I Was Born Alone Quotes & Sayings

Regardless of how many people I surrounded myself with, no matter how many friends and family I loved and was loved by in return, I was alone at the moment of being born and at the moment of dying. Nobody came with you and nobody went with you. It was a journey of one. — Karen Marie Moning

Here's a secret: Everyone, if they live long enough, will lose their way at some point. You will lose your way, you will wake up one morning and find yourself lost. This is a hard, simple truth. If it hasn't happened to you yet, consider yourself lucky. When it does, when one day you look around and nothing is recognizable, when you find yourself alone in a dark wood having lost the way, you may find it easier to blame it on someone else
an errant lover, a missing father, a bad childhood
or it may be easier to blame the map you were given
folded too many times, out-of-date, tiny print
but mostly, if you are honest, you will only be able to blame yourself.
One day I'll tell my daughter a story about a dark time, the dark days before she was born, and how her coming was a ray of light. We got lost for a while, the story will begin, but then we found our way. — Nick Flynn

My nana was always a widow as long as I was alive; my grandfather died before I was born. All the women on my street - there were four houses in a row with all old women who lived alone who were widowed. They all had kids, but they were all widowed. My mom didn't put me in preschool; I didn't know that was a thing. I just hung out with these women all day. — Jen Kirkman

But it doesn't happen that way, I keep telling myself knowingly and sadly. Only in our fraternity pledges and masonic inductions, our cowboy movies and magazine stories, not in our real-life lives. For, the seventeenth-century humanist to the contrary, each man is an island complete unto himself, and as he sinks, the moving feet go on around him, from nowhere to nowhere and with no time to lose. The world is long past the Boy Scout stage of its development; now each man dies as he was meant to die, and as he was born, and as he lived: alone, all alone. Without any God, without any hope, without any record to show for his life.
("New York Blues") — Cornell Woolrich

I was born to end up alone. — Yana Toboso

I was born to be alone, and I always shall be; but now I want to be. — Mary MacLane

I did not have a father. It was my mom who chose to be alone. She felt that she would be better off by herself with me after I was born. — Olga Kurylenko

Most of the benches bore the names of benefactors - in memory of Mrs. Ruth Klein or whatever - but my mother's bench, the Rendezvous Point, alone of all the benches in that part of the park had been given by its anonymous donor a more mysterious and welcoming message: EVERYTHING OF POSSIBILITY. It had been Her Bench since before I was born; in her early days in the city, she had sat there with her library book on her afternoons off, going without lunch when she needed the price of a museum pass at MoMA or a movie ticket at the Paris Theatre. — Donna Tartt

When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me. I deliver myself entirely to them. — Niccolo Machiavelli

Her name was Melanie Stryder. She was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She was in Los Angeles when the occupation became known to her, and she hid in the wilderness for a few years before finding ... Hmmm. Sorry, I'll try that one again later. The body has seen twenty years. She drove to Chicago from ... " I shook my head. "There were several stages, not all of them alone. The vehicle was stolen. She was searching for a cousin named Sharon, whom she had reason to hope was still human. She neither found nor contacted anyone before she was spotted. But ... " I struggled, fighting against another blank wall. "I think ... I can't be sure ... I think she left a note ... somewhere. — Stephenie Meyer

Alone with myself and my talent, I chose it in some way I never had before. I chose myself also. The person I was and had been all along, the one who had not belonged to the place where she was born, nor to the places she found along the way, the one always under the mask, here she came out and breathed the air and felt at home. I had always believed that to be this person might destroy me or the world, and so as the world seemed to end, this made the end of the world seem nearly a paradise. — Alexander Chee

Love not often, but forever. It's one of my mother's sayings, and all my life it has been the story of my heart ... Love for my mother; love for my friends; the dark and complex love of a woman for a man. But when Fleur was born, everything changed. A man who has never seen it may think he understands the ocean; but he thinks only of what he knows ... The reality, however, is beyond imagining: the scents, the sounds, the anguish, and the joy of it beyond any comparison with previous experience. That was Fleur. For the first instant, ... I knew that the world had changed. I had been alone and had never know it; had traveled, fought, suffered, danced, fornicated, loved, hated, grieved, and triumphed all alone, living like an animal from day to day, caring for nothing; desiring nothing; fearing nothing. Suddenly now everything was different ... I was a mother. — Joanne Harris

I was born by myself but carry the spirit and blood of my father, mother and my ancestors. So I am really never alone. My identity is through that line. — Ziggy Marley

Sinner's Prayer Heavenly Father, I come to you in prayer asking forgiveness for my sins. I believe that Jesus died for my sins and was resurrected sitting on the right hand of the Father. Through Jesus, I believe I have eternal life. I believe that His death and resurrection provided for my forgiveness. I trust in Jesus and Jesus alone as my personal Lord and Savior. Thank you Lord, for saving me and forgiving me! I ask you right now to come into my heart and I give you my life. I accept Jesus as my personal savior. I confess with my mouth that I am born again. Fill me with your Holy Spirit and cleanse me Lord. Make me new in you. I receive your Holy Spirit and can begin a new life now in you Jesus. Help and guide me daily to read your word and to walk with you God. In Jesus' name Amen. — Janie McGee

At nightfall I return home and enter my study. There on the threshold I remove my dirty, mud-spattered clothes, slip on my regal and courtly robes, and thus fittingly attired, I enter the ancient courts of bygone men where, having received a friendly welcome, I feed on the food that is mine alone and that I was born for. I am not ashamed to speak with them and inquire into the reasons for their actions; and they answer me in kindly fashion. And so for four hours I feel no annoyance; I forget all troubles; poverty hold no fears, and death loses its terrors. I become entirely one of them. — Niccolo Machiavelli

When evening comes, I return home and go into my study. On the threshold I strip off my muddy, sweaty, workday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born. And there I make bold to speak to them and ask the motives of their actions, and they, in their humanity, reply to me. And for the space of four hours I forget the world, remember no vexation, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death: I pass indeed into their world. — Niccolo Machiavelli

The light. The light is so bright that all that remains is you and the darkness. You can feel the audience breathing. It's like holding a gun or standing on a precipice and knowing you must jump. It feels slow and fast. It's like dying and being born and fucking and crying. It's like falling in love and being utterly alone with God; you taste your own mouth and feel your own skin and I knew I was alive and I knew who I was and that that wasn't who I'd been up till then. I'd never been so far away but I knew I was home. "I know everything," I thought. — Anonymous

Serafina may think I'm a crazy person, but I'm not. She has her scars, too - and not only the ones I saw when she turned her head and her hair fell aside. We are both living out our lives in a Purgatorio. The difference? I arrived from the Paradiso, once young and married and so in love. But Serafina, she who was born alone in a fever dream of fire? She whose very skin is a tapestry of loss? Serafina, of course, arrived from the Inferno. — Chris Bohjalian

Indeed, happiness is nothing other than being encompassed, an after-image of the original shelter within the mother. But for this reason no one who is happy can know that he is so. To see happiness, he would have to pass out of it: to be as if already born. He who says he is happy lies, and in invoking happiness, sins against it. He alone keeps faith who says: I was happy. — Theodor W. Adorno

The guy was just sitting there," Tom added happily. "Am I right?" Gabe nodded, generous in his small smile. "That's right. John, chapter nine. Jesus and his disciples were having a discussion, it seems, about human suffering being a punishment for sin. The disciples pointed to the blind man begging. This man was born blind, they said, was it because his parents sinned? It was the belief in those days," he added, young scholar, "that blindness or deformity was a punishment for the parents' sins." "Grateful to be an orphan," Tom said suddenly, and looked at my mother and me, smiling. "Or maybe that means I'm in more trouble than most." "Well, we're all sinners," Gabe said. "But the point is, no one was asking Jesus to cure the man, they were just using him to illustrate their question. And yet, Our Lord, out of compassion alone, it seems to me, approaches the man, picks up some dirt - " He paused, ducking his head with a wry smile. "We all know the story." "Right," Tom cried. — Alice McDermott

If you were alone when you were born, alone when you were dying, really absolutely alone when you were dead, why "learn to be alone" in between? If you had forgotten, it would quickly come back to you. Aloneness was like riding a bike. At gunpoint. With the gun in your own hand. Aloneness was the air in your tires, the wind in your hair. You didn't have to go looking for it with open arms. With open arms, you fell off the bike: I was drinking my wine too quickly. — Lorrie Moore

My heart born naked was swaddled in lullabies. Later alone it wore poems for clothes. Like a shirt I carried on my back the poetry I had read. So I lived for half a century until wordlessly we met. From my shirt on the back of the chair I learn tonight how many years of learning by heart I waited for you. — John Berger

My name is Ferrum. I was the first, born of the forges, when mankind first began to experiment with iron. I rose from their imagination, from their ambition to conquer the world with a metal that could slice through bronze like paper. I was there when the world started to shift, when humans took their first steps out of the Dark Ages into civilization. For many years, I thought I was alone. But mankind is never satisfied. Others came, risen from these dreams of a new world ... Then, with the invention of computers, the gremlins came, and the bugs. Given life by the fear of monsters lurking in machines, these were more chaotic than the other fey, violent and destructive. They spread to every part of the world. As technology became a driving force in every country, powerful new fey rose into existence. Virus. Glitch. And Machina, the most powerful of all. — Julie Kagawa

My mother lived alone in the ruins of the great Library, which was called Compleat, and a very passionate and dashing Library indeed. Under the slightly blackened rafters and more than slightly caved-in walls, my mother lived and read and dreamed, allowing herself to grow closer and closer to Compleat, to notice more and more how fine and straight his shelves remained, despite great structural stress. That sort of moral fortitude is rare in this day and age. By and by, my siblings and I were born and romped on the balconies, raced up and down the splintered ladders, and pored over many encyclopedias and exciting novels. I know just everything about everything - so long as it beings with A through L. — Catherynne M Valente

I was, being human, born alone;
I am, being woman, hard beset;
I live by squeezing from a stone
The little nourishment I get. — Elinor Wylie

Looking back, I see that I was born with the subtle sense that material treasures alone, no matter how grand, would never be enough to satisfy the longing in my heart to see the light, to know the truth. — Rod Stryker

I was travelling alone on the empty road,
I saw a gravid woman who standing alongside the road and I crossed off,
I do not know that she was going to give birth to the "Fortune Seed", later !
I perceived that the "Fortune Seed" born today so i return back and found the seed on the road,
I decided to carry the "Fortune seed" forever, now the empty road filled with two hands together with the sign of true love — Sam Nelson

For me alone Don Quixote was born and I for him. His was the power of action, mine of writing. — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

I am technically "boss" of the family which I am carrying along-but I am grateful to know that it is only technically - that the real authority rests on the other side of the house. It is placed there by a beneficent Providence, who foresaw before I was born, or, if he did not, he has found it out since - that I am not in any way qualified to travel alone. — Mark Twain

Have you ever considered, for even a moment, the list of things I'm not allowed to do because some bitter old men say so? I can't lead a mass, can't earn the greens of a priest, let alone claim my birthright. My entire life, from the cradle to the grave, is dictated by 'traditions' and rules that you aren't subject to. My power was taken away from me the moment I was born a woman. So no, you do not get to give me permission to cry!" "I'm — Craig Schaefer

Once they got there, it wasn't a pretty landing. With the oars damaged and the foresail torn, Leo could barely manage a controlled descent. The others strapped themselves in below - except for Coach Hedge, who insisted on clinging to the forward rail, yelling, "YEAH! Bring it on, lake!" Leo stood astern, alone at the helm, and aimed as best he could. Festus creaked and whirred warning signals, which were relayed through the intercom to the quarterdeck. "I know, I know," Leo said, gritting his teeth. He didn't have much time to take in the scenery. To the southeast, a city was nestled in the foothills of a mountain range, blue and purple in the afternoon shadows. A flat desert landscape spread to the south. Directly beneath them the Great Salt Lake glittered like aluminum foil, the shoreline etched with white salt marshes that reminded Leo of aerial photos of Mars. "Hang on, Coach!" he shouted. "This is going to hurt." "I was born for hurt! — Rick Riordan

There was never a man born so wise or good, but one or more companions came into the world with him, who delight in his faculty, and report it. I cannot see without awe, that no man thinks alone and no man acts alone, but the divine assessors who came up with him into life,
now under one disguise, now under another,
like a police in citizen's clothes, walk with him, step for step, through all kingdoms of time. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

A child was a temptation of the flesh, as well as of the spirit; I knew the bliss of that unbounded oneness, as I knew the bittersweet joy of seeing that oneness fade as the child learned itself and stood alone.
But I had crossed some subtle line. Whether it was that I was born myself with some secret quota embodied in my flesh, or only that I knew my sole allegiance must be given elsewhere now ... I knew. As a mother, I had the lightness now of effort completed, honor satisfied. Mission accomplished. — Diana Gabaldon

It's not about you it's about human behavior. You know how there will be a report on TV of some woman who kills herself and her kids, and everyone acts like that's so shocking"
I nod "I guess so"
"What's shocking," Cheryl says, "is that it doesn't happen more often. What's shocking is that everyone says they fell in love with their child the minute it was born, what's shocking is that no one is honest about how hard it all is. So-am I surprised that some lady drowns her children and shoots herself? No. I think it's sad; I wish people had noticed that she was struggling, I wish she could have asked for help. What shocks me is how alone we all are — A.M. Homes

Kalmar nodded. "I'm sorry, Papa. I wasn't strong enough."
"None of us are, lad. Me least of all." Esben smiled and took a rattling breath. "But it's weakness that the Maker turns to strength. Your fur is why you alone loved a dying cloven. You alone in all the world knew my need and ministered to my wounds." Esben pulled Kalmar closer and kissed him on the head. "And in my weakness, I alone know your need. Hear me, son. I loved you when you were born. I loved you when I wept in the Deeps of Throg. I loved you even as you sang the song that broke you. And I love you now in the glory of your humility. You're more fit to be the king than I ever was. Do you understand?"
Kalmar shook his head.
Esben smiled and shuddered with pain. "A good answer, my boy. Then do you believe that I love you?"
"Yes, sir. I believe you." Kalmar buried his face in his father's fur.
"Remember that in the days to come. Nia, Janner, Leeli - help him to remember. — Andrew Peterson

I could see the road ahead of me. I was poor and I was going to stay poor. But I didn't particularly want money. I didn't know what I wanted. Yes, I did. I wanted someplace to hide out, someplace where one didn't have to do anything. The thought of being something didn't only appall me, it sickened me. The thought of being a lawyer or a councilman or an engineer, anything like that, seemed impossible to me. To get married, to have children, to get trapped in the family structure. To go someplace to work every day and to return. It was impossible. To do things, simple things, to be part of family picnics, Christmas, the 4th of July, Labor Day, Mother's Day ... was a man born just to endure those things and then die? I would rather be a dishwasher, return alone to a tiny room and drink myself to sleep. — Charles Bukowski

Give me, if you will, prayers;
Or let me know dryness,
An abudance of devotion,
Or if not, then barrenness.
In you alone, Sovereign Majesty,
I find my peace,
What do you want of me?
Yours I am, fo ryou I was born:
What do you want of me? — Teresa Of Avila

I, that have neither pity, love, nor fear.
Indeed, 'tis true that Henry told me of;
For I have often heard my mother say
I came into the world with my legs forward:
Had I not reason, think ye, to make haste,
And seek their ruin that usurp'd our right?
The midwife wonder'd and the women cried
'O, Jesus bless us, he is born with teeth!'
And so I was; which plainly signified
That I should snarl and bite and play the dog.
Then, since the heavens have shaped my body so,
Let hell make crook'd my mind to answer it.
I have no brother, I am like no brother;
And this word 'love,' which graybeards call divine,
Be resident in men like one another
And not in me: I am myself alone. — William Shakespeare

Stars, too, were time travelers. How many of those ancient points of light were the last echoes of suns now dead? How many had been born but their light not yet come this far? If all the suns but ours collapsed tonight, how many lifetimes would it take us to realize we were alone? I had always known the sky was full of mysteries - but not until now had I realized how full of them the earth was. — Ransom Riggs

I was born alone and I will die alone. I've got to do what's right for me and not live my life the way anybody else wants it. — Curtis Jackson

Sometimes, but only for a moment, I saw a faint solitary
figure with a Rosa veiled face, and carrying a faint torch, flit among the dancers, but like a dream within a
dream, like a shadow of a shadow, and I knew by an understanding born from a deeper fountain than thought,
that it was Eros himself, and that his face was veiled because no man or woman from the beginning of the
world has ever known what love is, or looked into his eyes, for Eros alone of divinities is altogether a spirit,
and hides in passions not of his essence if he would commune with a mortal heart. So that if a man love nobly
he knows love through infinite pity, unspeakable trust, unending sympathy; and if ignobly through vehement
jealousy, sudden hatred, and unappeasable desire; but unveiled love he never knows. — W.B.Yeats

Your limits. You are small and alone. You need friends to protect you. Without them, you are unable to withstand me. I vowed not to possess you again, but I can still kill you." The armored dudes stepped forward. The points of their swords hovered a few inches from Leo's face. Leo's fear suddenly made way for a whole lot of anger. This eidolon in the wolf helmet had shamed him, controlled him, and made him attack New Rome. It had endangered his friends and botched their quest. Leo glanced at the dormant spheres on the worktables. He considered his tool belt. He thought about the loft behind him - the area that looked like a sound booth. Presto: Operation Junk Pile was born. "First: you don't know me," he told Wolf Head. "And second: Bye." He lunged for the stairs and bounded to — Rick Riordan

When evening comes, I return to my home, and I go into my study; and on the thresh-hold, I take off my everyday clothes, which are covered in mud and mire,and I put on regal and curial robes; and dressed in a more appropriate manner I enter into the ancient courts of ancient men and am welcomed by them kindly, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born; and there I am not ashamed to speak to them, to ask them the reasons for their actions; and they, in their humanity, answer me; and for four hours I feel no boredom,I dismiss every affliction, I no longer fear poverty nor do I tremble at the thought of death; I become completely part of them. — Niccolo Machiavelli

Just as a vampire has no choice but to drink human blood, I have no choice but to kill people. My fate was already decided the moment I was born. I wasn't abused by my parents and scarred mentally. I have no ancestors that were murderers. I was raised in a very ordinary household. But whereas ordinary children play alone with imaginary friends and pets, I spent my time staring at imaginary corpse. — Otsuichi

I was born alone, I'm gonna die alone. I have my own identity. I'm my own person, and no two people are the same. — ASAP Ferg

My parents had come from Mexico, a short road in my imagination. I felt myself as coming from a caramelized planet, an upside-down planet, pineapple-cratered. Though I was born here, I came from the other side of the looking glass, as did Alice, though not alone like Alice. Downtown I saw lots of brown people. Old men on benches. Winks from Filipinos. Sikhs who worked in the fields were the most mysterious brown men, their heads wrapped in turbans. They were the rose men. They looked like roses. — Richard Rodriguez

Then Jesus introduced Himself to me. Though my birth certificate reads 1983, I reckon I was born in 1999, when I met Jesus - not in a church or on a camp or through people, but alone in my bedroom with an open Bible and a tangible revelation that the Son of God was not only real, but alive and awesome and stronger than the chains that bound me. — Brooke Fraser