Loneliness Quotes

This is what's so terrifying about being lonely: the instinctive sense that it is literally repulsive, inhibiting contact at just the moment contact is most required.

~ Olivia Laing

It is lonely never to have been loved, only devoured.

~ Rosemary Sutcliff

I knew how to be a friend, a lover, a partner. I knew how to make someone feel cherished and seen and listened to -- everything I had myself always so desperately wanted and been afraid I might never have because I was so used to being overlooked.

~ Alexis Hall

Collapse, spread, merging, union: these things sound like the opposite of loneliness, and yet intimacy requires a solid sense of self to be successful and satisfying.

~ Olivia Laing

The tender breeze felt my loneliness. It brought me your fragrance.

~ Avijeet Das

Many persons seek community because they are afraid of loneliness...those who take refuge in community while fleeing from themselves are misuing it to indulge in empty talk and distraction, no matter how spiritual this idle talk and distraction may appear...it is precisely such misuse of community that creates deadly isolation of human beings.

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

To be truly able to greet life with lucidity and tinkling laughter, one must have had bravely experienced that ones heart feels as if it´s thousand years old with all the twinges of grief, nocturnal distress and loneliness and understood that not one expression of human sorrow is really alien. It can serve as a springboard for a more life-sensitive state of mind that paints even seemingly deadly boring details into gratifying wonders (it is not equal to a nauseating expression such as seeing the good in everything). I believe and do know that this sort of state can bring one a little closer to bearing the great mosaic that life is and maybe, rather than leaving us feeling opressed, helps us to grow a bit lighter.

~ Maria Urbel

She had said that she preferred to be alone for so many years that it was now one of those things that equally well might or might not be true.

~ Joyce Ballou Gregorian

She’d sworn she wouldn’t end up like her little brother, but loneliness didn’t arrive with flashing bulbs and a warning label. The descent was as simple and complex as a faked smile, white lies about being “okay,” and the nod and acceptance as her own peers didn’t delve deeper, shutting the coffin lid for her.

~ Katherine Mcintyre

It is in the company of others that one can be really lonely, for then one's personality is forced openly to try to express what it's separate individuality is.

~ Nanamoli Thera

I am scared of this emptiness, pull me out of my body

~ Hilal Hamdaan

Sometimes the loneliness had been almost too much, he thought, and always at those times he had found comfort in the woods, where he said nothing. He wondered if the others were still gloomy; no one spoke of it any longer. He smiled as he thought of how the women had wet and screamed and straddle behind him, I want to run to catch up once more.

~ Kate Wilhelm

There are kinds of solitude that provide a respite from loneliness, a holiday if not a cure.

~ Olivia Laing

And here I was, left with only myself to deal with. It was entirely up to me.

~ James Baldwin

At that time I was only twenty-four years old. My life then was already gloomy, disorderly, and solitary to the point of savagery.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

There’s nothing lonelier than a hand on glass. Maybe because it’s so rarely reciprocated.

~ Julie Buxbaum

It was strange learning the contours of another’s loneliness. You could never know it all at once; like stepping inside a dark cave, you felt along the walls, bumped into jagged edges.

~ Brit Bennett

I'm always losing things.

~ Kathleen Glasgow

Everyone here seems to know exactly what they need, but I leave without a thing.

~ Kathleen Glasgow

Loneliness is personal, and it is also political. Loneliness is collective; it is a city. As to how to inhabit it, there are no rules and nor is there any need to feel shame, only to remember that the pursuit of individual happiness does not trump or excuse our obligations to each another. We are in this together, this accumulation of scars, this world of objects, this physical and temporary heaven that so often takes on the countenance of hell. What matters is kindness; what matters is solidarity. What matters is staying alert, staying open, because if we know anything from what has gone before us, it is that the time for feeling will not last.

~ Olivia Laing

Why do you put yourself in unsafe places? Because something in you feels fundamentally devoid of worth.

~ Olivia Laing

It was books that made me feel that perhaps I wasn't completely alone.

~ Cassandra Clare

To be so lonelyyou told yourself you liked to be this way& almost believed it was true.

~ Natalie Wee

Though he was not as dastardly as Esmé or Count Olaf or the hook-handed man, Jerome was still an ersatz guardian, because a real guardian is supposed to provide a home, with a place to sleep and something to wear, and all Jerome had given them in the end was Good luck. Jerome reached the end of the block and turned left, and the Baudelaires were once again alone in the world.

~ Lemony Snicket

She had collected experiences, I realized, as much as she had collected all these things. As we moved her out of her own life, she seemed lonelier that I hope I'll ever be.

~ Jenny Moore

What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast.

~ Olivia Laing

The study showed that chronic loneliness impacts out bodies as negatively as smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. Not the same way, of course, just the life risk part. And there's more bad news. The article went on to say that lonely people had worse reactions to flu shots that non-lonelies (I think I just made up that word; my computer put a red squiggly line under it) and that loneliness depresses the immune system. On other words, if you're lonely, not even your body wants to be around you, so it tries to off itself.

~ Richard Paul Evans

My loneliness is a choice, not a situation.

~ Kavipriya Moorthy

My loneliness was an important part of my own little universe, not some pathological disease that needs to be gotten [sic] rid of.

~ Banana Yoshimoto

I'm alone and nobody is in the mirror

~ Jorge Luis Borges

She's one in a million. And that's why she's lonely.

~ Joyce Rachelle

Loneliness kills. It becomes more conspicuous in the crowd.

~ Girdhar Joshi

I know what you might think; that being alone is a sign of loneliness. But the way I see it, sometimes being alone serves as a period of insight as to who you really are. Think about it.

~ Lauren Lola

We are not lonely, because we chose to be alone.We are not lost, because we chose to disappear.

~ Steven Wilson

some people are lonely for all the right reasons.

~ Meg Rosoff

You give the shirt off your back, no questions asked, and you stand alone at the cavernous mouth of your suburban closet—your entire life spent wonderingwhere your clothes went.

~ Kris Kidd

And whatever troubled him and showed in his face might have been the same old trouble - the problem of occupying space in the world and having a name people could call you by, being somebody they thought they could know.

~ Alice Munro

So much of the theatrical can leave you with a yearning for the real. The real is suddenly and starkly there right at the city’s edge and extends for thousands of square miles of desert and mountain and canyon with which human beings can do almost nothing profitable other than to leave it be and just look at it.

~ Timothy O'grady

There are times when you are home to yourself and you long for company.

~ Srividya Srinivasan

I gave them everything I had, and I guess it feelsalright.I gave them my body,and they use it every night.

~ Kris Kidd