Real Loneliness Quotes & Sayings

Friends are the real superheroes. They battle our worst enemies - loneliness, grief, anxiety, depression, fear, and doubt - every time they come around. — Richelle E. Goodrich

I ignore people who need me and latch on to people who don't. I dive into every other world except my own just because I want something more glamorous than my real life. I do destructive shit so a stupid hypocritical fish will like me.
I fall for fish instead of girls. — Hannah Moskowitz

Fearfulness obscures the distinction between real threat on one hand and on the other the terrors that beset those who see threat everywhere ... Granting the perils of the world, it is potentially a very costly indulgence to fear indiscriminately, and to try to stimulate fear in others, just for the excitement of it, or because to do so channels anxiety or loneliness or prejudice or resentment into an emotion that can seem to those who indulge it like shrewdness or courage or patriotism. — Marilynne Robinson

I lend everyone my ear,
But nobody my heart,
And I sure would like to change that,
But I don't know where to start,
I smile more to myself,
Than the world will ever see,
Because the only time my smile is real,
Is in my own company,
People don't know how I feel,
They never even ask,
It seems I have fooled them all,
They can't see past my mask,
If they were with me late at night,
When the world was still asleep,
Maybe I'd let them sort,
Through the secrets that I keep,
But when I wake at 2am,
Nobody is ever there,
And I learnt that why I hide my heart,
Is because no-one really cares. — Erin Hanson

There is no holy life. There is no war between good and evil. There is no sin and no redemption. None of these things matter to the real you. But they all matter hugely to the false you, the one who believes in the separate self. You have tried to take your separate self, with all its loneliness and anxiety and pride, to the door of enlightenment. But it will never go through, because it is a ghost. — Deepak Chopra

There is a core of loneliness. It's partly existential. Secondly, I was raised a loner. My parents were not there. My father was asked to leave because he couldn't metabolize ethanol. Actually, my mother ran away with us when I was 2 months old and my brother was 5. Real dramatic stuff: down the fire escape, through backyards. So, I sort of raised myself. I was alone a lot and I invented myself - I lived through the radio and through my imagination. — George Carlin

The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend! — Edith Wharton

When Christ said: I was hungry and you fed me, he didn't mean only the hunger for bread and for food; he also meant the hunger to be loved. Jesus himself experienced this loneliness. He came amongst his own and his own received him not, and it hurt him then and it has kept on hurting him. The same hunger, the same loneliness, the same having no one to be accepted by and to be loved and wanted by. Every human being in that case resembles Christ in his loneliness; and that is the hardest part, that's real hunger. — Mother Teresa

I used to think that the term inner child was a ridiculous metaphor invented to remind responsibility-burdened adults to lighten up occasionally and just have fun. But it turns out that the inner child is very real. It is our past. And the only way to escape the past is to embrace it. So before going to bed that night, I put the photo in a frame and place it next to my bed. And I vow that from this day forward, that child will be protected. He will be loved. He will be accepted. He will be trusted. And all this will be given unconditionally. He will not be taught to hate and fear. He will not be criticized for failing to live up to unrealistic expectations. He will not be used as a Kleenex or aspirin for someone else's feelings of loneliness, fear, depression, or anxiety. — Neil Strauss

This was what I came to found. The conquest of loneliness was the missing link that was one day going to make a decent novelist out of me. If you are out here and cannot close off the loves and hates of all that back there in the real world the memories will overtake you and swamp you and wilt your tenacity. Tenacity stamina ... close off to everything and everyone but your writing. That s the bloody price. I don t know maybe it's some kind of ultimate selfishness. Maybe it's part of the killer instinct. Unless you can stash away and bury thoughts of your greatest love you cannot sustain the kind of concentration that breaks most men trying to write a book over a three or four year period. — Leon Uris

Where were me parents? Where were Becky? I felt so alone, so lost that I could
not see. By that I mean, everything round me were a blur, everything inside me
were a blur of fear and shock. I heard meself crying and moaning, My oh my, my
oh my ... I still have nightmares 'bout that time. I still feel like a sharp piece of
ice has stabbed me heart real deep. I was filled, filled to the brim with utter baffle
and utter loneliness. p. 15 — Louis Nowra

Remember that hate is not the opposite of love as people think. Hate is love standing upside down; it is not the opposite of love. The real opposite of love is fear. In love one expands, in fear one shrinks. In fear one becomes closed, in love one opens. In fear one doubts, in love one trusts. In fear one is left lonely. In love one disappears; hence there is no question of loneliness at all. Love is when you have known your inner sky. There is no higher religion than love — Rajneesh

We need to build our friendships on truth and wholeness. We need friends who can be with us in our loneliness, not people who will cheer us up so that we don't feel it. We need friends who get furious with us when we are not being real or true to ourselves, not when we don't do what they want us to do. — Geneen Roth

Real loneliness comes when we have lost all sense of having things in common. When — Henri J.M. Nouwen

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

I think I'd like her to turn round. I want to see her face a second time. That first time she was hardly visible. She was little more than dark on dark, a body shape, as I remember it. If only she would spin round on her heels and the moonlight would oblige, I could persuade myself she's real and not a spectre summoned up by loneliness. — Jim Crace

Ideas aren't real estate, they grow collectively and that knocks out the egotistical loneliness that generally infects art. — Robert Redford

My loneliness is not
By the presence or absence of people;
On the contrary, I hate who steals my loneliness,
Without, in exchange, offer me a real company — Friedrich Nietzsche

i could go if i wanted
share the floorboards with someone
in a place less haunted
but i like it here
and i'm happy to stay in this mess on my own
in this home i have built for myself in my bones — Savannah Brown

Remind yourself of that when feelings of loneliness and despair come over you. Remember, those are just feelings. They are not real, but God's love is so real that He created you to prove it. It — Nick Vujicic

A big part of serious fiction's purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves ... I strongly suspect a big part of real art fiction's job is to aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people, to move people to countenance it. — David Foster Wallace

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

My first life, for all it lacked any real direction, had about it a kind of happiness, if ignorance is innocence, and loneliness is a separation of care. — Claire North

I went through a period in my life when I had no friends, when the phone never rang, when I thought I would die from loneliness. I know that the real blessing here isn't that I have a book published, but that I have so many people to thank. — Louise Penny

Real relief from loneliness requires the cooperation of at least one other person, and yet the more chronic our loneliness becomes, the less equipped we may be to entice such cooperation. — John T. Cacioppo

Not to mention the loneliness. And at the same time, the crowdedness. The never being really alone, just to think, to rest or to do something private - anything private. You can't even got to toilet in private. And if you want company, real company, not just people hanging about making a noise, that's when you realize how lonely you are. — Meg Rosoff

And who can be love? Certainly, if you are not aware of who you are, you cannot be love. You will be fear. Fear is just the opposite of love. Remember, hate is not the opposite of love, as people think. Hate is love standing upside down, it is not the opposite of love. The real opposite of love is fear. In love one expands, in fear one shrinks. In fear one becomes closed, in love one opens. In fear one doubts, in love one trusts. In fear one is left lonely. In love one disappears; hence there is no question of loneliness at all. When one is not, how can one be lonely? Then these trees and the birds and the clouds and the sun and the stars are all within you. Love is when you have known your inner sky. — Osho

I expect you to vanish
up and up into the tree,
a shake of the branches
and gone like you
had never happened.
But you came down
and handed me a leaf
"from seven limbs up,
already yellow," you said,
and then you walked away
and you were still real. — Karen Finneyfrock

Like if youre beautiful you dont feel pain or have dreams or know the despair of loneliness. Why should you be unhappy, youre so beautiful? My God they drive me nuts, like all I am is a beautiful body and nothing else. Not once, never, have they ever tried to love the real me, to love me for what I am, to love me for my mind. — Hubert Selby Jr.

If you like, you can all think of it as my gift to you. I never had much else to give. You can get on and play your own lives as you like, while I just keep moving. This story of it all can be another gift. I've made an arrangement with Adam. When I've finished, which is almost now, I'm going to put the bundle of papers in the garden of the Old Fort, before I move on. Adam's going to get them and take them to his father. And if you read it and don't believe it's real, so much the better. It will make another safeguard against Them.
But you wouldn't believe how lonely you get. — Diana Wynne Jones

The audience looked at him. They felt he had no chance. They could drop the nameless resentment, the sense of insecurity which he aroused in most people. And so, for the first time, they could see him as he was: a man totally innocent of fear. The fear of which they thought was not the normal kind, not a response to a tangible danger, but the chronic, unconfessed fear in which they all lived. They remembered the misery of the moments when, in loneliness, a man thinks of the bright words he could have said, but had not found, and hates those who robbed him of his courage. The misery of knowing how strong and able one is in one's own mind, the radiant picture never to be made real. Dreams? Self-delusion? Or a murdered reality, unborn, killed by that corroding emotion without name - fear - need - dependence - hatred? — Ayn Rand

We are a generation of lovers who long to be loved. We spend exorbitant amounts of money to compel others to delight in us. We construct our ideal life on Facebook because we are unsatisfied with our real life, which is tainted with boredom, loneliness, insecurity, and a lack of friends and followers . We do not enjoy the person God created us to be or the life God has gifted us with. We think we are overweight, underweight, too pale, too dark, too plain, or just plain boring. Yet we crave to be delighted in by a significant other. So we pursue misguided avenues to make ourselves delightful, to satisfy our craving to be loved.
Charis: God's Scandalous Grace for Us (pp. 118-119). — Preston Sprinkle

Real love is the shared loneliness". — Alexandar Tomov

Ice vs. fire; free choice vs. necessity; weight vs. lightness; emptiness vs. meaning...speaking of emptiness, there was a time today when my whole body felt completely devoid of life and utterly without meaning. A character in one of Edith Wharton's novels says that "the real loneliness comes from all these kind faces who only ask one to pretend..." That is how I felt today, waiting anxiously for my afternoon pick-up, only to be let down, and later, facing the world (as if everything was okay inside). — Sarah Emily Miano

I hope you read this, whoever you are, and imagine that there is a hypothetical person out there who needs your love, has been waiting silently, patiently for it all his life, is flawed and downright ugly at times and yet would have just eaten up any tiny bit of affection you had been willing to give, had you ever stopped your own happy life to notice. And then imagine that this hypothetical person is real, because he probably is ... Wish I'd met you. Wish I wasn't your hypothetical. But you're reading this, which means a few minutes ago, I went into that bathroom and pulled the trigger. You probably heard it. Sorry. You're welcome. Thank you. And please. Please, please, please, please, please, please, please. — Charles Yu

He'd mistaken loneliness for independence, and had become so good at closing himself off from the world that it took an e-mail from Ellie to remind him what it was like to have a real conversation. — Jennifer E. Smith

I can't deceive myself that out of the bare stark realization that no matter how enthusiastic you are, no matter how sure that character is fate, nothing is real, past or future, when you are alone in your room with the clock ticking loudly into the false cheerful brilliance of the electric light. And if you have no past or future which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide. — Sylvia Plath

Real love is not an escape from loneliness, real love is an overflowing aloneness. One is so happy in being alone that one wud like to share. — Rajneesh

It wasn't a fear associated with physical injury, but the prospect of real pain. A world where love and trust and kindness and intimacy were options. A world that, once she was inevitably forced to leave it again, would only exacerbate the loneliness and darkness of her reality. — Lindsay J. Pryor

I am alone and my spiritual journey is my experience.' This is the real experience of freedom and independence. Then we begin to see that being alone is a very beautiful thing. Nobody is obstructing our vision. We have complete panoramic vision. — Chogyam Trungpa

What I felt in each instance was sadness, loneliness (the loneliness of the abandoned child of whatever age), regret for time gone by, for things unsaid, for my inability to share or even in any real way to acknowledge, at the end, the pain and helplessness and physical humiliation they each endured. I understood the inevitability of each of their deaths. I had been expecting (fearing, dreading, anticipating) those deaths all my life. They remained, when they did occur, distanced, at a remove from the ongoing dailiness of my life. — Joan Didion

We waste so much energy trying to cover up who we are when beneath every attitude is the want to be loved, and beneath every anger is a wound to be healed and beneath every sadness is the fear that there will not be enough time.
When we hesitate in being direct, we unknowingly slip something on, some added layer of protection that keeps us from feeling the world, and often that thin covering is the beginning of a loneliness which, if not put down, diminishes our chances of joy.
It's like wearing gloves every time we touch something, and then, forgetting we chose to put them on, we complain that nothing feels quite real. Our challenge each day is not to get dressed to face the world but to unglove ourselves so that the doorknob feels cold and the car handle feels wet and the kiss goodbye feels like the lips of another being, soft and unrepeatable. — Mark Nepo

Moreover, I was beginning to experience something new - the fear of being alone. I had not been alone since I walked from the hospital along Piccadilly, and then there had been bewildering novelty in all I saw. Now,for the first time I began to feel the horror that real loneliness holds for a species that is by nature gregarious. I felt naked, exposed to all the fears that prowled ... — John Wyndham

Talking to strangers sounded like talking to no one, which Henry had some firsthand experience in- in real life. It was lonely. Almost as lonely as Lake View Cemetery, where he'd buried Ethel. — Jamie Ford

Specifically, one whose life is ruled and dictated by dependency needs suffers from a psychiatric disorder to which we ascribe the diagnostic name "passive dependent personality disorder." It is perhaps the most common of all psychiatric disorders.
People with this disorder, passive dependent people, are so busy seeking to be loved that they have no energy left to love. They are like starving people, scrounging wherever they can for food, and with no food of their own to give to others. It is as if within them they have an inner emptiness, a bottomless pit crying out to be filled but which can never be completely filled. They never feel "full-filled" or have a sense of completeness. They always feel "a part of me is missing." They tolerate loneliness very poorly. Because of their lack of wholeness they have no real sense of identity, and they define themselves solely by their relationships. — M. Scott Peck

Like any / unloved thing, I don't know if I'm real /
when I'm not being touched. — Natalie Wee

,,, let go of the real source of our unhappiness: our own self-obsession. Stress, loneliness, pessimism, financial worries, and unhappy relationships all have one thing in common: they're all about "me". — David Michie

I didn't really get the chance to talk to girls. I was a straight boy with hormones kicking in, and I wanted to talk to girls, but they weren't interested in talking back to me, so there was a real sense of loneliness. — Andy Biersack

I said something that surprised me. I said, after two such men had just walked slowly by, "I know it's terrible of me, but I'm almost jealous of them. Because they have each other, they're tied together in a real community." And he looked at me then, and with real kindness on his face, and I see now that he recognized what I did not: that in spite of my plenitude, I was lonely. Lonely was the first flavor I had tasted in my life, and it was always there, hidden inside the crevices of my mouth, reminding me. He saw this that day, I think. And he was kind. "Yes" is all he said. He could easily have said, "Are you crazy, they're dying!" But he did not say that, because he understood that loneliness about me. That is what I want to think. That is what I think. — Elizabeth Strout

We consume so we never have to answer the hard questions. When we are bored we eat. When we are lonely we watch a movie, read the newspaper, jump on social media. Each time we do we cover up our real emotions and keep throwing another layer of confusion and anxiety on top, making it almost impossible to dig ourselves out of the hole, or at least see which way is up. — Evan Sutter

Sometimes I get real lonely sleeping with you. — Haruki Murakami

Until you experience real loneliness, you shall never know what real loneliness is. So many people feel miserable and lonely just because they ignore their inner man, create a gap between themselves and their inner man, and neglect their true self! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

She almost never said his name. Because it made the dreams too real. Because it made the loneliness too tangible when she woke up. — Dianna Hardy

I look at pictures of you because I am afraid that you would notice me staring in real life. I looked at your picture today for countless minutes. It is closer than I'll ever get to you for real. I felt like I was looking at a captured animal at a safe distance. If you knew I was doing this, you would feel sickened and frightened. That's why you'll never know. Years will go by and you'll never know. I will never say the things that I want to say to you. I know the damage it would do. I love you more than I hate my loneliness and pain. — Henry Rollins

Real travel is not about the highlights with which you dazzle your friends once you're home. It's about the loneliness, the solitude, the evenings spent by yourself, pining to be somewhere else. Those are the moments of true value. You feel half proud of them and half ashamed and you hold them to your heart. — Tahir Shah

Deepen you knowledge of Jesus which ends loneliness, overcomes sadness and uncertainty, gives real meaning to life, curbs passions, exalts ideals, expands energies in charity, brings light into decisive choices. Let Christ be for you the Way, the Truth, and the Life. — Pope John Paul II

Loneliness is caused by an alienation from life. It is a loneliness from your real self. — Maxwell Maltz

You see, to me, the art of music is listening to it, not playing it. The real art of it is hearing it. — Keith Richards

It may be that Christians, notwithstanding corporate worship, common prayer, and all their fellowship in service, may still be left to their loneliness. The final break-through to fellowship does not occur, because, though they have fellowship with one another as believers and as devout people, they do not have fellowship as the undevout, as sinners. The pious fellowship permits no one to be a sinner. So everybody must conceal his sin from himself and from the fellowship. We dare not be sinners. Many Christians are unthinkably horrified when a real sinner is suddenly discovered among the righteous. So we remain alone with our sin, living in lies and hypocrisy. The fact is that we are sinners! — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I can call back the solemn twilight and mystery of the deep woods, the earthy smells, the faint odors of the wild flowers, the sheen of rain-washed foliage, the rattling clatter of drops when the wind shook the trees, the far-off hammering of wood-peckers and the muffled drumming of wood-pheasants in the remotenesses of the forest, the snap-shot glimpses of disturbed wild creatures skurrying through the grass, - I can call it all back and make it as real as it ever was, and as blessed. I can call back the prairie, and its loneliness and peace, and a vast hawk hanging motionless in the sky, with his wings spread wide and the blue of the vault showing through the fringe of their end-feathers. — Mark Twain

Real loneliness is not necessarily limited to when you are alone. — Charles Bukowski

But for the first time, Boaz couldn't think of a single word to describe this kind of loneliness, so scary and real it required an entirely different language, new and strange and yet to be invented — Molly Antopol

All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world: but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World. Look at yon butterfly. If it swallowed all Hell, Hell would not be big enough to do it any harm or to have any taste'
'It seems big enough when you're in it, Sir.'
'And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies, and itchings that it contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good. If all Hell's miseries together entered the consciousness of yon wee yellow bird on the bough there, they would be swallowed up without trace, as if one drop of ink had been dropped into that Great Ocean to which your terrestrial Pacific is only a molecule'
'I see,' said I at last. 'She couldn't fit into Hell. — C.S. Lewis

She needed intimacy and a sense of partaking in, not just observing, real life. — Eiji Yoshikawa

An ad that pretends to be art is
at absolute best
like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair. — David Foster Wallace

Most of the writers I know are weird hybrids. There's a strong streak of egomania coupled with extreme shyness. Writing's kind of like exhibitionism in private. And there's also a strange loneliness, and a desire to have some kind of conversation with people, but not a real great ability to do it in person. — David Foster Wallace

All my life I have been the sort of person in whom people confide. And all my life I have been flattered by this role - grateful for the frisson of importance that comes with receiving important information. In recent years, however, I have noticed that my gratification is becoming diluted by a certain weary indignation. They tell me because they regard me as safe. All of them, they make their disclosures to me in the same spirit that they might tell a castrato or a priest - with a sense that I am so outside the loop, so remote from the doings of the great world, as to be defused of any possible threat. The number of secrets I receive is in inverse proportion to the number of secrets anyone expects me to have of my own. And this is the real source of my dismay. Being told secrets is not - never has been - a sign that I belong or that I matter. It is quite the opposite: confirmation of my irrelevance. — Zoe Heller

The fear inside of loneliness: That only what others have is real. — Liv Ullmann

E was simply a man who had gone even further into loneliness than others - and that's a real exploit, by the way; where breaking records in loneliness is concerned, we're all champions in the field ... he continually repeats: dogs are not enough anymore. People feel so damned lonely, they need company, they need something bigger, stronger, to lean on, something that can really stand up to it all. Dogs aren't enough; what we need is elephants ... — Romain Gary

And if I am comfortable with it, why do I still call it loneliness? Because
and I think somehow she would understand this
you can have and recognize a sadness in your alienation and in other people's alienation and still not long to be around anyone. I think that if you wonder about other people's loneliness, or contemplate it at all, you've got a real leg up on being comfortable on your own. — Dana Spiotta

A child blind from birth doesn't even know he's blind until someone tells him. Even then he has only the most academic idea of what blindness is; only the formerly sighted have a real grip on the thing. Ben Hanscom had no sense of being lonely because he had never been anything but. If the condition had been new, or more localized, he might have understood, but loneliness both encompassed his life and overreached it. — Stephen King

This blessing of loneliness was not really loneliness. Real loneliness was something unendurable. What one wanted when exhausted by the noise and impact of physical bodies was not no people but disembodied people; all those denizens of beloved books who could be taken to one's heart and put away again, in silence, and with no hurt feelings. — Elizabeth Goudge

My characters are quite as real to me as so-called real people; which is one reason why I'm not subject to what is known as loneliness. I have plenty of company. — William S. Burroughs

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

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

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

I feel like I could disappear because I'm not real to other people. — Miranda Emmerson

I have heard of a man lost in the woods and dying of famine and exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness was relieved by the grotesque visions with which, owing to bodily weakness, his diseased imagination surrounded him, and which he believed to be real. So also, owing to bodily and mental health and strength, we may be continually cheered by a like but more normal and natural society, and come to know that we are never alone. — Henry David Thoreau

It hit him that his own form of loneliness was a luxury, one as chosen and as paid for as three weeks in Kenya's velds or a cherry red Ferrari. Real loneliness wasn't something an assistant scoped out and got a good price on. Real loneliness was smothering and it stank of hopelessness. — Douglas Coupland

Solitude that throws the honest rays of perfect euphoria;
Solitude that makes me breathe in the real me;
Solitude I call it - my abode, my self made haven;
Solitude I call it - the sanguine face of Loneliness. — Debatrayee Banerjee

Home. the word always had air quotes around it in her mind. She'd done what she could to make her flat cozy, filling it with art, books, ornate lanterns, and a Persian carpet as soft as lynx fur. And of course there were her angel wings taking up one whole wall. But there was no help for the real emptiness; its close air was stirred by no breath but her own. When she was alone, the empty place within her, the missingness, as she thought of it, seemed to swell. Even being with Kaz had done something to keep it at bay, though not enough. Never enough. — Laini Taylor

There was a real sense of comfort but at the same time it felt oddly tense. The feeling that every little things we said, these conversations, at any moment, they could stop being possible, and so they were precious, it was that feeling, and the sense of the miracle of this shared moment, here and now. Why were we so far apart, even when we are together? It was anice loneliness, like th sensation of washing your face with cold water. — Banana Yoshimoto

When I think about popular culture, I can't help but think that we're living in the age of loneliness. There's this illusion that we all have instant access to each other, but we actually have no real connection. — Madonna Ciccone

There are a few books I have read that I've never been the same after, and I think all good writing somehow addresses the concern of and acts as an anodyne against loneliness. We're all terribly, terribly lonely. And there's a way, at least in prose fiction, that can allow you to be intimate with the world and with a mind and with characters that you just can't be in the real world.
I don't know what you're thinking. I don't know that much about you as I don't know that much about my parents or my lover or my sister, but a piece of fiction that's really true allows you to be intimate with ... I don't want to say people, but it allows you to be intimate with a world that resembles our own in enough emotional particulars so that the way different things must feel is carried out with us into the real world.
I think what I would like my stuff to do is make people less lonely. — David Foster Wallace

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

I would like to be able to say that she broke my heart but I know better. I broke my own heart. I can't say that she did it and get behind that statement in any real way. I know too much. The only one I can blame for my loneliness is myself. Even if I did think that she did it to me I wouldn't feel any better. Tonight I was watching a movie and this actor in the film looked like her when she had a profile shot. She did not break my heart I did. I don't know why I would do something this painful to myself. I wish I would stop it's been months now and I'm still hurting myself nightly. I can avoid it for awhile and then it comes back. — Henry Rollins

Maybe reading was just a way to make her feel less alone, to keep her company. When you read something you are stopped, the moment is stayed, you can sometimes be there more fully than you can in your real life. — Helen Humphreys

It came as a surprise to us, as I suspect it does to many, that marriage changed us. We'd felt as though we'd always had those rings, wrapped about our fingers, like the scraggly garlands of those first, revelatory conversations. But those real rings, wooden as they were, began to set their roots, and that settling, the calming feeling of having been planted into the same plot to flourish, was a relief from that once-nagging question of loneliness. No matter what happened now, even if we'd found ourselves lonelier than we'd ever been, we'd know that that plot of land was our own to cultivate. Each moment was now a dual-moment, each of our lives a dual-life. The open road, that atlas, the open-faced moon and that wine were the first conscious recognitions of our floating life. One that perhaps we'd have created on our own, but now no longer had to. — Megan Rich

... the loneliness ... the "inexpressibly delicious" sensation of this memory - for as memories are older they're like wine rarer, till if you find a real old memory, one of infancy, not an established often tasted one but a brand new one, it would taste better than the Napoleon brandy Stendhal himself must have stared at ... — Jack Kerouac

The things I was good at had no real application: addressing envelopes in bubble letters with smiling creatures on the flap. Making sludgy coffee I drank with grave affect. Finding a certain desired song playing on the radio, like a medium scanning for news of the dead. — Emma Cline

The interstate seems to stretch for miles in a straight line as the fields and farms give way to a more barren landscape. Loneliness has been good to me' is playing on my personal radio where I hear songs before I write them, and I wonder if this is just another mirage I will forget or if this will become a real song. It has been a long time since I've written a song, and the visits from the muse seem to be lessened by something. I still keep my faith that the muse knows best and whn I am ready the inspiration will be there. I am trying not to look too ready. I know that just invites false promise. — Neil Young

Real loneliness is having no one to miss. Think yourself lucky you've known something worth missing. — Emma Donoghue

We all say we hate being misunderstood and how we desperately want to find people who understand us. But it is not lack of compatible people that keeps us lonely. There is no shortage of people on your journey. The real, secret obstacle that we have against finding authentic, genuine relationships with people is our subconscious fear of growth. If we stick around in the bin of broken toys playing the queen or the king, at least we get to feel some sense of accomplishment at being the most evolved person we know. To find our tribe means finding people we can learn from, people who are better at some things than we are, people who have something to teach. We say we want it, but how many of us fear being a beginner more than loneliness and much more than being in the wrong crowd? There is a strange comfort, a sense of safety, to suffering and loneliness. To be happy, to find our family, we must be willing to let that go. — Vironika Tugaleva

As an only child, I embrace loneliness. Hollywood loneliness helped to understand Marilyn Monroe in a real way. I was able to portray her very well. — Catherine Hicks

One real meeting is much better than a thousand internet or social media words. — Stephen Richards

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

I thought I knew what loneliness was before he found me, but I had no clue. You don't know what real loneliness is until you've known the opposite. — Rick Yancey

There is a certain shade of red brick
a dark, almost melodious red, sombre and riddled with blue
that is my childhood in St.Louis. Not the real childhood, but the false one that extends from the dawning of consciousness until the day that one leaves home for college. That one shade of red brick and green foliage is St. Louis in the summer (the winter is just a gray sky and a crowded school bus and the wet footprints on the brown linoleum floor at school), and that brick and a pale sky is spring. It's also loneliness and the queer, self-pitying wonder that children whose families are having catastrophes feel. — Harold Brodkey

Perhaps loneliness - it is that loneliest time of the night, the predawn darkness when the worst dreams come, the sunrise seems far off, and the creatures that inhabit both the real world and the darker edges of the unconscious prowl with the impunity of predators who know that their prey is helpless and alone. — Don Winslow

Real loneliness was a smeary red: the color of the taillights of the car ahead of you reflected on wet hot-top in a driving rain. — Stephen King