Loneliness Friend Quotes & Sayings

Loneliness can drive a person mad. There's a place, in every man's soul, that no friend can reach, only a lover, and he longed for the chance to close that emptiness. — Tionne Rogers

A lonely soul is the best friend of itself — Munia Khan

I'm never going to be happy, but I could get close now, I think. I could be almost normal. I could have a friend. — Alyssa Brugman

If you know someone who's depressed, please resolve never to ask them why. Depression isn't a straightforward response to a bad situation; depression just is, like the weather.
Try to understand the blackness, lethargy, hopelessness, and loneliness they're going through. Be there for them when they come through the other side. It's hard to be a friend to someone who's depressed, but it is one of the kindest, noblest, and best things you will ever do. — Stephen Fry

I reach up and pull my hair back from my face, show him the scar from the accident. Unconsciously, he mimics my gesture, touches the same scar on his own forehead.
"It's just like mine," says my self, amazed. "How did you get it?" "The same as you. It is the same. We are the same."
A translucent moment. I didn't understand, and then I did, just like that. I watch it happen. I want to be both of us at once, feel again the feeling of losing the edges of my self, of seeing the admixture of future and present for the first time. But I'm too accustomed, too comfortable with it, and so I am left on the outside, remembering the wonder of being nine and suddenly seeing, knowing, that my friend, guide, brother was me. Me, only me. The loneliness of it. — Audrey Niffenegger

- Alone, quite alone. You have no fear of that. And you know what that word means? Not only to be separate from all others but to have not even one friend.
- I will take the risk, said Stephen.
- And not to have any one person, Cranly said, who would be more than a friend, more even than the noblest and truest friend a man ever had. — James Joyce

Sleep.
She needed sleep like she needed oxygen, water and food - yet, she was pretty sure she wouldn't find any tonight. No. Sleep wouldn't be her friend this evening.
Instead, loneliness, hurt, confusion, and pain would replace it. — Gail McHugh

I was almost a wife but lost the man. I was almost recognisable as a friend. And then I wasn't. The nights when I flicked off the bedside lamp and found myself in the heedless, lonely dark. The times I thought, with a horrified twist, that none of this was a gift. Suzanne got the redemption that followed a conviction ... I got the snuffed-out story of the bystander, a fugitive without a crime, half hoping and half terrified that no one was ever coming for me. — Emma Cline

But I needed to build up my loneliness tolerance, was all. The loneliness became like a friend, my constant companion. I could depend on it, and only it. — Jessica Knoll

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

Do you have a shoulder to cry on?
Someone who would listen to your deepest woes without judging you?
Or is it just you and the image in the mirror? — Sanhita Baruah

Penelope? Thank you. For not leaving me alone to deal with this . . . when things got hard. other people would have. You're a true friend. — Svetlana Chmakova

Do you think you can cause something to happen just from wanting it so much?' she asked. 'I don't get what you mean. Does this have to do with your dad?' asked Frannie. 'Not really. I'm talking about loneliness.' Frannie turned around and considered her answer. For awhile she seemed to be in a wilderness of her own. 'Do you mean that you imagined that Issy was your friend?' 'Yes, so completely that it was real.' 'Oh, that can happen. I believe that totally. Loneliness is powerful. — Delia Ephron

But the loneliness was still on Danny and demanded an outlet.
'Here we sit,' he began at last.
' - broken-hearted,' Pilon added rhythmically.
'No, this is not a poem,' Danny said. 'Here we sit, homeless. We gave our lives for our country, and now we have no roof over our head.'
'We never did have,' Pilon added helpfully.
Danny drank dreamily until Pilon touched his elbow and took the bottle.
'That reminds me,' Danny said, 'of a story of a man who owned two whore-houses
' His mouth dropped open. 'Pilon! my little fat duck of a baby friend. I had forgotten! I am an heir! I own two houses.'
'Whore-houses?' Pilon asked hopefully. 'Thou art a drunken liar,' he continued.
'No, Pilon. I tell the truth. The viejo died. I am the heir. I, the favourite grandson.'
'Thou art the only grandson,' said the realist Pilon. — John Steinbeck

I and me are always too deeply in conversation: how could I endure it,
if there were not a friend?
The friend of the hermit is always the third one: the third one is the float which prevents the conversation of the two from sinking into the depth. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I love you. He stabbed a thumb at his chest as he glared at her.
Of course he did. Lucien had never hidden the fact.
But the love of a friend, while comforting, was not enough anymore.
It did not soothe the restless discomfort that pushed against her chest or quell the
loneliness that seemed to grow within her each passing day. — Kristen Callihan

Go oft to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Taggle looked up at her, his amber eyes as deep as the loneliness Kate had felt before he became her friend.
"The traditional thing," he said slowly, "involves the river and a sack. — Erin Bow

Even in your closest friendships, you're alone. Maybe it's your best friend who, in fact, reminds you, just by making it her business to try to know your heart, that no one can - that our fate is to suffer in isolation and then die. But it's our collective fate! So I guess I'm an optimist. — Lauren Fox

One of the greatest acts of service you can do is to find someone who is secretly lonely and be a friend to them, if only for a day. — Dan Pearce

I could be the lone Eskimo, friend of whales and seals.
The Panopticon — Jenn Fagan

Mary remained weeping for her friend Jesus who had been all the world to her, and whose death ad meant the loss of that world. With great courage to be alone, and great courage to love despite devastating loss, she struggled to carry on, hoping to find and rebury Jesus' missing body. Suddenly Jesus stood before her alive again, calling her name. She turned, reaching, and said "Rabbouni!" "Noli me tangere," he replied- "don't touch me." If the courage to be alone requires also the courage to love, the courage to love still does not overcome loneliness. — Robert Cummings Neville

What a difference having a friend makes. — Richard Paul Evans

7. The Law of Balance in Life. It is also the case with human affairs. Social positions high or low, occupations spiritual or temporal, work rough or gentle, education perfect or imperfect, circumstances needy or opulent, each has its own advantage as well as disadvantage. The higher the position the graver the responsibilities, the lower the rank the lighter the obligation. The director of a large bank can never be so careless as his errand-boy who may stop on the street to throw a stone at a sparrow; nor can the manager of a large plantation have as good a time on a rainy day as his day-labourers who spend it in gambling. The accumulation of wealth is always accompanied by its evils; no Rothschild nor Rockefeller can be happier than a poor pedlar. A mother of many children may be troubled by her noisy little ones and envy her sterile friend, who in turn may complain of her loneliness; but if they balance what they gain with what they lose, they will find the both sides are equal. — Kaiten Nukariya

Friends are a strange, volatile, contradictory, yet sticky phenomenon. They are made, crafted, shaped, molded, created by focused effort and intent. And yet, true friendship, once recognized, in its essence is effortless.
Best friends are formed by time.
Everyone is someone's friend, even when they think they are all alone.
If the friendship is not working, your heart will know. It's when you start being less than perfectly honest and perfectly earnest in your dealings. And it's when the things you do together no longer feel right.
However, sometimes it takes more effort to make it work after all.
Stick around long enough to become someone's best friend. — Vera Nazarian

Be my friend and love me, for the world is terrible lonely and I am sad. — Catherynne M Valente

I'm considering keeping the shutters open, even if people are spying on me at night from the apartment across the street. Especially if they are spying on me. It makes me feel less alone. I have a mental camaraderie with that imaginary person and their imaginary gaze. I find myself performing myself for them and exaggerating my facial expressions so they can see me more clearly, like actors project their voices on stage. I'm miming myself. — Jalina Mhyana

I am never lonely when I am praying, for this brings me into companionship with the greatest friend of all - Jesus Christ. He said, "I call you not servants; ... but ... friends" [John 15:15 KJV]. — Billy Graham

Loneliness is not the enemy of your joy
as long as you know how you should always destroy
the pensive mood that remains with you like a friend
who never stands up for you when you're forced to bend — Munia Khan

Loneliness is remedied at times with the company of a friend and at other times with the company of oneself. — Patricia Selbert

And Aedan discovered that it only takes a single friend to put loneliness to flight. He would be able to face the next day. They both would. — Jonathan Renshaw

She understood now why her friend Elizabeth, with her near-genius, analytical mind gave wide berth to murder mysteries, psychological thrillers, and horror stories, and read only romance novels. Because, by God, when a woman picked up one of those steamy books, she had a firm guarantee that there would be a Happily-Ever-After. That though the world outside those covers could bring such sorrow and disappointment and loneliness, between those covers, the world was a splendid place to be. — Karen Marie Moning

But I have one want which I have never yet been able to satisfy; and the absence of the object of which I now feel as a most severe evil. I have no friend, Margaret: when I am glowing with the enthusiasm of success, there will be none to participate my joy; if I am assailed by disappointment, no one will endeavour to sustain me in dejection. I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. I desire the company of a man who could sympathise with me; whose eyes would reply to mine. You may deem me romantic, my dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of a friend. I have no one near me, gentle yet courageous, possessed of a cultivated as well as of a capacious mind, whose tastes are like my own, to approve or amend my plans. How would such a friend repair the faults of your poor brother! — Mary Shelley

To forget a friend is sad. Not everyone has had a friend. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Get married, my friend, you don't know what it means to live alone, at my age. Nowadays feeling alone fills me with appalling anguish; being alone at home, by the fire, in the evening. It seems to me then that I'm alone on the earth, dreadfully alone, but surrounded by indeterminate dangers, by unknown, terrible things; and the wall, which divides me from my neighbour, whom I do not know, separates me from him by as great a distance as that which separates me from the stars I see through my window. A kind of fever comes over me, a fever of pain and fear, and the silence of the walls terrifies me. It is so profound, so sad, the silence of the room in which you live alone. It isn't just a silence of the body, but a silence of the soul, and, when a piece of furniture creaks, a shiver runs through your whole body, for in that dismal place you expect to hear no sound. — Guy De Maupassant

I agree with Proust in this, he says, that books create their own silences in ways that friends rarely do. And the silence that grows palpable when one has finished a canto of Dante, he says, is quite different from the silence that grows palpable when one has reached the end of Oedipus at Colonus. The most terrible thing that has happened to people today, he says, is that they have grown frightened of silence. Instead of seeking it as a friend and as a source of renewal they now try in every way they can to shut it out ... the fear of silence is the fear of loneliness, he says, and the fear of loneliness is the fear of silence. People fear silence, he says, because they have lost the ability to trust the world to bring about renewal. Silence for them means only the recognition that they have been abandoned ... How can people find the strength to be happy if they are so terrified of silence? — Gabriel Josipovici

And that is one of the worst things about this life. As a liar, a pretend person, you cannot really truly ever be someone's friend. My American life, it is lonely. Often, it is very, very lonely. — Jillian Cantor

There are many and more who would kiss my hand, taste my lips, to my loneliness lend their bodies' warmth. I have want of a friend. There are few, some few, who would give their names and fortunes rich or send first sons to my ailing bed. I have need of a friend. There is one and only one who will give the air from his failing lungs for my body's mend. And that one is my love. — Anonymous

How should they know? I can't reveal
to a single friend what my soul conceals,
whom I'm in love with or what I believe -
my dreams, my thoughts - or why I grieve. — Hristo Botev

Loneliness forced me to be my own best friend. — Bertrand Blier

There was a quality of loneliness to her that comes when your only friend walks away and you don't know why and there's no one else and never will be. A left-behind look. — Robert Crais

Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. You simply say, "Here are the perimeters of our attention. If you prowl around under the windows till the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. If you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it." Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire. — Marilynne Robinson

We were putting into these gomers our fear of death, but who knew if they feared death? Perhaps they welcomed death like a dear long-lost cousin, grown old but still known, coming to visit, relieving the loneliness, the failing of the senses, the fury of the half-blind looking into the mirror and not recognizing who is looking back, a dear friend, a dear reliever, a healer who would be with them for an eternity, the same eternity as the long ago, before birth. — Samuel Shem

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

Loneliness is an old friend standing beside you in the mirror, looking you in the eye, challenging you to live your life without it. you can't find the words to fight yourself, to fight the words screaming that you're not enough, never enough never ever enough . — Tahereh Mafi

In America the vast spaces accentuate the vast spaces between people, deserts which stretch between human beings. It is a void which has to be spanned by the automobile. It takes an hour to reach a movie, two hours to reach a friend. So the coyotes howl and wail at the awful emptiness of mountains, deserts, hills. — Anais Nin

and for the first time in his life he realised the whole horror of that loneliness to which, perhaps, all greatness is condemned. But to be forsaken is something very different from deliberately choosing blessed loneliness. How he longed, in those days, for the ideal friend who would thoroughly understand him, to whom he would be able to say all, and whom he imagined he had found at various periods in his life from his earliest youth onwards. Now, however, that the way he had chosen grew ever more perilous and steep, he found nobody who could follow him: he therefore created a perfect friend for himself in the ideal form of a majestic philosopher, and made this creation the preacher of his gospel to the world. Whether — Friedrich Nietzsche

A story is like a giant jigsaw puzzle, a jigsaw puzzle that would cover the whole floor of a room with its tiny pieces. Buts it's not that sort of puzzle that comes with a box. There is no lid with a picture on it so that you can see what the puzzle will look like when it's finished. And you have only some of the pieces. All you can do is keep looking and listening, sniffing about in all sorts of places, until you find the next piece. And then you'll be amazed where that next piece will take you. Suddenly your puzzle can have a whole new person in it, or it can go from being on a train to a hot air balloon, from city to country, from love to sadness to loneliness and back to love. Pieces can come to you at any time. When you're having a cup of tea or sitting on a bus or talking with a friend.it will be like a bell going off in your head. That's what comes next you'll think. And that's why it's serendipity. Serendipity is luck and chance and fate all tumbled into one. — Angelica Banks

And he looked lonely enough that she said, 'If you like, you could be my friend'. — Sarah J. Maas

But loneliness is as delusive a belief in the pertinence of the world as is love: in choosing to feel lonely, as in choosing to love, one carves a space next to oneself to be filled by others - a friend, a lover, a toy poodle, a violinist on the radio. — Yiyun Li

Are you upset little friend? Have you been lying awake worrying? Well, don't worry ... I'm here. The flood waters will recede, the famine will end, the sun will shine tomorrow, and I will always be here to take care of you. — Charles M. Schulz

When I was a kid
10, 11, 12, 13
the thing I wanted most in the world was a best friend. I wanted to be important to people; to have people that understood me. I wanted to just be close to somebody. And back then, a thought would go through my head almost constantly: "There's never gonna be a room someplace where there's a group of people sitting around, having fun, hanging out, where one of them goes, 'You know what would be great? We should call Fiona. Yeah, that would be good.' That'll never happen. There's nothing interesting about me." I just felt like I was a sad little boring thing. — Fiona Apple

Loneliness is my worst enemy, but in the end he's usually my only real friend. — Dave Guerrero

Sometimes I think, What a man gonna do with all this media publicity, Photos in newspapers, photography in and among the industry, references and contacts when he cannot help a friend, when he has no family life, and not Even a dog to welcome him after work hours! — Himmilicious

Let this little book be thy friend, if, owing to fortune or through thine own fault, thou canst not find a dearer companion. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The lonely? Where's that from?

Sadness' best friend. Sadness brought
it along and I couldn't turn it away, so
I let it multiply in my pulse instead. — Darshana Suresh

There's a line you never get to cross, as long as you live. The edge of your body. You're trapped inside your skin, and no matter how many times you reach out to touch a friend or a lover, no matter how close you hold someone or how fiercely you make love, when it begins, when it ends, and all the moments in between, you are still yourself, alone. I know you knew this. It was in all the love songs you wrote. I think it was the hidden impulse we both had, down inside, that made us take razors to our skin, that desire to open up and let the world in, to let ourselves out, to take that sharp thin line of flesh and erase it. — Michael Montoure

Loneliness is something that finds us all when we think about it and when we're by ourselves when we don't want to be. It creeps up when we desperately feel like we need someone special but can't seem to find anything more than a friend that wishes they could help. Sometimes a friend cannot be found when your willing to settle for one. Sometimes it passes quickly, and sometimes it sticks around to try to drive us to insanity. Its like a creature lying in wait to take us at our weakest moment, but only toying with us when we give up to it. In the end it always passes. There is always something to appreciate and someone to cheer us up. We adapt and overcome. Life is a gift with much more to it than a passing emotion. All around us are beautiful things to console us. Life is much more than one feeling. It is as great as we let it be. — Joshua Hartzell

He stood and watched his friend hobble around the house, felt the cold claw of loneliness reach out and touch him with icy fingers. A terrible loneliness. The loneliness of age - of age and the outdated. — Clifford D. Simak

Most of the world's great souls have been lonely. Loneliness seems to be one price the saint must pay for his saintliness ... Always remember: you cannot carry a cross in company. Though a man were surrounded by a vast crowd, his cross is his alone and his carrying of it marks him as a man apart. Society has turned against him; otherwise he would have no cross. No one is a friend to the man with a cross. — Aiden Wilson Tozer

And even when you're ready to let go. When you're ready to break free. When you're ready to be brand-new. Loneliness is an old friend standing beside you in the mirror, looking you in the eye, challenging you to live your life without it. You can't find the words to fight yourself, to fight the words screaming that you're not enough never enough never ever enough. Loneliness is a bitter, wretched companion. Sometimes — Tahereh Mafi

Music has always carried me through times of loneliness. So when I make music, I like it to make people who listen to it feel like they have a friend who reveals something personal to them, rather than trying to be like a god up on a pedestal — John Frusciante

Who Am I? Well, I am the Imaginary Friend. You know-the one you conjure up for conversation when you're consumed with loneliness, greed or visions of imminent doom. I have listened to thousands of stories and it would be a shame if they just stayed with me, never to be heard again. I have chosen to share only the ones I found to be particularly... curious. Have you ever been troubled by nightmares? Were you relieved when you woke up? No matter. Are you sure you can tell the difference between the nightmare and the waking state? Think it through before giving me your answer. Sometimes only an imaginary friend can truly listen to your deepest troubles and most distressing woes. Wouldn't you agree? — P.S. Gifford

First of all, it's friendship with God that makes possible friendship with one another in a manner that is not that we just like one another, but that were are joined by common judgments, by God, for the good of God's church. Such friendship occurs not by trying to be each other's friend, but by discovering you were engaged in common good work that is so determinative, you cannot live without one another. Now, if the church is that, it will talk about friendship in a way that avoids the superficiality of the language of relationship. Because relationships are meant to be spontaneous and short. Friendship, if it is the friendship of God, is to be characterized by fidelity in which you are even willing to tell the friend the truth. Which may mean you will risk the friendship. You need to be in that kind of community to survive the loneliness that threatens all of our souls. — Stanley Hauerwas

In loneliness, in sickness, in confusion-the mere knowledge of friendship makes it possible to endure, even if the friend is powerless to help. It is enough that they exist. Friendship is not diminished by distance or time, by imprisonment or war, by suffering or silence. It is in these things that it roots most deeply. It is from these things that it flowers. — Pam Brown

Part Five: The Single Hound
XVIII
THERE is another Loneliness
That many die without,
Not want or friend occasions it,
Or circumstances or lot.
But nature sometimes, sometimes thought, 5
And whoso it befall
Is richer than could be divulged
By mortal numeral. — Emily Dickinson

books are the arms which murder isolation, drive away loneliness, fulfill a friend's company. — Self-Realization Fellowship

I'm tired of living unable to love anyone. I don't have a single friend - not one. And, worst of all, I can't even love myself. Why is that? Why can't I love myself? It's because I can't love anyone else. A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else. Do you understand what I am saying? A person who is incapable of loving another cannot properly love himself. — Haruki Murakami

his survival was threatened day by day. Minute by minute. It was impossible to picture a spoiled, beautiful man like Christopher Phelan contending with danger and hardship. Hunger. Loneliness. Beatrix stared at her friend pensively, their gazes meeting in the looking glass. "What is your favorite song, Pru?" "I don't have one, actually. Tell him yours." "Should we discuss this with Audrey?" Beatrix asked, referring to Phelan's sister-in-law. "Certainly not. Audrey has a problem with honesty. She wouldn't send the letter if she knew I hadn't written it." Beatrix made a sound that could have either been a laugh or a groan. — Lisa Kleypas

There was a blond misty boy sitting beside me, and he looked at me, and I at him, and we were not strangers: our hands moved towards each other to embrace. I never heard his voice, for we did not speak; it is a shame, I should so like the memory of it. Loneliness, like fever, thrives on night, but there with him light broke, breaking in the trees like birdsong, and when sunrise came, he loosened his fingers from mine, and walked away, that misty boy, my friend. — Truman Capote