LONELINESS QUOTES III

quotations about loneliness

loneliness quote

I don't think that loneliness is necessarily a bad or unconstructive condition. My own skill at jamming time may actually be dependent on some fluid mixture of emotions, among them curiosity, sexual desire, and love, all suspended in a solvent medium of loneliness.

NICHOLSON BAKER

The Fermata

Tags: Nicholson Baker


Many of the loneliest people in the world have plenty of company. Their lives are full of social activity. They are always doing. Sometimes they are like hunted creatures. The hunted look one can often see in their eyes. They would be astonished, perhaps resentful, if they were told that they were themselves the hunters. Sometimes they blame the people about them. Sometimes they blame the conditions of life. Themselves they never blame. With longing, they look out on the world as if seeking for someone to give help. They even become reproachful and say there is no one with sympathy for them or understanding. And yet help is always with them, waiting for a chance, in the inner consciousness.

JOHN DANIEL BARRY

"Loneliness", Reactions and Other Essays Discussing Those States of Feeling and Attitude of Mind That Find Expression In Our Individual Qualities


Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?

HARUKI MURAKAMI

Sputnik Sweetheart

Tags: Haruki Murakami


I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

The Great Gatsby

Tags: F. Scott Fitzgerald


The survival of the fittest is going to make some man very lonesome some day.

EVAN ESAR

20,000 Quips & Quotes


Physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance.

ROBERT M. PIRSIG

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Tags: Robert M. Pirsig


I see around me games and fun but I'm not asked to play.
Whence this awful loneliness amid life's grand buffet?

ROBERT H. OLANDER

The Traveler and Other Poems


Self is the only prison that can ever bind the soul.

HENRY VAN DYKE

"The Prison and the Angel"

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God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter -- they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.

SYLVIA PLATH

The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Tags: Sylvia Plath


Tranquility, allied to loneliness, possessed no charms.

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY

Lodore

Tags: Mary Shelley


We live as we dream--alone.

JOSEPH CONRAD

Heart of Darkness


No one ever discovers the depths of his own loneliness.

GEORGES BERNANOS

The Diary of a Country Priest

Tags: Georges Bernanos


Labor in loneliness is irksome.

MARK TWAIN

The Innocents Abroad


Lonely people, in talking to each other can make each other lonelier.

LILLIAN HELLMAN

The Autumn Garden

Tags: Lillian Hellman


A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey's gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind.

JOHN CHEEVER

"The Sixties", John Cheever: The Journals


And I was alone, had been for a while, and might be for a while, but it no longer frightened me the way it had. I was discovering something terrifyingly simple: there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I was discovering this in the way, I suppose, that everybody does, but having tried, endlessly, to do something about it.

JAMES BALDWIN

Just Above My Head

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It is loneliness that makes the loudest noise. This is as true of men as of dogs.

ERIC HOFFER

"Thoughts of Eric Hoffer", The New York Times Magazine, Apr. 25, 1971

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The Loneliness One dare not sound --
And would as soon surmise
AS in its Grave go plumbing
To ascertain the size --
The Loneliness whose worst alarm
Is lest itself should see --
And perish from before itself
For just a scrutiny --
The Horror not to be surveyed --
But skirted in the Dark --
With Consciousness suspended --
And Being under Lock --
I fear me this -- is Loneliness --
The Maker of the soul
Its Caverns and its Corridors
Illuminate -- or seal --

EMILY DICKINSON

"The Loneliness One Dare Not Sound", Poems

Tags: Emily Dickinson


All the lonely people, where do they all come from?

THE BEATLES

"Eleanor Rigby", Revolver

Tags: The Beatles


Everyone's alone -- or so it seems to me.
They make noises, and think they are talking to each other;
They make faces, and think they understand each other.
And I'm sure they don't. Is that a delusion?

T. S. ELIOT

The Cocktail Party