Loneliness Is Quotes & Sayings

You may have noticed that people in bus stations, if they know you also are alone, will glance at you sidelong, with a look that is both piercing and intimate, and if you let them sit beside you, they will tell you long lies about numerous children who are all gone now, and mothers who were beautiful and cruel, and in every case they will tell you that they were abandoned, disappointed, or betrayed--that they should not be alone, that only remarkable events, of the kind one reads in a book, could have made their condition so extreme. And that is why, even if the things they say are true, they have the quick eyes and active hands and the passion for meticulous elaboration of people who know they are lying. Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever been otherwise. Loneliness is absolute discovery. — Marilynne Robinson

My reputation is largely the creature of the kindly imaginings of my flock, whom I chose not to disillusion, in part because the truth had the kind of pathos in it that would bring on sympathy in its least bearable forms. — Marilynne Robinson

Loneliness often fools us into believing everyone is bad. — R.K. Ryals

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

But there it is: Everyone is alone, for life, and maybe that's not such a bad thing. — Julianna Baggott

My solo travels in Paris have brought many perfect hours of being alone but not a moment of loneliness. People who depend on other people are often in hiding from themselves. Two and a quarter million people live in the City of Light: you will see many of them and you will pass them in the street, but when you see Notre Dame after dark and walk home and perhaps stop to have a drink in the Marais, you can feel that the only thing that is missing from your experience is the common dependence on someone to distract your attention. You are living without it: you are on vacation. — Andrew O'Hagan

Pay careful attention to the bodily sensations that you recognize as hunger. When you feel yourself starting to get hungry, sit down for a few minutes (and if you can't sit down, stand still). Where in your body do you experience hunger? In your throat? Your chest? Your stomach? Your legs? How is this sensation different from the sensation, let's say, of excitement? Or loneliness? What happens to you when you feel yourself getting hungry? Do you feel that you need to eat immediately? — Geneen Roth

I get an audience personally involved in a song - because I'm involved myself. It's not something I do deliberately: I can't help myself. If the song is a lament at the loss of love, I get an ache in my gut. I feel the loss myself and I cry out the loneliness, the hurt and the pain that I feel. — Frank Sinatra

In any ten step instruction manual and every book of doctrines, there is complex advice that serves the very simple function of helping the lonely person find some similarity with the world around him.
He connects and, suddenly, there is a burst of joy, a ray of hope. He believes that it was those steps or that book, specifically, that brought him happiness, when really he has simply been triggered into his natural state. — Vironika Tugaleva

There is in certain living souls a quality of loneliness unspeakable, so great it must be shared as company is shared by lesser beings. Such a loneliness is mine; so know by this that in immensity there is one lonelier than you. — Theodore Sturgeon

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

You know those nights where the day has unfolded in such a way that now, in the night, you can feel all the gaps in your body and you can see all the reasons you're not who you wish you were - you know those nights where the only sound is of you drinking and the people outside who have each other to drink with - those nights when you're unable to think or be or do because of the paralyzing loneliness - it feels like a hundred of those nights - stitched together and squared - and they come to me in a blush. — Stefan Golaszewski

While extroverts commonly feel loneliness when others are absent, introverts can feel most lonely when others are present, because ours is the aching loneliness of not being known or understood. — Adam S. McHugh

The drivenness in any addiction is about the ruptured self, the belief that one is flawed as a person. The content of the addiction, whether it is alcoholism or work, is an attempt at an intimate relationship. The workaholic with her work or the alcoholic with his booze are having a love affair. Each alters mood to avoid the feeling of loneliness and hurt in the underbelly of shame. — John Bradshaw

Forget sex or politics or religion, loneliness is the subject that clears out a room. — Douglas Coupland

One of the oldest aches in the bones of humanity is loneliness. I mean it's one of the things that goes way back; loneliness is not good for the world. And so, whoever you are, gay or straight, it is totally normal, natural, and healthy to want somebody to go through life with. It's central to our humanity. — Rob Bell

My music is very personal. I've created it in solitude. I face a white wall and beller. I like that sound - the expression of loneliness. That's what it's all about. — Dwight Yoakam

My own study of the networked life has left me thinking about intimacy - about being with people in person, hearing their voices and seeing their faces, trying to know their hearts. And it has left me thinking about solitude-the kind that refreshes and restores. Loneliness is failed solitude. To experience solitude you must be able to summon yourself by yourself; otherwise you will only know how to be lonely — Sherry Turkle

Loneliness is the bitter fruit of wilderness. — The Paper Doll

We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community. — Dorothy Day

You travel life has the aspect of a dream. It is something outside the normal, yet you are in it. It is peopled with characters you have never seen before and in all probability will never see again. It brings occasional homesickness, and loneliness, and pangs of longing ... But you are like the Vikings who have gone into a world of adventure, and home is not home until you return. — Agatha Christie

Maybe the biggest problem with loneliness is that we walk around thinking we're the only ones suffering from it. — Jeanne Marie Laskas

Maybe it's the fact the most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip - and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendant horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it's stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete. — David Foster Wallace

Loneliness is black coffee and late-night television; solitude is herb tea and soft music. Solitude, quality solitude, is an assertion of self-worth, because only in the stillness can we hear the truth of our own unique voices. — Pearl Cleage

Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine. — Honore De Balzac

The orange turns to dull bronze light and continues to show what it has shown all day long, but now it seems to show it without enthusiasm. Across those dry hills, within those little houses in the distance are people who've been there all day long, going about the business of the day, who now find nothing unusual or different in this strange darkening landscape, as we do. If we were to come upon them early in the day they might be curious about us and what we're here for. but now in the evening they'd just resent our presence. The workday is over. It's time for supper and family and relaxation and turning inward at home. We ride unnoticed down this empty highway through this strange country I've never seen before, and now a heavy feeling of isolation and loneliness becomes dominant and my spirits wane with the sun. — Robert M. Pirsig

At the innermost core of all loneliness is a deep and powerful yearning for union with one's lost self. — Brendan Francis

As far as loneliness, I feel Los Angeles and its layout, having to drive everywhere - it is a lonely place. It's an isolated city in that respect because you're driving to places alone listening to the radio. — Jason Schwartzman

Solitude is one thing and being alone is another. Solitude can be isolation, an escape, an unwanted thing; but to be alone without the burden of life, with that utter freedom in which time/thought has never been, is to be with the universe. In solitude there is despairing loneliness, a sense of being abandoned, lost, craving for some kind of relationship, like a ship lost at sea. All our daily activity leads to this isolation, with its endless conflicts and miseries, and rare joys thrown in. This isolation is corruption, manifested in politics, in business and of course in organized religions. Corruption exists in the very high places and on the very doorstep. To be tied is corruption; any form of attachment leads to it, whether it be to a belief, faith, ideal, experience, or any conclusion. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

The most evident quality of human life is its loneliness. — Austin O'Malley

Does no one want to know the truth here, Mr. Archer? The real loneliness is living among all these kind of people who only ask one to pretend! — Edith Wharton

An overcrowded world is the ideal place in which to be lonely. — Brian W. Aldiss

When we truly realize that we are all alone is when we need others the most. — Ronald Anthony Cross

Loneliness is simply the felt experience of our "Obediential Potency." In our loneliness, "in the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable,"18 we experience our nature, learn the reason why God had made us, and are pushed out of ourselves in order to move toward that end. — Ronald Rolheiser

I think the hardest part of being a teenage, or any age really, is the misconception that you're alone. You're not alone. You're not the only one going through what you're going through, and life does get better if you want it to. — Ellie Elisabeth

Loneliness is a darkness of the soul — N.K. Jemisin

This is just a nigger talkin', an' a busted-back nigger. So it don't mean nothing, see? You couldn't remember it anyways. I seen it over an' over-a guy talkin' to another guy and it don't make no difference if he don't hear or understand. The thing is, they're talkin', or they're settin' still not talkin'. It don't make no difference, no difference. — John Steinbeck

The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all. — Beryl Markham

All I know is that I shall be alone again. There is nothing more terrible than to be alone among human beings. — Stefan Zweig

A morning of awkwardness is far better then a night of loneliness — Hank Moody

No one in the modern world is more lonely than the writer with a literary conscience. — Ellen Glasgow

There is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along ... — Rainer Maria Rilke

Dear Natasha,
It's the middle of the night. I can't sleep. Thoughts are creeping through my head like darkness slips around the bodies of sky scrapers in every city we've ever been to. From the bottom up, suffocating the life on the street first and then raising to the head and the brain, circling into smog and clouds until the black stretches up so high that nobody can even remember what the stars used to look like.
This is how I feel when I lie awake and think of you. I miss you. — Melodie Ramone

But if we don't have experience with solitude - and this is often the case today - we start to equate loneliness and solitude. This reflects the impoverishment of our experience. If we don't know the satisfactions of solitude, we only know the panic of loneliness. — Sherry Turkle

God hates loneliness, and community is God's answer to loneliness. When we walk alongside other people, we find a community where we learn how to love. — Rick Warren

Times may have changed, but there are some things that are always with us - loneliness is one of them. — Laurie Graham

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

But then I realized, they didn't mean their own mothers. Not those weak women, those victims. Drug addicts, shopaholics, cookie bakers. They didn't mean the women who let them down, who failed to help them into womanhood. They didn't mean the mothers washing dishes wishing they'd never married, the ones in the ER, saying they fell down the stairs, not the ones in prison saying loneliness is the human condition.
They wanted the real mother, the blood mother, the great womb, mother of a fierce compassion, a woman large enough to hold all the pain, to carry it away. What we needed was someone who bled, someone deep and rich as a field, a wide hipped mother, auwesome, immense, women like huge soft couches, mothers coursing with blood, mothers big enough, wide enough, for us to hide in, to sink down to the bottom of, mothers who would breathe for us when we could not breathe anymore, mothers who would fight for us, who would kill for us, and die for us. — Janet Fitch

We do not need to grieve for the dead. Why should we grieve for them? They are now in a place where there is no more shadow, darkness, loneliness, isolation, or pain. They are home. — John O'Donohue

But the solitude in Ohio is different from that of most other places. There is a certain silence to it, a certain loneliness. — Pittacus Lore

Acting is the greatest answer to my loneliness that I have found. — Claire Danes

The laughter of the world is merely loneliness pathetically trying to reassure itself. — Neal A. Maxwell

Loneliness is just a passing disillusion we can conquer by acknowledging those around us. — Jenny Cutler Lopez

The pain of being alone is completely out of this world, isn't it? I don't know why, but I understand your feelings so much, it actually hurts. — Masashi Kishimoto

Loneliness is the best way to realize that you are not alone.. — C. Massios

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

One cat in a house is a sign of loneliness. — Edward Dahlberg

Real loneliness consists not in being alone, but in being with the wrong person, in the suffocating darkness of a room in which no deep communication is possible. — Sydney J. Harris

The terrible truth about depression, and the part of its nature that terrifies me the most, is that it appears to operate beyond reason; feelings happen to you for no apparent cause. Or rather, there is usually an initial cause, a 'trigger'as they say in therapeutic circles, but in severe depression the feelings of sadness, grief, loneliness and despair continue long after the situation has resolved itself. It is as if depression has a life of its own, which is perhaps why so many sufferers refer to it as a living thing, as some sort of demon or beast. — Sally Brampton

If you are not capable of being alone, your relationship is false. It is just a trick to avoid your loneliness, nothing else. — Rajneesh

What is the difference between being an independent person
and being a person who is accepting of loneliness — Mira Gonzalez

There can be tremendous loneliness in the crossover to a soul-centered life. Walking through uncharted territory often means walking alone. This is particularly true in the transition stages before we find a conscious soulpod. It can be like primary school all over again - who will be my first real friends? — Jeff Brown

For how smart we think we are, how facile with words, we don't have a word for this feeling, the feeling of being blessed by belonging. If the universe is an unfolding bud, then I am a part of its creative surge, along with the flowing of water and the growing of pines. I can find a kind of camaraderie in this universe, once I recover from the astonishment of it. Or maybe not camaraderie exactly. What is the opposite of loneliness? — Kathleen Moore

Our mind is a crazy nightclub of cacophonous sound filled with strange images and one-night stands: our mind tells us lonely, loveless tales that leave us frightened but really have no lasting power — Lauren Roedy Vaughn

The world is "sick" with loneliness in spite of multitudes of people living in it — Sunday Adelaja

The third kind of loneliness is avoiding unnecesssary activities. When we're lonely in a "hot" way, we look for something to save us; we look for a way out. We get this queasy feeling that we call loneliness, and our minds just go wild trying to come up with companions to save us from despair. That's called unnecessary activity. It's a way of keeping ourselves busy so we don't have to feel any pain. It could take the form of obsessively daydreaming of true romance, or turning a tidbit of gossip into the six o'clock news, or even going off by ourselves into the wilderness. The point is that in all these activities, we are seeking companionship in our usual, habitual way, using our same old repetitive ways of distancing ourselves from the demon loneliness. Could we just settle down and have some — Pema Chodron

If he'd learned one thing while he'd been away, it was that loneliness is the most taboo subject in the world. Forget sex or politics or religion. Or even failure. Loneliness is what clears out a room. — Douglas Coupland

There is no loneliness like that of a failed marriage. — Alexander Theroux

Smallness is subversive, because smallness can creep into smaller places and wreak transformation at the most vulnerable, cellular level. In a time when largeness is threatening to topple us, I wish to remember and praise the beauty of smallness, in order to banish the Goliath of loneliness. — Sarah Ruhl

I love your loneliness. It is brave. It makes the universe want to protect you. — Ben Okri

Human beings, in point of fact, are lonely by nature, and one should feel sorry for them and love them and mourn with them. It is certain that people would understand one another better and love one another more if they would admit to one another how lonely they were, how sad they were in their tormented, anxious longings and feeble hopes. — Halldor Laxness

A young outcast will often feel that there is something wrong with himself, but as he gets older, grows more confident in who he is, he will adapt, he will begin to feel that there is something wrong with everyone else. — Criss Jami

In solitude the lonely man is eaten up by himself, among crowds by the many. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The misery of other people is only an abstraction [ ... ] something that can be sympathized with only by drawing from one's own experiences. But as it stands, true empathy remains impossible. And so long as it is, people will continue to suffer the pressure of their seemingly singular existence. — Nicole Krauss

Don't you see that I cannot be composed, I cannot reconcile myself, because there is no other reality but loneliness for me and before I am dragged back into isolation I will clasp and grasp and claw in fright even at you without consciousness - even I - and I am afraid that I cannot survive if I have to go on into myself. — Allen Ginsberg

I am never lonely when I am sharing [Christ] with others. There is a great exhilaration in talking to others about [Him]. — Billy Graham

People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other. — Wendell Berry

We've been very lonely, but we had it easy. Because death is so heavy - we, too young to know about it, couldn't handle it. After this you and I may end up seeing nothing but suffering, difficulty and ugliness, but if only you'll agree to it, I want for us to go on to more difficult places, happier places, what ever comes, together. I want you to make the decision after you're completely better, so take your time thinking about it. In the mean time, though, don't disappear on me. — Banana Yoshimoto

To break the silence the old man said the first thing that came to his mind: Loneliness is a type of violence. — Jonathan Messinger

There is one thing I can say for certain: the older a person gets, the lonelier he becomes. It's true for everyone. But maybe that isn't wrong. What I mean is, in a sense our lives are nothing more than a series of stages to help us get used to loneliness. That being the case, there's no reason to complain. And besides who would be complaint to anyway? (A Walk To Kobe, Granta 124: Travel) — Haruki Murakami

Any extended period of negative emotions can lead to you giving in to despair and accepting your fate. If you remain alone for a long time, you will decide loneliness is a fact of life and pass up opportunities to hang out with people. The loss of control in any situation can lead to this state. — David McRaney

The sky is one whole, the water another; and between those two infinities the soul of man is in loneliness. — Henryk Sienkiewicz

I flipped through Xuanzang's records almost 1400 years later, and thought that the written word was a fragile truth. His records were meticulous, but there was a vastness left unsaid. There were spools of thought that fell through the cracks and were swallowed by time. I hungered to know if he ever lost sight of is training, if on empty mountain roads loneliness crept into the sides of his mind till he thought he was mad, if in foreign marketplaces he succumbed to desire or greed or temper. — Mishi Saran

You and I share the same DNA.
Is there anything more lonely than that? — Charlie Kaufman

If God exists, and I truly don't believe he does, he will know that there are limits to human understanding. He was the one who created the confusion in which there is poverty, injustice, greed, and loneliness. He doubtless had the best of intentions, but the results have proved disastrous; if God exists, he will be generous with those creatures who chose to leave this Earth early, and he might even apologize for having made us spend time here. — Paulo Coelho

Once I accepted the fact that I was bad luck, I shied away from group activities. And groups. And activities. I started spending a lot of time in my room, tucked under my covers reading books. There's only so much damage a book can do, and I wasn't worried about hurting myself. Accidentally hurting yourself is way better than hurting other people.
Sure, I got lonely for a while. But getting invited to slumber parties just wasn't worth the stress of wondering if I might accidentally burn down the house with my flat iron or be the only survivor of a freak sleepover massacre. And loneliness is just like everything else - if you endure it long enough, you get used to it. — Paula Stokes

Loneliness is not cured by human company. Loneliness is cured by contact with reality. — Anthony De Mello

For the first time in my life, I actually wished that everyone was the same. And I despised myself for my "differentness" or "uniqueness" as an individual. In the world there are lots of social groups people can fit into, and I've spent time roaming in and out of a few and being kicked out of many. Now I stand on the outside and look in. Wondering where is my place. Coming to a conclusion, I have no place. — Laura Hanna

Loneliness is a bitter, wretched companion. sometimes it just won't let go. — Tahereh Mafi

Don't you realize the Internet is just a way for millions of sad people to be completely alone together? — Wayne Gladstone

There are those that wonder which is worse: Not being able to reach out or not having anyone to reach for. There are some that ponder which is the greater ache: Not being able to tell or not having anyone that cares enough to ask. Perhaps it's not one person that is to blame, but both. — Donna Lynn Hope

The General Public is a statistical fiction created by a few exceptional men to make the loneliness of being exceptional a little easier to bear. — Samuel R. Delany

The worst part is the unknown. The pain of being alone, the loneliness, is familiar. You've dealt with that. You understand it. But loving someone, risking everything, is unknown. There's no way to know how bad it's going to be. You barely survive the pain of being alone, so how can you deal with anything worse? So you don't bother to try. — Susan Mallery

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

I realize that nothing is really normal. All it takes to alter normalcy is a death or a birth. Or just some misguided fear, love, or loneliness that never goes away. — Kevin Sampsell

I wish other people would write about loneliness more. It's hard to remember that it's not personal. We live in a world that is built to make people lonely ... It's difficult to remember that your loneliness is not really about you and everyone has it. — Jessa Crispin

You happen to be possessed of a certain verbal acuity coupled with a relentless hair trigger humor and surface cheer spackling over a chronic melancholia and loneliness
a grotesquely caricatured version of your deepest self which you trot out at the slightest provocation to endearing and glib comic effect, thus rendering you the kind of fellow who is beloved by all yet loved by none, all of it to distract, however fleetingly, from the cold and dead-faced truth that with each passing year you face the unavoidable certainty of a solitary future in which you will perish one day while vainly attempting the Heimlich maneuver on yourself over the back of the kitchen chair — David Rakoff

Companionship refused is worse than loneliness. — Mark Haddon

So be encouraged. The agony you are experiencing is normal. The loneliness you feel is to be expected. The sleepless nights when you stare up at the ceiling and think, "What have I gotten myself into?" are part of the process. All of those experiences will ultimately lead you to the conclusion, "God, if you don't come through, I'm sunk!" And that is exactly where he wants you to be - and stay. For this reason, men and women of vision are men and women of faith. And through their faith, God is honored. — Andy Stanley

The differences were plain enough, and yet I saw that they were as nothing compared with what we had in common. As I lay in bed at night, the sky outside my window reflecting the city's dim glow, I thought about Abuelita's fierce loyalty to blood. But what really binds people as family? The way they shore themselves up with stories; the way siblings can feud bitterly but still come through for each other; how an untimely death, a child gone before a parent, shakes the very foundations; how the weaker ones, the ones with invisible wounds, are sheltered; how a constant din is medicine against loneliness; and how celebrating the same occasions year after year steels us to the changes they herald. And always food at the center of it all. — Sonia Sotomayor