Well Of Loneliness Quotes

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

Love should never draw from the well of loneliness. ~ Lenny Bartulin

Do you believe in God, Martin?'
And he answered, 'Yes, because of His trees. Don't you?'
'I'm not sure ... '
'Oh, my poor, blind Stephen! Look again, go on looking until you do believe. ~ Radclyffe Hall

I had been right the first time. His sonorous voice echoed through a hollow place of sorrow, catching its reverberations from those ragged walls. His gaiety masked a deep well of loneliness; he was a bright outward shape wrapped around shadows. ~ Sharon Shinn

I would rather,' he said, 'give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel.' (And here let me pause to make Mr. Douglas a sporting offer. I will provide a healthy boy, a phial of prussic acid, and a copy of The Well of Loneliness, and if he keeps his word and gives the boy the prussic acid I undertake to pay all expenses of his defense at the ensuing murder trial and to erect a monument to his memory after he has been hanged.) ~ Aldous Huxley

In the country, I stopped being a person who, in the words of Sylvia Boorstein, startles easily. I grew calmer, but beneath that calm was a deep well of loneliness I hadn't known was there ... Anxiety was my fuel. When I stopped, it was all waiting for me: fear, anger, grief, despair, and that terrible, terrible loneliness. What was it about? I was hardly alone. I loved my husband and son. I had great friends, colleagues, students. In the quiet, in the extra hours, I was forced to ask the question, and to listen carefully to the answer: I was lonely for myself. [p. 123] ~ Dani Shapiro

I'm quite all right. I'm not even scared. You see, I've learned from looking around, there is something worse than loneliness - and that's the fear of it." - Dorothy Parker ~ Nicole Archer

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

It is important to recognize the power of our emotions-and to take responsibility for them by creating a light and positive atmosphere around ourselves. This attitude of joy that we create helps alleviate states of hopelessness, loneliness, and despair. Our relationships with others thus naturally improve, and little by little the whole of society becomes more positive and balanced. ~ Tarthang Tulku

Those boys just want to get in your pants," he said. "You know that, right?" [...]

"That's not true," Tiffany said.

Well, of course it was true. But if Tiffany didn't know this, now was not the time to clue her in.

"How do you know we weren't trying to get in their pants?" I asked. ~ Jennifer Echols

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

Men who no longer can make sure of the reality which they feel and experience through talking about it and sharing it with their fellow-men, live in the same nightmare of loneliness and uncertainty which, in a normal world, is the terrible fate of insanity. ~ Hannah Arendt

The soul, in its loneliness, hopes only for "salvation." And yet what is the burden of the Bible if not a sense of the mutuality of influence, rising out of an essential unity, among soul and body and community and world? These are all the works of God, and it is therefore the work of virtue to make or restore harmony among them. The world is certainly thought of as a place of spiritual trial, but it is also the confluence of soul and body, word and flesh, where thoughts must become deeds, where goodness must be enacted. This is the great meeting place, the narrow passage where spirit and flesh, word and world, pass into each other. The Bible's aim, as I read it, is not the freeing of the spirit from the world. It is the handbook of their interaction. It says that they cannot be divided; that their mutuality, their unity, is inescapable; that they are not reconciled in division, but in harmony. What else can be meant by the resurrection of the body? The body should be "filled with light," perfected in understanding. And so everywhere there is the sense of consequence, fear and desire, grief and joy. What is desirable is repeatedly defined in the tensions of the sense of consequence. ~ Wendell Berry

Oh! To live alone, always alone, in the midst of the crowd that surrounds me, without a word of love ever coming to gladden my soul, without a friendly hand reaching out to me! ~ Herculine Barbin

A lot can be determined by the choices we make, even if the action is initiated by self-preservation. Many ... no, most ... of our choices are driven by fear: fear of death, fear of humiliation, fear of loneliness. But it's how we respond to fear that matters. It's what defines us. What makes us who we are. So maybe in your mind you acted selfishly, but I'm alive because of the choice you made. So I'll remember it as an act of kindness and yes, even bravery. ~ Michael J. Sullivan

His angelic wings blackened when the dark fury assailed his mind. Summoning new strength from the unholy power that ravaged his soul, grieved to drastic levels of desperation by the tainting of the holy light within him, he combated ally and enemy alike, bent on destroying both sides in order to ensure the quelling of the dark energies there and then. For days and nights, the lone warrior bathed himself in the blood of angels and demons. And when it was over, he stood alone on contaminated land, with a contaminated soul. He was banned forever from Heaven and not even Hell had space for a creature which seemed to cherish Oblivion over Pandemonium. The dark angel, not so far removed from his former self as his superiors seemed to believe, died on the edge of the cliffs, of utter loneliness and despair. ~ T.A. Miles

Never take the first plant you find, as it might be the last - and you want that first one to speak well of you to the others of her kind. ~ Robin Wall Kimmerer

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

I have been blessed with many curses in my life, not the least of which was being born half Lebanese and half American. Throughout my life, these contradictory parts battled endlessly, classed, never coming to a satisfactory conclusion. I shuffled ad nauseam between the need to assert my individuality and the need to belong to my clan, being terrified of loneliness and terrorized of losing myself in relationships. I was the black sheep of my family, yet an essential part of it. ~ Rabih Alameddine

She watched him with her yellow eyes and in them was no despair but only that same reckonless deep of loneliness that cored the world to its heart. ~ Cormac McCarthy

He who has nothing external that can divert him must find pleasure in his own thoughts, and must conceive himself what he is not; for who is pleased with what he is? He then expiates in boundless futurity, and culls from all imaginable conditions that which for the present moment he should most desire, amuses his desires with impossible enjoyments, and confers upon his pride unattainable dominion. The mind dances from scene to scene, unites all pleasures in all combination, and riots in delights which nature and fortune, with all their bounty, cannot bestow.

In time some particular train of ideas fixes the attention; all other intellectual gratifications are rejected; the mind, in weariness or leisure, recurs constantly to the favorite conception, and feasts on the luscious falsehood whenever she is offended with the bitterness of truth. By degrees the reign of fancy is confirmed; she grows first imperious, and in time despotic. Then fictions begin to operate as realities, false opinions fasten upon the mind, and life passes in dreams of rapture or of anguish. ~ Samuel Johnson

Every one of Joel's important songs
including the happy ones
are ultimately about loneliness. And it's not 'clever lonely' (like Morrissey) or 'interesting lonely' (like Radiohead); it's 'lonely lonely,' like the way it feels when you're being hugged by someone and it somehow makes you sadder. ~ Chuck Klosterman

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.
At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me. ~ C.S. Lewis

Toronto is the greatest and happiest city on earth, but despite that - maybe because of that - it made me unhappy, as I just lived in an apartment there, never seeing anyone. Once I went to watch the Blue Jays play baseball, but being surrounded by so many people who I knew I could never connect with was the thing that made me want to [leave]. ~ Matt Haig

I enjoy controlled loneliness. I like wandering around the city alone. I'm not afraid of coming back to an empty flat and lying down in an empty bed. I'm afraid of having no one to miss, of having no one to love. ~ Kuba Wojewódzki

A mystifying sensation of loneliness shook him. Arthur had been alone before, to be sure, but to be alone while surrounded by people, the one sane man in a mad place - that was loneliness. ~ Graham Moore

Man loves company - even if it is only that of a small burning candle. ~ Georg C. Lichtenberg

Just think about it," he said softly. "You can do practically anything. You can have practically everything. And none of it will keep you from being alone."
"Shut up shut up ... Everybody's alone."
He nodded. "But some people learn how to live with it. ~ Theodore Sturgeon

We wander, question. But the answer waits in each separate heart - the answer of our own identity and the way by which we can master loneliness and feel that at last we belong. ~ Carson McCullers

he was ever alone now, set apart from those around him, separated by a divide he could see across but never cover. To be without family was a strange, unseeable prison, the bars of loneliness and rootlessness enclosing ever more tightly as years and experience accumulated, isolating a male such that he touched naught and naught touched him. Darius ~ J.R. Ward

Gradually, after being the target a few times of a similar capriciousness, which he discerned as default behavior for most people, and not liking it, Paul learned to not be more generous or enthusiastic or attentive that he could sustain regardless of his mood and to not talk to people if his only reason to was because he felt lonely or bored. ~ Tao Lin

Is intelligence always good? I wonder. What if intelligence is wasted? What if intelligence leads to more loneliness rather than to fulfillment? What if instead of productivity and clarity, it generates pain, isolation, and regret? ~ Iain Reid

When you're whirling free of the mother ship, when you cut your ropes, slip your chain, step off the map, go absent without leave, scram, vamoose, whatever; suppose that it's then, and only then, that you're actually free to act! To lead the life nobody tells you how to live, or when, or why. In which nobody orders you to go forth and die for them, or for god, or comes to get you because you broke one of the rules, or because you're one of the people who are, for reasons which unfortunately you can't be given, simply not allowed. Suppose you've got to go through the feeling of being lost, into the chaos and beyond; you've got to accept the loneliness, the wild panic of losing your moorings, the vertiginous terror of the horizon spinning round and round like the edge of a coin tossed in the air. ~ Salman Rushdie

I yearn for empty thoughts and silence in my head. For someone to sit down beside me, to hold my hand and take away the cold sting of loneliness that creeps under my skin like an English winter. ~ Malia Zaidi

Nothing is more painful than the loneliness of being with someone who is never completely there. ~ Rick Yancey

You ask yourself: where are your dreams now? And you shake your head and say how swiftly the years fly by! And you ask yourself again: what have you done with your best years, then? Where have you buried the best days of your life? Have you lived or not? Look, you tell yourself, look how cold the world is becoming. The years will pass and after them will come grim loneliness, and old age, quaking on its stick, and after them misery and despair. Your fantasy world will grow pale, your dreams will fade and die, falling away like the yellow leaves from the trees ... Ah, Nastenka! Will it not be miserable to be left alone, utterly alone, and have nothing even to regret - nothing, not a single thing ... because everything I have lost was nothing, stupid, a round zero, all dreaming and no more! ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Estefania knew how to read an artist and their visions; her body would guide them through the melancholia and loneliness of a female body. Its unclaimed ecstasy. ~ Laura Gentile

You know I understand how you feel.... the loneliness that sets in....how empty your heart aches wishing you had someone near....to hold... to kiss and love. That type of passion poets write about...that person your souls yearns yet can not find....that love that all time will lie down and be still for.... but at last it feels ever more like a cruel joke and fickle fate which has no plans of happiness....we drudge on with our existence trying to make sense of it....then slowly you feel the light dim....till it blows out. You've set yourself in complete darkness, with no direction, fully immersing yourself in confusion, doubt and suffer. Feeding your starving desires with delusions; completely disabling your inner mind from seeing the ugly truth beyond the shattered reality. You look at yourself through a contaminated mirror, seeing what you want to see from a certain angle, completely ignoring the faults and imperfections hidden under the surface. I petty the day that will wash your fickle images, scattering your true colors to yourself not more... As I see through what you choose to hide. ~ N2

We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness ...
True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation.
One's inner voices become audible. One feels the attraction of one's most intimate sources.
In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures. ~ Wendell Berry

A wish for a future no longer tainted by the past. A future that held joy, not regret. A future that offered love instead of loneliness. ~ Irene Hannon

I felt more than ever the necessity of my mission. But I went home out of spirits, I hardly know why. I must work by myself all life long. ~ Elizabeth Blackwell

Without principles and without virtue, and still full of the prejudices of that group of men whose pride had just led them to fight against the sovereign himself, Oxtiern imagined that nothing in the world could curb his passions. Well, of all those that burned within him, love was the most impetuous; but this feeling, which can be almost a virtue in a good soul, is bound to become the source of many crimes in a corrupt heart like that of Oxtiern. ~ Marquis De Sade

Jesus never tried to hide his loneliness and dependence on other people. He chose his disciples not as servants but as friends. He shared moments of joy and grief with them, and asked for them in times of need. They became his family, his substitute mother and brothers and sisters. They gave up everything for him, as he had given up everything for them. He loved them, plain and simple. ~ Philip Yancey

To love women, to love our vaginas, to know them and touch them and be familiar with who we are and what we need. To satisfy ourselves, to teach our lovers to satisfy us, to be present in our vaginas, to speak of them out loud, to speak of their hunger and pain and loneliness and humor, to make them visible so they cannot be ravaged in the dark without great consequence, so that our center, our point, our motor, our dream, is no longer detached, mutilated, numb, broken, invisible, or ashamed. ~ Eve Ensler

When those blades cut, they cause tears that feed the well of Urdr that lies beside the world tree, and the well gives the water that keeps Yggdrasil alive, and if Yggdrasil dies then the world dies, and so the well must be kept filled and for that there must be tears. ~ Bernard Cornwell

Well of course there's been a great deal of progress over the last 40 years. We don't have laws that segregate black people within the society any longer. ~ Angela Davis

I'd like to walk there again. It was so lonely - a nice kind of loneliness, and all grass and clover and soft sea air. ~ C.S. Lewis

There's a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn't expect to find it, either. ~ Marilynne Robinson

There are many wells today, but they are dry. There are many hungry souls today that are empty. But let us come to Jesus and take Him at His Word and we will find wells of salvation, and be able to draw waters out of the well of salvation, for Jesus is that well. ~ William J. Seymour

The people you think are the happiest are usually the saddest; that's because they see more and feel deeper than others do. They are the sensitive and they see beyond the veil of what's tangible and what's not. They wear no masks and can see through the masks of others. The sensitive to life are few in number, which is why they feel so alone ... because they are all alone. ~ Donna Lynn Hope

Sit with me, and I'll not be alone.
Hold my hand, and I'll not feel alone.
Cry with me, and I'll no longer suffer alone. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich