Loneliness Quotes

You have to face the very thing you fear.--tdf ~ Tonya D. Floyd

Remember that although the distinction can be difficult to draw, loneliness and solitude are different. ~ Gretchen Rubin

The mistake every lonely person makes is to confuse attention with love. ~ Marty Rubin

My books are based on the "what if" principle. "What if you became invisible?" or "What if you did change into your mother for one day?" I then take it from there. Each book takes several months in the long process of writing, rewriting, writing, rewriting, and each has its own set of problems. The one thing I dislike about the writing process is the sometimes-loneliness of it all. Readers only get to see the glamour part of a bound book, not some of the agonizing moments one has while constructing it. ~ Mary Rodgers

On her own, Grace could be effervescent, illuminating the entire room with her intelligence and wit. Around others she seemed to lose her luster. ~ Krystal Sutherland

So therefore I dedicate myself, to my art, my sleep, my dreams, my labors, my suffrances, my loneliness, my unique madness, my endless absorption and hunger because I cannot dedicate myself to any fellow being. ~ Jack Kerouac

However, those who are committed to INFPs know that their mates love to eradicate their frequent bouts of loneliness by spending lots of time connecting emotionally and physically, whether it's snuggling on the couch and watching a movie or just reading side-by-side in bed. ~ Diana Jackson

She had always maintained a cynical facade, using it as a defence against embarrassment, fear, loneliness ... but at the moment she felt unusually vulnerable. ~ Lisa Kleypas

Loneliness is the price we have to pay for being born in this modern world, so full of freedom, independence and our own egotistical selves. ~ Will Schwalbe

A thousand recollected lives were passing through her, a thousand stories - of love and work, of parents and children, of duty and joy and grief. Beds slept in and meals eaten, and the bliss and pain of the body, and a view of summer leaves from a window on a morning it had rained; the nights of loneliness and the nights of love, the soul in it's body keeping always longing to be known. ~ Justin Cronin

At times, when loneliness seems to crush all beauty, the only way to resist is to remain open. ~ Paulo Coelho

May came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone. ~ E. E. Cummings

The strength of a love is always misjudged if we evaluate it by its immediate cause and not the stress that went before it, the dark and hollow space full of disappointment and loneliness that precedes all the great events in the heart's history. ~ Stefan Zweig

I have a life that's just been a well of loneliness. ~ Jessica Lange

I knew this for a fact. Little by little, the ache to see him, to hear him would disappear. Little by little I'd forget how his arms felt, how his fingers felt, how his lips felt..the sound of his voice, the intensity of his gaze, all of it. Trace by trace it would slip from my mind, recede into foggy memory. The painful haze that dulled my present would melt into the past. Maybe not all the way, maybe there would be a few scars. Maybe I'd be different, but I'd be me again. Little by little. ~ Jennifer DeLucy

No specter assails us in more varied disguises than loneliness, and one of its most impenetrable masks is called love. ~ Arthur Schnitzler

All I know is that loneliness is a slow and painful death.' Marion paused. ~ Arnaldur Indridason

So now it's this thing I do.
I go away, ever so often, by myself, for myself,
to new places with foreign streets I haven't walked yet,
and there I wander, up and down, watching people going places I don't know
and it always hits me that they're never alone,
always with someone,
and I wonder how they would spend a day all on their own in a foreign city with nothing to do and no one to see,
and I wonder if they'd be happy.
Just simply being free,
like I am trying to be.
Happy.
Just simply being me. ~ Charlotte Eriksson

All the things that girls feel they are not when they fear that if they become, if they are, they will no longer be loved by the sisters whose hearts they have not meant to break. And besides, if the sisters are gone and only the beloved remains with his dense curls and his lips, how safe are you then? You have to have him or you will die if the sisters are gone with their listening ears and their feet to rub and their bodies to dress and their shared loneliness. ~ Francesca Lia Block

Try listening to yourself sometime, alone in a transient room in a strange town. The worst is when you draw a blank, and the ash-blonde ghosts of the past carry on long twittering long-distance calls with your inner ear, and there's no way to hang up. ~ Ross Macdonald

Anger, resentment, jealousy, desire for revenge, lust, greed, antagonisms, and rivalries are the obvious signs that I have left home. And that happens quite easily. When I pay careful attention to what goes on in my mind from moment to moment, I come to the disconcerting discovery that there are very few moments during the day when I am really free from these dark emotions, passions and feelings.

Constantly falling back into an old trap, before I am even fully aware of it, I find myself wondering why someone hurt me, rejected me, or didn't pay attention to me. Without realizing it, I find myself brooding about someone else's success, my own loneliness, and the way the world abuses me. Despite my conscious intentions, I often catch myself daydreaming about becoming rich, powerful, and very famous. All of these mental games reveal to me the fragility of my faith that I am the Beloved One on whom God's favor rests. I am so afraid of being disliked, blamed, put aside, passed over, ignored, persecuted, and killed, that I am constantly developing strategies to defend myself and thereby assure myself of the love I think I need and deserve. And in so doing I move far away from my father's home and choose to dwell in a "distant country. ~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

I couldn't leave there without carrying some of her sadness and loneliness with me like a cloak. There was a smell that I've come to think of as life rot. Where a life has spoiled, gone bad through lack of use. ~ Lisa Unger

A person might be living with numerous people; but, if he doesn't find a companion who thinks similarly as he thinks, he is still alone ~ Rajasaraswathii

There is always a man eager to explain my mental illness to me. They all do it so confidently, motioning to their Hemingway and Bukowski bookshelf as they compare my depression to their late-night loneliness. There is always someone that rejected them that they equate their sadness to and a bottle of gin (or a song playing, or a movie) close by that they refer to as their cure. Somehow, every soft confession of my Crazy that I hand to them turns into them pulling out pieces of themselves to prove how it really is in my head.

So many dudes I've dated have faces like doctors ready to institutionalize
and love my crazy (but only on Friday nights.)

They tell their friends about my impulsive decision making and how I "get them" more than anyone they've ever met but leave out my staring off in silence for hours and the self-inflicted bruises on my cheeks.

None of them want to acknowledge a crazy they can't cure.

They want a crazy that fits well into a trope and gives them a chance to play Hero. And they always love a Crazy that provides them material to write about.

Truth is they love me best as a cigarette cloud of impossibility, with my lipstick applied perfectly and my Crazy only being pulled out when their life needs a little spice.

They don't want me dirty, having not left my bed for days. Not diseased. Not real.

So they invite me over when they're going through writer's block but don't answer m ~ Lora Mathis

All of us experience, to a greater or lesser extent, a loneliness that results from not having enough anchors, enough absolutes, and enough permanent roots to make us feel secure and stable in a world characterized by transience. ~ Ronald Rolheiser

I became hypnotized by my own loneliness, unwilling to stop until my eyes wouldn't stay open anymore, watching the white line of the highway as though it was the last thing that connected me to the earth. ~ Paul Auster

Solitude that throws the honest rays of perfect euphoria;
Solitude that makes me breathe in the real me;
Solitude I call it - my abode, my self made haven;
Solitude I call it - the sanguine face of Loneliness. ~ Debatrayee Banerjee

Longing was a feeling that was hard to live with. It didn't ask permission. It didn't pay attention to time or place. It was overwhelming and demanding, grasping and selfish. It clouded thoughts or made them too bright, too sharp. Longing demanded unconditional surrender. Lumikki tried to fight it and failed. She didn't want to long and yet she longed. She didn't want to remember, and yet her dreams and her body remembered, reminding her constantly.
The longing was physical. It was dizziness. It was a seizing in her belly. It was the need to wrap her arms around herself alone in bed when there was no one else to do it for her. She felt the longing in her fingertips that yearned to stroke, to touch, to caress. The longing made her fingers restless, fiddling with the zipper of her jacket, the strings in her hoodie, fidgeting with whatever little thing happened to her hand. The longing made her teeth bite into her lower lip, leaving it chipped and almost bleeding. She knew she was being stupid. She knew her longing was pointless. ~ Salla Simukka

They're sharing a drink called loneliness, but at least its better than drinking alone. ~ Billy Joel

Loneliness, depression, and suicide are in fact side effects rising out of the misinterpretation of beliefs – beliefs that are created by the places we are in, the people we are surrounded by, and ourselves. Misunderstanding stops us from seeing further, causing emptiness, and making life seem uninteresting, limited – and consequently, boring. ~ Jellis Vaes

Opposite to where she sat the water was a boggy brown, but not too far along it was a dark violet colour, always changing, the way the sweep of the current changed, but as she saw it, her own life did not change at all - the same routine, the same longing and the same loneliness. ~ Edna O'Brien

It's bad to be unable to stand solitude. ~ Leo Tolstoy

There are times when you long for answers and you become painfully aware that you are surrounded by people who may not even comprehend your questions ~ Srividya Srinivasan

Pocket Poem
If this comes creased and creased again and soiled
as if I'd opened it a thousand times
to see if what I'd written here was right,
it's all because I looked too long for you
to put in your pocket. Midnight says
the little gifts of loneliness come wrapped
by nervous fingers. What I wanted this
to say was that I want to be so close
that when you find it, it is warm from me. ~ Ted Kooser

I don't think there's a lonelier feeling than being with someone who has stopped caring. ~ Alexis Harrington

There were not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible to them. ~ Jack London

There had never been any more between us than
chance had brought. But perhaps that makes a greater indebtedness
and binds closer than much else ~ Erich Maria Remarque

One aged man - one man - can't fill a house. ~ Robert Frost

I am lonesome so regular it's like a job I gotta report to every day. ~ Alice Childress

I happen to believe that America is dying of loneliness, that we, as a people, have bought into the false dream of convenience, and turned away from a deep engagement with our internal lives - those fountains of inconvenient feeling - and toward the frantic enticements of what our friends in the Greed Business call the Free Market. We're hurtling through time and space and information faster and faster, seeking that network connection. But at the same time we're falling away from our families and our neighbors and ourselves. We ego-surf and update our status and brush up on which celebrities are ruining themselves, and how. But the cure won't stick. ~ Cheryl Strayed

It would be merciful for people not to come calling and disturb the loneliness of the mountains to which I have returned from the sorrows of the world. ~ Muso Soseki

I preach that odd defiant melancholy that sees the dreadful loneliness of the human soul and the pitiful disaster of human life as ever redeemable and redeemed by compassion, friendship and love. ~ John Derbyshire

The Last Toast

I drink to our demolished hose,
to all this wickedness,
to you, our loneliness together,
I raise my glass -

And to the dead-cold eyes,
the lie that has betrayed us,
the coarse, brutal world, the fact
that God has not saved us.

1934 ~ Anna Akhmatova

When traveling is made too easy and comfortable, its spiritual meaning is lost. This may be called sentimentalism, but a certain sense of loneliness engendered by traveling leads one to reflect upon the meaning of life, for life is after all a travelling from one unknown to another unknown. ~ D.T. Suzuki

Glitch or not, we seem to need a power greater than ourselves. We seem to need enormous shadows of divinity stalking us. We know we are weak. Alcoholics are, above all, lonely, fearful pepole who make a fetish of loneliness, who think they
we
are too good to be part of the human race. And we have to be humbled to remember who we are
stumbling human beings, more ape than angel. ~ Erica Jong

I don't know what the hell I'm workin' for. Sometimes I sit in my apartment–all alone. And I think of the rent I'm paying. And it's crazy. But then, it's what I always wanted. My own apartment, a car, and plenty of women. And still, goddammit, I'm lonely. ~ Arthur Miller

There never was a woman so ill-suited to public life as I am. I have had to whip myself, as it were, into society, and the loneliness of it all has been terrific. ~ Pearl Mary Teresa Craigie

He was free and unencumbered. Which is to say alone and unemployed. ~ Tim Winton

You should view each new travel frustration - sickness, fear, loneliness, boredom, conflict - as just another curious facet in the vagabonding adventure. ~ Rolf Potts

Given enough time, you could convince yourself that loneliness was something better, that it was solitude, the ideal condition for reflection, even a kind of freedom.
Once you were thus convinced, you were foolish to open the door and let anyone in, not all the way in. You risked the hard-won equilibrium, that tranquility that you called peace ~ Dean Koontz

I can't take the anger, the loneliness, the pain any longer. I sink to my knees. Everything wrong with my life swells in a rush of emotion. ~ Holly S. Roberts

This bed yawns
beneath the weight
of our absent selves. ~ Maya Angelou

I was lonely, and a lonely heart has hungers that can overpower both common sense and dignity. ~ Robin Hobb

Now
she reached down that far, she submerged her filthy self, full of choked cries, of loneliness and poison, until she felt it rising up. It was being pulled out, saved from herself
and she was rising along with it, slowly: who she was now, what she had lost in the past year, and what was growing, slowly, inside her, in spite of everything. ~ David Grossman

We could build entire cities out of the stories of loneliness. ~ Hannah Brencher

Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort. Then he feels his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness. ~ Blaise Pascal

I am jealous of anyone who can make other people care so much. ~ David Levithan

The economic dependence of woman and her apparently indestructible illusion that marriage will release her from loneliness and work and worry are potent factors in immunizing her from common sense in dealing with men at work. ~ Mary Barnett Gilson

I have my throne, I have my sword, I have an empire. But I have . . . no-one. ~ Steven Erikson

I love you, Cat," he whispered. "I don't know what I did to deserve you, but I hope you know that I'd do it all over again to be with you. Thousands of years of loneliness was worth every second you've been in my life. ~ Larissa Ione

The chief characteristics of my childhood were an aching loneliness and the daily struggle to avoid a bleakness of spirit that unrelieved loneliness can foment. ~ Dean Koontz

Can I Tinder swipe for cat cuddles? ~ Shannon Mullen

I took one of my hands in the other, tried to imagine what it would feel like if it was another person's hand holding mine. There have been times where I felt that I might die of loneliness. ~ Gail Honeyman

The Sun is never alone as the light remains with him always. Even when he goes down sinking...sinking, the light drowns with him ~ Munia Khan

Why be crying, fearful, lonely, when you have the whole universe? Be still, listen to your heart, breathe, and know you need nothing. ~ Jay Woodman

I had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness and time - those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything. ~ Lawrence Durrell

Usually, we think that "good" loneliness is what we call "solitude," the choice of some alone-time. But I want to press on with the negative dimension, to look at ways in which a fundamental sense of being separated from others shapes who we are and why. ~ Thomas L. Dumm

Everyone contemplates suicide at some point, even if it's just for a minute. And one thing is usually the root cause. Loneliness. ~ Penelope Douglas

The association between failure, loneliness, and solitude is so strong in our culture that people often find it difficult to believe that there are some who like being by themselves. ~ Suzanne Gordon

Loneliness and solitude are two different things. When you are lonely, it is easy to delude yourself into believing that you are on the right path. Solitude is better for us, as it means being alone without feeling lonely. But eventually it is best to find a person, the person who will be your mirror. Remember, only in another person's heart can you truly see yourself and the presence of God within you ~ Elif Shafak

To save myself, I would try to summon up a vision of Mattie, but I could not see her. I could not imagine her. Some nights in the midst of this loneliness I swung among the scattered stars at the end of the thin thread of faith alone.
And then I would wake up and be in awe to see the daylight coming and my old familiar workaday life taking shape again in the dear world. Coherence and clarity returned. I could imagine myself again. I could imagine Mattie Chatham. I could imagine Port William. ~ Wendell Berry

I am alone
and my heart
is my own.

Loneliness.
Solitude.
The first is a curse,
the second a blessing.
I would rather be a hermit
than live with a stranger
who would make me feel
even more lonely
than when I am
truly
alone. ~ Margarita Engle

...the freedom produced by love was the highest condition available in the given order of things, and given that, how strange it was that such love seemed to be characteristic of lonely people who were condemned to live in perpetual isolation, that love was one of the aspects of loneliness most difficult to resolve, and therefore all those millions on millions of individual loves and individual rebellions could never add up to a single love or rebellion, and that because all those millions upon millions of individual experiences testified to the unbearable fact of the world's ideological opposition to this love and rebellion, the world could never transcend its own first great act of rebellion.. ~ Laszlo Krasznahorkai

This, however, is OKCupid, the vast, weird pink-and-blue toned jungle of the id masquerading as a dating site, where rare birds of modern romance flutter amongst the night-terrors of human loneliness and despair and the suspicious skin irritants of late-night hook-uppery. ~ Laurie Penny

But in spite of my great desire for intimacy, I've always been a loner. Perhaps when the longing for connection is as strong as it is in me, when the desire is for something so deep and true, one knows better than to try. One sees that this is not the place for that. ~ Elizabeth Berg

I am lonely here sometimes. I'm like the gate, swinging in the breeze when I long for someone to just secure the latch and stop me from flailing about ~ Sarah Jio

If a man cannot understand the beauty of life, it is probably because life never understood the beauty in him. ~ Criss Jami

I have a feeling of complete balance. The sea, the house, the loneliness, the light. Everything is clearer. Much more precise. I have the feeling that I am living on a limit, and I'm crossing that limit sometimes. ~ Ingmar Bergman

There is sadness and then there is happiness. Happiness does not normally make its prescence felt. You have to go deep and feel the true happiness inside your own heart. Happiness can be our solitude, our loneliness, or a few good friends. You must find your happiness and protect your happiness! ~ Avijeet Das

A writer is essentially a man who does not resign himself to loneliness. ~ Francois Mauriac

No one has touched me in 264 days. Sometimes I think the loneliness inside of me is going to explode through my skin and sometimes I'm not sure if crying or screaming or laughing through the hysteria will solve anything at all. Sometimes I'm so desperate to touch to be touched to feel that I'm almost certain I'm going to fall off a cliff in an alternate universe where no one will ever be able to find me. It doesn't seem impossible. I've been screaming for years and no one has ever heard me. "Aren't you hungry?" His voice is lower now, a little worried now. I've been starving for 264 days. "No." The word is little more than a broken breath as it escapes my lips ~ Tahereh Mafi

I have often said that loneliness is the predominant attitude in our culture. A person can be lonely in the midst of a party; he can be lonely in a crowd. Loneliness may be experienced by the rich and famous or the poor and unknown. ~ Billy Graham

One of the sicknesses of the twentieth century? I'll tell you the worst one. People can't stand to be alone. Can't tolerate it! So they go to the movies, get drive-in hamburgers, put their home telephone numbers in the crapsheets and say 'Please call me up!' It's sick. People hate their own company --- they cry when they see themselves in mirrors. It scares them, the way their faces look. Maybe that's a clue to the whole thing... ~ Paul Theroux

...what living things provide. In place of boredom, they offer spontaneity. In place of loneliness, they offer companionship. In place of helplessness, they offer a chance to take care of another being. ~ Atul Gawande

LIFE says Loneliness Is Friendly Enemy ~ Shivangi Lavaniya

Love is not blind but if the heart has to choose between pain and loneliness, it will choose pain every time. ~ J. Autherine

Loneliness is a very special place, Silently silently you touch my face ~ Dennis Wilson

Je fais mon lit et mon ménage; I seek my dinner in a restaurant; my supper takes care, of itself; I pass days laborious and loveless; nights long and lonely; I am ferocious, and bearded and monkish; and nothing now living in this world loves me, except some old hearts worn like my own, and some few beings, impoverished, suffering, poor in purse and in spirit, whom the kingdoms of this world own not, but to whom a will and testament not to be disputed has bequeathed the kingdom of heaven. ~ Charlotte Bronte

Silences of my days
Silences of my wanderings
Silences of my nights
Silences of my loneliness

Silences of my work
Silences of my insanity
Silences of my dreams
Silences of my craziness


Silences of my passions
Silences of my reading
Silences of my obsessions
Silences of my writing


Silences of my thoughts
Silences of my pondering
Silences of my emotions
Silences of my aching

Silences of my stares
Silences of my pining
Silences of my feelings
Silences of my longing

Silences where I truly live
My Silences
Leave me to my silences... ~ Avijeet Das

In the Grand Canyon, Arizona has a natural wonder which is in kind absolutely unparalleled throughout the rest of the world. I want to ask you to keep this great wonder of nature as it now is. I hope you will not have a building of any kind, not a summer cottage, a hotel or anything else, to mar the wonderful grandeur, the sublimity, the great loneliness and beauty of the canyon. Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

Real loneliness was a smeary red: the color of the taillights of the car ahead of you reflected on wet hot-top in a driving rain. ~ Stephen King

Humans were not meant for isolation. WE were not meant for loneliness. ~ S. Jae-Jones

You cant see the hurt in my eyes. I cover it up too good. You cant see the loneliness in my eyes. I cover it up too good. You cant see the depression in my eyes. I cover it up too good. You cant see my past in my eyes. No one has seen my whole past. Not even me. One thing I cant cover up, though, is my longing to be with you. The longing to just be together in any way possible. We are both broken. But that's okay. The only way two things can fit together to make a whole is if they were incomplete to begin with. ~ Youknownotmyname

The realities of motherhood are often obscured by a halo of illusions. The future mother tends to fantasize about love and happiness and overlooks the other aspects of child-rearing: the exhaustion, frustration, loneliness, and even depression, with its attendant state of guilt. ~ Elisabeth Badinter

I thought about how often this was needed in everyday life. How we feel lonely, sometimes to the point of tears, but we don't let those tears come because we are not supposed to cry. ~ Mitch Albom

For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live. ~ George Orwell

The Swimming Pool

All around the apt. swimming pool
the boys stare at the girls
and the girls look everywhere but the opposite
or down or up. It is
as it was a thousand years ago: the fat
boy has it hardest, he
takes the sneers,
prefers the winter so he can wear
his heavy pants and sweater.
Today, he's here with the others.
Better they are cruel to him in his presence
than out. Of the five here now (three boys,
two girls) one is fat, three cruel,
and one, a girl, wavers to the side,
all the world tearing at her.
As yet she has no breasts
(her friend does) and were it not
for the forlorn fat boy whom she joins
in taunting, she could not bear her terror,
which is the terror
of being him. Does it make her happy
that she has no need, right now, of ingratiation,
of acting fool to salve
her loneliness? She doesn't seem
so happy. She is like
the lower middle class, that fatal group
handed crumbs so they can drop a few
down lower, to the poor, so they won't kill
the rich. All around
the apt. swimming pool
there is what's everywhere: forsakenness
and fear, a disdain for those beneath us
rather than a rage
against the ones above: the exploiters,
the oblivious and unabashedly cruel. ~ Thomas Lux

I did not love you out or boredom or loneliness or caprice. I loved you because the desire for you was stronger than any happiness. ~ Alessandro Baricco

The winter light, tinted by the bright colors in the street, plays on the go-board. All these festivities cut me off from the rest of the world. My loneliness is like a bolt of crimson silk stowed in the bottom of a wooden chest. ~ Shan Sa

I offered my love wrapped in words, But she knew she could do much better than just words. And now she is in love again, Undressed in the arms of another man… ~ Piyush Rohankar