

The SolitaryAs one who has sailed across an unknown sea,among this rooted folk I am alone;the full days on their tables are their own,to me the distant is reality.A new world reaches to my very eyes,a place perhaps unpeopled as the moon;their slightest feelings they must analyze,and all their words have got the common tune.The things I brought with me from far away,compared with theirs, look strangely not the same:in their great country they were living things,but here they hold their breath, as if for shame.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

I’m perfectly alone right now, my mind is on overdrive, the gears are grinding in whirring dissonance – and it’s just how I like it.

~ Trevor J. Freeman

God doesn't promise us an easy life. But He does promise to love us and never leave us, no matter what happens.

~ J.e.b. Spredemann

Because sometimes it’s being in a crowd that makes you feel lonelier than when you’re alone.

~ Winna Efendi

Sometimes while waiting for God's promises to come to pass, we messed up things and go into so many troubles, but God’s mercy has never failed in bringing us out of them all.

~ Bamigboye Olurotimi

LonelinessIt's Hell for us to draw the fettersOf life in alienation, stiff.All people prefer to share gladness,And nobody - to share grief.As a king of air, I'm lone here,The pain lives in my heart, so grim,And I can see that, to the fearOf fate, years pass me by like dreams;And comes again with, touched by gold,The same dream, gloomy one and old.I see a coffin, black and sole,It waits: why to detain the world?There will be not a sad reflection,There will be (I am betting on)Much more gaily celebrationWhen I am dead, than - born.

~ Mikhail Lermontov

If you’re trying to tell me you’re not used to mattering to someone, I might just bleed out right here on the floor.

~ Kelly Moran

The loneliness comes to me in certain hours everyday, like a visitor. Like a friend you never expected, a friend you never really want to be with, but he always visit you and love you somehow

~ Xiaolu Guo

I’m not used to people sticking around when things go bad,” she said, by way of explanation.

~ Alexander Freed

Do we really need each other, or are we just covering up each other's loneliness?

~ Vatsal Surti

Maybe my dissertation really had been as brilliant as he claimed, the truth was I remember almost nothing about it; the intellectual leaps I made when I was young were a distant memory to me, and now I was surrounded by a kind of aura, when really my only goal in life was to do a little reading and get in bed at four in the afternoon with a carton of cigarettes and a bottle; and yet, at the same time, I had to admit, I was going to die if I kept that up – I was going to die fast, unhappy and alone. And did I really want to die fast, unhappy and alone? In the end, only kind of.

~ Michel Houellebecq