Love Loneliness Quotes & Sayings

I was in awe of the mystery of human compassion and the inability of love to make the distance between us any more bearable. — Keith Hollihan

When we have no reason to be happy we often think to end ourselves, We often think we have no one in this world, it happens when our loved ones leave us and make us alone in this vast universe. — Debolina

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

The worst kind of loneliness, I think, is to be in the presence of those you love and have them treat you like you aren't there. — John Burley

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

The song is languid and speaks of love and loneliness and loss. Why does love seem to go with the sad things? — Lisa Ann Sandell

Maybe that was the key to getting rid of the loneliness, I thought. Treating love as entertainment, not as salvation. — Tiffanie DeBartolo

I never wanted to be alone, but I always opted for loneliness. I am an emotional, sensitive and expressive creature. I cannot detach my feelings, never could I control. I fall in love and I can be easily broken. — M.F. Moonzajer

Love is something totally new every day, but pleasure is not, pleasure has continuity. Love is always new, and therefore it is its own eternity. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Going from love to loneliness was worse than not knowing love at all. — Taryn Browning

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

Professionally," Susan said, "I'm not at all sure that love, as such, is not simply a complex of human impulses: need, identification, possessiveness, fear of loneliness, impulse to replicate the family from which you sprang, sexual desire, anger, the desire to punish, the desire to be punished. — Robert B. Parker

Thank God for them all, of course, and for that strange interval, which was most of my life, when I read out of loneliness, and when bad company was much better than no company. You can love a bad book for its haplessness or pomposity or gall, if you have that starveling appetite for things human, which I devoutly hope you never will have. "The full soul loatheth an honeycomb; but to the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet. — Marilynne Robinson

Loneliness is the fundamental force that urgees mystics to a deeper union with God ... An experience of God quenches this thirst for the absolute but at the same time, paradoxiacally, whets it, because this is an experience that can never be total; by necessity, the knowledge of God is always partial. So loneliness opens up mystics to a desire to love each other and every human being as God loves them. — Jean Vanier

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

Everyone keeps telling me that time heals all wounds, but no one can tell me what I'm supposed to do right now. Right now I can't sleep. It's right now that I can't eat. Right now I still hear his voice and sense his presence even though I know he's not here. Right now all I seem to do is cry. I know all about time and wounds healing, but even if I had all the time in the world, I still don't know what to do with all this hurt right now. — Nina Guilbeau

Oh to have you with me, to have you here, not to be alone, but to be with you, my beauty, you of all souls! You. — Anne Rice

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

Every time, Love pushed down the door where her loneliness lived. The Music came and sealed the chamber of her heart. She was filled with clear sweetness that was there from the start. — David Paul Kirkpatrick

Even in the depths of sleep, in which he had to satisfy his need for protection and love by curling himself up into a trembling ball, he could not rid himself of the feeling of loneliness and homelessness. — Bruno Schulz

The absurdity of it, she thought, this quest for the love of a man who was her equal. She loathed herself for it. She thought of her life (and herself) as a missed opportunity. Somewhere, back there, she had missed something. What was it? When was it? The worse horror beneath: that she hadn't missed anything, that her life was merely the sum of her choices and that her choices had led her to this: another truncated encounter; the carcinogenic belief in the idea of a Great Love; clammy sex; loneliness in the small hours. — Glen Duncan

Maybe love was superstition, a prayer we said to keep the truth of loneliness at bay. — Leigh Bardugo

I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Love is about control and loss of control. In love, we give ourselves up to each other. We lose control or, rather, we cede control to another, trusting in a way we would never otherwise trust, letting the other person hold the deepest part of our being in their hands, with the capacity to hurt it mortally. This cession of control is a deeply terrifying thing, which is why we crave it and are drawn to it like moths to the flame, and why we have to trust it unconditionally. In love, so many hazardous uncertainties in life are resolved: the constant negotiation with other souls, the fear and distrust that lie behind almost every interaction, the petty loneliness that we learned to live with as soon as we grew apart from our mother's breast. We lose all this in the arms of another. We come home at last to a primal security, made manifest by each other's nakedness ...
And with that loss of control comes mutual power, the power to calm, the power to redeem, and the power to hurt. — Andrew Sullivan

The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Grief causes you to leave yourself. You step outside your narrow little pelt. And you can't feel grief unless you've had love before it - grief is the final outcome of love, because it's love lost. [ ... ] It's the cycle of love completed: to love, to lose, to feel grief, to leave, and then to love again. Grief is the awareness that you will have to be alone, and there is nothing beyond that because being alone is the ultimate final destiny of each individual living creature. That's what death is, the great loneliness. — Philip K. Dick

People Die ...
Beauty Fades ...
Love Changes ...
And You Will Always Be Alone — L.J.Smith

I'm not asking you to do anything of the sort - I know you can't marry someone as a cold, political act. But you'll be far from me, and I know well how loneliness eats away at affections and passions. You must marry someone you love, someone who'll be your companion and trusted adviser. You need such a voice by your side, especially in moments of doubt." Kuni — Ken Liu

We can all nod and smile and carry on our end of the conversation in an endless loop while our minds float somewhere outside our bodies. We are thinking about our kids, about finances and fiancees and soon-to-be ex wives, about the sex we're not having, the sex our soon-to-be ex wives are having, about loneliness and love and death and Dad, and this constant crowd is like a fog on a dark road; you just keep driving and watch it dissipate in your low beams. — Jonathan Tropper

There's something I want to say in this space, but it's an emptiness where there's usually a hug. - Colin Morton to Mary Lee Bragg, 1972 — David Eso

The simplest spiritual discipline is some degree of solitude and silence. But it's the hardest, because none of us want to be with someone we don't love. Besides that, we invariably feel bored with ourselves, and all of our loneliness comes to the surface.
We won't have the courage to go into that terrifying place without Love to protect us and lead us, without the light and love of God overriding our own self-doubt. Such silence is the most spacious and empowering technique in the world, yet it's not a technique at all. It's precisely the refusal of all technique. — Richard Rohr

Jealousy is a terrible thing. I know all the psychological triggers. The fear of losing control, the fear of loss, the fear of abandonment, neglect and loneliness ... But the most destructive thing about jealousy is that it kills what it values-the love you want to save won't survive the constraints of jealousy. There is no entitlement. Love is either equal or a tragedy. — Michael Robotham

A Paradise for you and me
Trust, true love to guide us free
Loneliness shall not fill the day
I will forever be with you
Our Love is beautiful like the sunshine lighting the way
Your gentle feel
Your caring hands
There is no doubt in your soul
No eerie place in your heart to express this feeling
Our compassion flows in the waves just to save and brighten my day My heart has no hoes Awaiting your pace
to touch this place
Our love, withstanding all odds Diminishing hate, in our thoughts There is no place I rather be til eternity... Than in your soul, life and in your dreams... I am here to stay with you forever. — Henry Johnson Jr

I had created a happy world of make-believe around me during the long years of loneliness, a world of beauty and love. It had helped me to survive, this lovely world that was to be mine when the war was over. — Gerda Weissmann Klein

Sophie dear,' I said. 'Are you in love with him - with this spider-man?'
'Oh, don't call him that - please - we can't any of us help being what we are. His name's Gordon. He's kind to me, David. He's fond of me. You've got to have as little as I have to know how much that means. You've never known loneliness. You can't understand the awful emptiness that's waiting all round us here. I'd have given him babies gladly, if I could ... I - oh, why do they do that to us? Why didn't they kill me? It would have been kinder than this ... '
She sat without a sound. The tears squeezed out from under the closed lids and ran down her face. I took her hand between my own.
I remembered watching. The man with his arm linked in the woman's, the small figure on top of the pack-horse waving back to me as they disappeared into the trees. Myself desolate, a kiss still damp on my
cheek, a lock tied with a yellow ribbon in my hand. I looked at her now, and my heart ached. — John Wyndham

I must conquer my loneliness alone. I must be happy with myself or I have nothing to offer you. Two halves have little choice but to join; and yes, they do make a whole. But two wholes when they coincide ... that is beauty. That is love ... — Peter McWilliams

I learned much too late
that what you called love
was nothing but a
desperate and irrational
fear of a life lived alone. — Beau Taplin

Maybe you've understood by now that for men like myself, that is, melancholy men for whom love, agony, happiness and misery are just excuses for maintaining eternal loneliness, life offers neither great joy nor great sadness. — Orhan Pamuk

What did falling in love do for you? Can you ever really explain it? It filled empty spaces I never knew were empty. It cured a loneliness I never knew I had. It gave me joy. And freedom. I think that was the most amazing part. I suddenly felt both embraced and freed at the same time. — Louise Penny

The loneliest days are the ones where you keep company with someone you love who can't hear you. — Holly Robinson

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

When we feel lonely we keep looking for a person or persons who can take our loneliness away. Our lonely hearts cry out, 'Please hold me, touch me, speak to me, pay attention to me.' But soon we discover that the person we expect to take our loneliness away cannot give us what we ask for. Often that person feels oppressed by our demands and runs away, leaving us in despair. As long as we approach another person from our loneliness, no mature human relationship can develop. Clinging to one another in loneliness is suffocating and eventually becomes destructive. For love to be possible we need the courage to create space between us and to trust that this space allows us to dance together. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

An emptiness rules at its core, a rottenness, a silence when one of you retires to bed without saying good night, when you eat together without conversation, when the phone's passed wordlessly to the other. An emptiness when every night you lie in the double bed, restlessly awake, astounded at how closely hate can nudge against love, can wind around it sinuously like a cat. An emptiness when you realize that the loneliest you've ever been is within a marriage, as a wife. — Nikki Gemmell

But one can acquire a taste for love as for loneliness or ugliness as for saintliness. Each a special way of going down. — Jack Gilbert

Smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss — Sigmund Freud

Even in an empty room, we are never alone. — Wayne Gerard Trotman

I was feeling lonely without her, but the fact that I could feel lonely at all was consolation. Loneliness wasn't such a bad feeling. It was like the stillness of the pin oak after the little birds had flown off. — Haruki Murakami

I sense the joy of young and old,
I hear wondrous tales told,
Beauty surrounds me as I gaze above,
But I am alone for I live without love. — Anonymous

My father gave me a ruined boy to compensate for the fact that he does not love me.
The boy is fragile, broken - broke himself - broke everything.
I asked him why he did it. He said because the world was unlivable. He said it was unlovable, but I think he meant himself. I think he meant that loneliness is sometimes painful.
I curl against him, tuck my head beneath his chin and listen to his heart. It says stay and wait. It says regret. He knows what it is to want love, a love so fierce you grow roots. I hear his heart say please.
He went looking for angels and found me instead, girl of the sorrows, sad but not sorry. I waited for a sign, a star to fall. He reached for a knife and drew branches. — Brenna Yovanoff

And because no one answered or cared and a conversation went on without her she felt profoundly lonely, suspecting once more for herself a particular doom of exclusion. Something of the trees in their intimacy of shadow was shared by the husband and wife and their host in the tree-shadowed room. She thought of love with its gift of importance. "I must break in on all this," she thought as she looked around the room. — Elizabeth Bowen

She talked about wanting to be a part of something, wanting to be desired, to be 'special', craving to be loved. She talked about experiencing the kind of loneliness so immense it could swallow you up. She called it 'loneliness that crowds couldn't cure'. — Cupcake Brown

Forgive us, O Lord, we acknowledge ourselves as type of the common man,
Of the men and women who shut the door and sit by the fire;
Who fear the blessing of God, the loneliness of the night of God, the surrender required, the deprivation inflicted;
Who fear the injustice of men less than the justice of God;
Who fear the hand at the window, the fire in the thatch, the fist in the tavern, the push into the canal,
Less than we fear the love of God. — T. S. Eliot

On the Eighth Day Adam Slept Alone

It must have been
the eighth day.

A day the scribes and Pharisees conveniently
left out.

Adam was either inspecting goats
or naming the birds

when something pinched
my side.

I had to stop pruning the tree of knowledge
to catch my breath.

God had taken a long weekend.

At first I thought the solitude of gardening
was going to my head.

Was it loneliness?
An omen? A vision?

For a moment I thought I would
ascend.

Then I realized it was just a rib
missing.

How you found your way in
along the banks of the third river

I will never know
but I still shiver to recall

how perfectly your fingers
fell into place

along the ridges
of my ribcage.

Go ahead, Love,
take every last bone.

Make of me
what you will. — Nancy Boutilier

Love and Loneliness inversely proportional to each other. Love increases then loneliness decreases from this world. — Anonymous

Love all the people you can. The sufferings from love are not to be compared to the sorrows of loneliness. — Susan Hale

To see and feel one's beloved naked for the first time is one of life's pure, irreducible epiphanies. If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include that truth of contact or be forever hollow. To make love to the one true person who deserves that love is one of the few absolute rewards of being a human being, balancing all of the pain, loss, awkwardness, loneliness, idiocy, compromise, and clumsiness that go with the human condition. To make love to the right person makes up for a lot of mistakes. — Dan Simmons

Maybe a first love exists to reaffirm the best parts of yourself, the choices you made when you didn't worry about the consequences. Maybe a first love exists to remind you to be brave in the moment, to stand up for your feelings, instead of shrinking back in the face of potential loneliness. — Adriana Trigiani

All I ever wanted was to reach out and touch another human being not just with my hands but with my heart. — Tahereh Mafi

Sometimes all we need to be able to continue alone
are the dead
rattling the walls
that close us in. — Charles Bukowski

Hey Circe, how come your horoscope predictions are never that a hot girl is gonna fall madly in love with me forever and ever?"
"Uh, cause you're a dork Seth!" She taunted.
"Oh yeah," Seth said happily smiling at her. "That explains the devastating loneliness and constant abuse by alpha males ... — Charlie Fey

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

Fully revealed, the green eyes pierced her heart. In them, she sensed pain, loneliness and despair. Yet they weren't seeing her. Focused on the movement of the blade, the mesmerizing gaze seemed a world away. Stroke after stroke, the unmasked face appeared in the mirror. — Chris Lange

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

Give me hunger,
O you gods that sit and give
The world its orders.
Give me hunger, pain and want,
Shut me out with shame and failure
From your doors of gold and fame,
Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!
But leave me a little love,
A voice to speak to me in the day end,
A hand to touch me in the dark room
Breaking the long loneliness. — Carl Sandburg

She climbed into his embrace. Bryan stayed awake until he heard her breathing steadily. "When you find your wings, don't fly away," he whispered. — Laura Bacchi

I HIDE myself within my flower
That wearing on your breast,
You, unsuspecting, wear me too
And angels know the rest.
I hide myself within my flower,
That, fading from your vase,
You, unsuspecting, feel for me
Almost a loneliness ... — Emily Dickinson

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

Please, God. Help me. Take this pain away. Please fill this loneliness with your love. Help me, God, please, help me. — David

A couple may claim to be bonded by love, but we boatmen may see instead resentment, anger, even hatred. Or a great barrenness. Sometimes a fear of loneliness and nothing more. — Kazuo Ishiguro

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

But how much love, oh, Lord, how much love I experienced at times in those dreams of mine, in those "escapes into everything beautiful and sublime." Even though it was fantastic love, even though it was never directed at anything human, there was still so much love that afterward, in reality, I no longer felt any impulse to direct it: that would have been an unnecessary luxury. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross. — Adolf Hitler

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 lay for a long time in silence, staring at the ceiling. Was my life always to be like this? I wondered. Was it going to go, forever, in an instant, from sunshine to shadow? From pandemonium to loneliness? From fierce anger to a fiercer kind of love? — Alan Bradley

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

Ignore the loneliness, enjoy your presence. — M.F. Moonzajer

And what I said was I'll miss you,
What I meant to say was that I love you,
What I wanted to say was that I meant what I said
I miss you like I miss my own bed
after too many nights of sleeping on couches
or hardwood floors
Or sitting silently behind the doors
Of hotel rooms became wounds
Breathing life in to this loneliness
I miss you
Like a burn victim must miss their own skin
I miss you like a sad ending
Must miss someplace new to begin
Because some say that the highway becomes a flat line
if you travel it for too long
I can't tell if that's true or false,
But I'm racing down it towards you trying to find my
Pulse. — Shane Koyczan

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

All that he had of her was his memory, where he held every moment, every single moment that she had been his. That was all he had, to keep out the loneliness. — Juliet Marillier

God never promised us an easy life. He never promised that we wouldn't suffer, that we wouldn't feel despair and loneliness and confusion and desperation. What he did promise was that in our suffering we would never be alone. And though we may sometimes make ourselves blind and deaf to his presence he is beside us and around us and within us always. We are never separated from his love. And he promised us something else, the most important promise of all. That there would be surcease. That there would be an end to our pain and our suffering and our loneliness, that we would be with him and know him, and this would be heaven. — William Kent Krueger

This life is difficult. We lose fathers, brothers, mothers, songbirds and pieces of ourselves. Whips strike the innocent, honors go to the guilty, and there is too much loneliness. I would be a fool to pray for my children to escape all of that. Ask for too much and it might actually turn out worse. But I can pray for small things, like fertile fields, a mother's love, a child's smile - a life that's less bitter than sweet. — Nadia Hashimi

I don't want my life to not be the way I expected.
I may not be scared of crowds. Or the dark. Or small spaces. But I am afraid.
I am afraid of responsibility; I am afraid of not living up to expectations, of the changing future, of growing up, not knowing, sex, relationships, hardship, secrets, grades, judgement, falling short, loneliness, change, confusion, arguments, curiosity, love, hate, losing, pressure, differences, honesty, lies.
I am afraid of me.
Yet, despite this, I know I am brave. I know I am brave because I've accepted my invisible fears and haven't let them overcome me.
I want you to know that you're brave because you know your fears. You're brave because you introduced yourself. You're brave because you said 'No, I don't understand.' You're brave because you are here. — Emily Trunko

Making a child feel unique means making him or her feel uniquely wanted. Having a talent is one thing; feeling that the universe welcomes it is another. Uniqueness without love is barren and very little different from loneliness. Today you can sit down and list each child's talents, having your children participate, in order to reinforce the notion that talents are given to us by spirit for our happiness and fulfillment. — Deepak Chopra

If you love, you will suffer. The only way to protect yourself against suffering is to protect yourself against love - and that is the greatest suffering of all, loneliness. — Peter Kreeft

Man has no choice but to love. For when he does not, he finds his alternatives lie in loneliness, destruction and despair. — Leo Buscaglia

Don't say I'm alone, this makes us depressed. loneliness are the moments when we can know more about ourselves. loneliness are the moments when we are only in God's company. Just feel it and enjoy these moments. — Kusum Manjeshri

Anyone who knows how scary it is to be alone, can't help loving others." ~Rin Sohma — Natsuki Takaya

Everlasting Light

Let me be your everlasting light
Your sun when there is none
I'm a shepherd for you
And I'll guide you through
Let me be your everlasting light

Let me be your everlasting light
Your home when there is cold
In me you can confide
When no one's by your side
Let me be your everlasting light

Oh baby, can't you see
It's shining just for you
Loneliness is over
Dark days are through
They're through

Let me be your everlasting light
Your train going away from pain
Love is the coal that makes this train roll
Let me be your everlasting light

Yeah, let me be your everlasting light
Let me be your everlasting light
Be your everlasting light — The Black Keys

I didn't think I was in a morbid mood, but it appears I am. My mind goes round and round trying to figure things out, but I always come back to the same two things: Loneliness and Death. Life ends before we figure anything out, most importantly how not to be lonely. Solitude is fine. But feeling like you have no one to love - abject lonliness - is not alright. — Jonathan Ames

We have forgotten love, and Sat lonely beside each other. We have eaten together, Lonely behind our plates, we Have hidden behind children, We have slept together in A lonely bed. Now my heart Turns toward you, awake at last, Penitent, lost in the last Loneliness. Speak to me. Talk To me. Break the black silence. — Kenneth Rexroth

I just never noticed how little of me existed before. I was a shadow without a person. — Michael J. Sullivan

there is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in the slow movement of
the hands of a clock.

people so tired
mutilated
either by love or no love.

people just are not good to each other
one on one.

the rich are not good to the rich
the poor are not good to the poor.

we are afraid.

our educational system tells us
that we can all be
big-ass winners.

it hasn't told us
about the gutters
or the suicides.

or the terror of one person
aching in one place
alone

untouched
unspoken to

watering a plant. — Charles Bukowski

I think the love between a child and parent is wonderful. You know, Mei ... I haven't seen my mother for over two years. I used to live with her ... but now I live with my father. I used to be sad and wonder why it happened ... but parents have a lot of things they have to deal with too. I saw how they were suffering ... and I know they both love me a lot. You can't let loneliness harden your heart. Mei, you know ... Misuzu loves you, don't you? — Bisco Hatori

For so many years she'd lived a life absent of emotion or companionship or love. She'd functioned as an automaton, acting out her part without feeling, lacking even the introspection to ask why she'd cast herself in this role, or where it all might end. It hadn't even been a lonely existence because she felt no loneliness; she felt nothing. Whereas now, she felt everything. Emotions festered in her; fear pecked like a carrion bird, guilt ripped and chewed. And, at her core, that crushing sense of hopelessness, threatening to consume everything that she'd started to become. — Stephen Lloyd Jones

And the boy's eyes are searching hers with something like loneliness, like the very last thing he wants is to be left behind right now. — Jennifer E. Smith

Respect for sovereignity, for privacy, for total independence. Gentle alliances against loneliness, they were, cool rational love-affairs without the love. — Richard Bach

The joy we feel to be together seems worthy of a fairy tale, from the moment our eyes met we felt the crush of love. This is not a passing infatuation, ours is love of truth. — Auliq Ice

You are the least-alone person I have ever known. Your heart has always included within it everyone who let you love them, and many who did not. — Orson Scott Card

Call it professional interest. You see, Jessamine, love is a kind of poison; one of my favorite kinds, in fact. It infects the blood; it takes over the mind; it seizes dominion over the body. It amuses me to think of him pining for you. Aching for what he cannot have. The loneliness in his soul is festering like a wound. There is nothing I could do for him that is worse that what you have already done, my lovely. And I assure you, in his case there will be no cure. — Maryrose Wood