c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Most of her friends owned laptops and seemed to spend more time with their phones than anything else. Steffy kept her latest playlists and apps updated frequently. She was a member of what Peter called, The Gadget Generation. She could not imagine what it must have been like before such a time. The unbearable isolation that must have been present. How did people deal with it? When she asked a few older people in the town, they simply said she had too much spare time on her hands. It appeared thinking was a crime in the world she lived
— Jaime Allison Parker, Justice of the Fox
Thinking, existentially speaking, is a solitary but not a lonely business; solitude is that human situation in which I keep myself company. Loneliness comes about when I am alone without being able to split up into the two-in-one, without being able to keep myself company.
— Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind
i could go if i wantedshare the floorboards with someonein a place less haunted but i like it hereand i’m happy to stay in this mess on my ownin this home i have built for myself in my bones
— Savannah Brown, Graffiti
I felt lonely, and in full possession of my loneliness. It was the first time I had owned anything of value.
— Ben Greenman, What He's Poised to Do: Stories
He lived on, miserable and misunderstood, as before, and increasingly lonely. One cannot write those words too often: Maurice’s loneliness: it increased.
— E.M. Forster, Maurice
Yes it’s me, I myself, what I turned out to be, (…) I’m the one here in myself, it’s me. (…) Whatever I was, whatever I wasn’t—it’s all in what I am. Whatever I wanted, whatever I didn’t want—all of this has shaped me. Whatever I loved, or stopped loving—in me it’s the same nostalgia (Álvaro de Campos)
— Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems
I walk across the park to her flat. It is over-heated and there is a great deal of pink. This used not to unnerve me. Now when I step into the bathroom I recoil.Pink bath, pink basin, pink toilet, pink bidet, pink tiles, pink wallpaper, pink rug. Brushes, soap, tooth brush, silk flowers, toilet paper: all pink. Even the little foot-operated waste-bin is pale pink. I know this little waste-bin well. Every time I sleep here I wonder what I am doing with my time and hers. She is sixteen years younger than I am. She is not the woman with whom I want to share my life. But, having begun, what we have continues. She wants it to, and I go along with it, through lust and loneliness, I suppose; and laziness, and lack of focus.
— Vikram Seth, An Equal Music
I look and I look...I must have come to the wrong planet.It's so strange here.
— Sigbjørn Obstfelder
Connor was....getting farther and farther ahead of me. I was frozen. And sometimes I feel like I haven't quite thawed.
— Debra Dockter, Deadly Design
No one is ever alone and silence does not equate defeat.
— Joan Ambu
Fighting the good fight is not as easy when you’re fighting alone.
— Joan Ambu
When one is just sad one should just be alone.
— Will Advise
It is good to be alone, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult should be one more reason to do it.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
The dog upstairs won't shut up, but I can't hate him, he's up there alone all day, making noise must be the only way he knows he's not a ghost.
— Danez Smith
I’m . . . accustomed to being alone. There are times when alone is the best place to be. I enjoy my own company.
— Sara Naveed, Our Story Ends Here
I crave stillness,And yet I fear the momentStillness turns into boredom,And the moment boredomTurns into loneliness.
— Chris Mc Geown, Dead of Night
There must be different kinds of loneliness, or at least different degrees of loneliness, but the most terrifying loneliness is not experienced by everyone and can be understood by only a few. I compare the panic in this kind of loneliness to the dog we see running frantically down the road pursuing the family car. He is not really being left behind, for the family knows it is to return, but for that moment in his limited understanding, he is being left alone forever, and he has to run and run to survive. It is no wonder that we make terrible choices in our lives to avoid loneliness.
— Charles M. Schulz, You Don't Look 35, Charlie Brown!
I am a lonely figure when I run the roads. People wonder how far I have come, how far I have to go. They see me alone and friendless on a journey that has no visible beginning or end. I appear isolated and vulnerable, a homeless creature. It is all they can do to keep from stopping the car and asking if they can take me wherever I'm going.I know this because I feel it myself. When I see the runner I have much the same thoughts. No matter how often I run the roads myself, I am struck by how solitary my fellow runner appears. The sight of a runner at dusk or in inclement weather makes me glad to be safe and warm in my car and headed for home. And at those times, I wonder how I can go out there myself, how I can leave the comfort and warmth and that feeling of intimacy and belonging, to do this distracted thing.But when finally I am there, I realise it is not comfort and warmth I am leaving, not intimacy and belonging I am giving up, but the loneliness that pursues me this day and every day. I know that the real loneliness, the real isolation, the real vulnerability, begins long before I put on my running shoes.
— George Sheehan
An overcrowded world is the ideal place in which to be lonely.
— Brian W. Aldiss, Supertoys Last All Summer Long and Other Stories of Future Time
I feel like I could disappear because I'm not real to other people.
— Miranda Emmerson, Miss Treadway and the Field of Stars
Each day was very much like any other day, because they were alone so much that nothing ever disturbed them.
— Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Something happens when you are alone most of the time, when there are no distractions. Your mind grows more powerful--muscular, even. It takes over and starts to carry you.
— Amanda Lindhout, A House in the Sky
A box sits empty,wanting to hold and protect.Hollow tears it cries.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Slaying Dragons
I am so lost in the lost road , I chose this on my own ,I emptied all that I had ,All that I have left within ,is emptiness - a void that refuses to fill.How can I be alone in a room ,filled with a million souls ? How can I stay hungry after feeding hundreds of homes ?  How ? Is this the pain of letting go and raising towards transcendence - Where I leave all my worldly pleasures and seek union with the One ?-Or is it a bout of lucidity , that I am all by myself , carrying on ,paying for the sins of others and living "BUT" for myself....-an everyday stagmata where the pain is so numb, that the the body ceases to exist ?
— BinYamin Gulzar
Outwardly I was all confidence and openness
—  inwardly I was spiteful and lonely and unaware of how to relate to the world. I wanted so much to be good but only knew how to appear that way by being bad.
Most of us are so enthralled with the scary tigers in our minds--our stories of loneliness, rejection, grief--that we don't realize they are in the past. They can't hurt us anymore.
— Geneen Roth, Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything
She sits there and feels the loneliness and the lack of him
— Maggie O'Farrell, Instructions for a Heatwave
Embracing human frailty, fallibility, and heartbreaking aloneness is crucial for any person seeking to attain self-actualization and self-realization.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man's untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitude--utter solitude without a policeman--by the way of silence--utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion? These little things make all the great difference. When they are gone you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness
— Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Give me wildflowers instead of your heart, for I’d rather have them wither than the latter.
— dandelionlady96
No better school invented yet than the school of loneliness in the matters of understanding our deep-self!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Loneliness was a full-body sensation, an anti-exhilaration, from his core outward.
— Charlie Jane Anders, All the Birds in the Sky
Loneliness is a strange sort of thing.It creeps up on you, quiet and still, sits by your side in the dark, strokes your hair as you sleep. It wraps itself around your bones,squeezing so tight you almost can’t breathe. It leaves lies in your heart, lies next to you at night, leaches the light out from every corner.It’s a constant companion, clasping your hand only to yank you down when you’re struggling to stand up.You wake up in the morning and wonder who you are. You fail to fall asleep at night and tremble in your skin.
— Tahereh Mafi, Unravel Me
I may be too young to be lonely, but I am too lonely to be young.
— Caroline Yawn
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.
— Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton
...very lonely and, often, very unhappy, with the poignant misery that comes to lonely people who long to be social and cannot, somehow, step naturally and unselfconsciously into some friendly group
— Shirley Jackson, Just an Ordinary Day: The Uncollected Stories
Modern life seems set up so that we can avoid loneliness at all costs, but maybe it's worthwhile to face it occasionally. The further we push aloneness away, the less we are able to cope with it, and the more terrifying it gets. Some philosophers believe that loneliness is the only true feeling there is.
— Michael Finkel, The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit
Although one curious thing that might sooner or later cross the woman's mind would be that she had paradoxically been practically as alone before all of this had happened as she was now, incidentally. Well, this being an autobiographical novel I can categorically verify that such a thing would sooner or later cross her mind, in fact. One manner of being alone simply being different from another manner of being alone, being all that she would finally decide that this came down to, as well. Which is to say that even when one's telephone still does function one can be as alone as when it does not.
— David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress
Poem to Be Read at 3:00 A.M.by Donald JusticeExcepting the dinerOn the outskirtsThe town of Ladoraat 3 A.M.Was dark butFor my headlightsAnd up inOne second-story roomA single lightWhere someoneWas sick orPerhaps readingAs I drove pastAt seventyNot thinkingThis poemIs for whoeverHad the light on
— Donald Justice
The walls of hell are coated with arrogance, and the floor is covered with pride.
— T.A. Cline
Loneliness teaches and shows you the real and unreal and such things that one can never understand and even imagine living with others.
— Ehsan Sehgal
No one has ever properly understood me, I have never fully understood anyone; and no one understands anyone else
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A teacher I once had told me that the older you get, the lonelier you become and the deeper the love you need. Loneliness creates an appetite for deeper love, and the entire predicament deepens. And as a result of suffering, your capacity to love deeply increases.
— Leonard Cohen
An echo from the past when, innocentWe looked upon the present with delightAnd doubted not the future would be kinderAnd never knew the loneliness of night.
— Noël Coward, The Complete Verse of Noël Coward
And though, truly, she sometimes felt like something inside her had disappeared, it seemed that must be a natural part of growing up. Standing out too much made one feel too alone to do it forever.
— Jodi Lynn Anderson, May Bird, Warrior Princess
People are so lonely, they spend their birthdays on the Internet, thanking people for wishing them a happy birthday, people who only know it’s their birthday because Facebook told them.
— Caroline Kepnes, Hidden Bodies
What she did learn from all the books was something else, something she hadn't really been expecting, which was that the story of loneliness is much longer than the story of life. In the sense of what most people mean by living, she said. Without children or partner, without meaningful family or a home, a day can last an eternity: a life without those things is a life without a story, a life in which there is nothing - no narrative dramas - to alleviate the cruelly meticulous passing of time.
— Rachel Cusk, Transit
Loneliness is better than bad company.
— Maryum Ahsam
Of course, the spectacle of two people's happiness is always something of a magnet for the unclaimed.
— Anita Brookner, Look at Me
Zel so often put himself outside of where he wanted to be and then looked in dumbly through the window of his longing, hurt and beaten and knowing that he had hurt and beaten himself but still he did it, over and over.
— Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time
A number of years ago I had some experience with being alone. For two succeeding years I was alone each winter for eight months at a stretch in the Sierra Nevada mountains on Lake Tahoe. I was the caretaker on a summer estate during the winter months when it was snowed in. And I made some observations then. As time went on I found that my reactions thickened. Ordinarily I am a whistler. I stopped whistling. I stopped conversing with my dogs, and I believe that the subtleties of feeling began to disappear until finally I was on a pleasure-pain basis. Then it occurred to me that the delicate shades of feeling, of reaction, are the result of communication, and without such communication they tend to disappear. A man with nothing to say has no words. Can its reverse be true- a man who has no one to say anything to has no words as he has no need for words? ... Only through imitation do we develop toward originality.
— John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America
It was the first time she had ever felt the kind of loneliness that couldn't be cured with just any available company.
— Lisa Kleypas, Mine Till Midnight
The SolitaryAs one who has sailed across an unknown sea,among this rooted folk I am alone;the full days on their tables are their own,to me the distant is reality.A new world reaches to my very eyes,a place perhaps unpeopled as the moon;their slightest feelings they must analyze,and all their words have got the common tune.The things I brought with me from far away,compared with theirs, look strangely not the same:in their great country they were living things,but here they hold their breath, as if for shame.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images
I’m perfectly alone right now, my mind is on overdrive, the gears are grinding in whirring dissonance – and it’s just how I like it.
— Trevor J. Freeman
God doesn't promise us an easy life. But He does promise to love us and never leave us, no matter what happens.
— J.E.B. Spredemann, A Secret Encounter
Because sometimes it’s being in a crowd that makes you feel lonelier than when you’re alone.
— Winna Efendi, Some Kind of Wonderful
Sometimes while waiting for God's promises to come to pass, we messed up things and go into so many troubles, but God’s mercy has never failed in bringing us out of them all.
— Bamigboye Olurotimi
LonelinessIt's Hell for us to draw the fettersOf life in alienation, stiff.All people prefer to share gladness,And nobody - to share grief.As a king of air, I'm lone here,The pain lives in my heart, so grim,And I can see that, to the fearOf fate, years pass me by like dreams;And comes again with, touched by gold,The same dream, gloomy one and old.I see a coffin, black and sole,It waits: why to detain the world?There will be not a sad reflection,There will be (I am betting on)Much more gaily celebrationWhen I am dead, than - born.
— Mikhail Lermontov
If you’re trying to tell me you’re not used to mattering to someone, I might just bleed out right here on the floor.
— Kelly Moran, Counterbalance
The loneliness comes to me in certain hours everyday, like a visitor. Like a friend you never expected, a friend you never really want to be with, but he always visit you and love you somehow,
— Xiaolu Guo, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers
I’m not used to people sticking around when things go bad,” she said, by way of explanation.
— Alexander Freed, Rogue One - A Star Wars Story
Do we really need each other, or are we just covering up each other's loneliness?
— Vatsal Surti, On Love
Maybe my dissertation really had been as brilliant as he claimed, the truth was I remember almost nothing about it; the intellectual leaps I made when I was young were a distant memory to me, and now I was surrounded by a kind of aura, when really my only goal in life was to do a little reading and get in bed at four in the afternoon with a carton of cigarettes and a bottle; and yet, at the same time, I had to admit, I was going to die if I kept that up – I was going to die fast, unhappy and alone. And did I really want to die fast, unhappy and alone? In the end, only kind of.
— Michel Houellebecq, Soumission
This is what's so terrifying about being lonely: the instinctive sense that it is literally repulsive, inhibiting contact at just the moment contact is most required.
— Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
It is lonely never to have been loved, only devoured.
— Rosemary Sutcliff, Sword at Sunset
I knew how to be a friend, a lover, a partner. I knew how to make someone feel cherished and seen and listened to -- everything I had myself always so desperately wanted and been afraid I might never have because I was so used to being overlooked.
— Alexis  Hall, Waiting for the Flood
Collapse, spread, merging, union: these things sound like the opposite of loneliness, and yet intimacy requires a solid sense of self to be successful and satisfying.
— Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
The tender breeze felt my loneliness. It brought me your fragrance.
— Avijeet Das
Wandering across a city — walking often quite alone, down dark alleys, through unfrequented districts and debouching suddenly onto main thoroughfares where for a spell one follows the main stream, is adopted by a group "he has come where we come from, wants to go where we want to go". For a while it is true but the side streets are there. Pause in one of them for a moment, and the stream has moved on. So, as there is no catching up with the group, there is no more reason to return to the main street than to wander away from it... more alleys... more thoroughfares... Where shall we be sleeping tonight? And those odd encounters of eyes in lonely alleys...
— Nanamoli Thera
Many persons seek community because they are afraid of loneliness...those who take refuge in community while fleeing from themselves are misuing it to indulge in empty talk and distraction, no matter how spiritual this idle talk and distraction may appear...it is precisely such misuse of community that creates deadly isolation of human beings.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community
I have good friends who listen to me for hours, the walls of my room
— Hilal Hamdaan
To be truly able to greet life with lucidity and tinkling laughter, one must have had bravely experienced that ones heart feels as if it´s thousand years old with all the twinges of grief, nocturnal distress and loneliness and understood that not one expression of human sorrow is really alien. It can serve as a springboard for a more life-sensitive state of mind that paints even seemingly deadly boring details into gratifying wonders (it is not equal to a nauseating expression such as "seeing the good in everything"). I believe and do know that this sort of state can bring one a little closer to bearing the great mosaic that life is and maybe, rather than leaving us feeling opressed, helps us to grow a bit lighter.
— Maria Urbel
She had said that she preferred to be alone for so many years that it was now one of those things that equally well might or might not be true.
— Joyce Ballou Gregorian, The Broken Citadel
She’d sworn she wouldn’t end up like her little brother, but loneliness didn’t arrive with flashing bulbs and a warning label. The descent was as simple and complex as a faked smile, white lies about being “okay,” and the nod and acceptance as her own peers didn’t delve deeper, shutting the coffin lid for her.
— Katherine McIntyre, Rising for Autumn
It is in the company of others that one can be really lonely, for then one's personality is forced openly to try to express what it's separate individuality is.
— Nanamoli Thera
I am scared of this emptiness, pull me out of my body
— Hilal Hamdaan
Sometimes the loneliness had been almost too much, he thought, and always at those times he had found comfort in the woods, where he said nothing. He wondered if the others were still gloomy; no one spoke of it any longer. He smiled as he thought of how the women had wet and screamed and straddle behind him, I want to run to catch up once more.
— Kate Wilhelm, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang
There are kinds of solitude that provide a respite from loneliness, a holiday if not a cure.
— Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
And here I was, left with only myself to deal with. It was entirely up to me.
— James Baldwin
At that time I was only twenty-four years old. My life then was already gloomy, disorderly, and solitary to the point of savagery.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
There’s nothing lonelier than a hand on glass. Maybe because it’s so rarely reciprocated.
— Julie Buxbaum, Tell Me Three Things
It was strange learning the contours of another’s loneliness. You could never know it all at once; like stepping inside a dark cave, you felt along the walls, bumped into jagged edges.
— Brit Bennett, The Mothers
I'm always losing things.
— Kathleen Glasgow, Girl in Pieces
Everyone here seems to know exactly what they need, but I leave without a thing.
— Kathleen Glasgow, Girl in Pieces
Loneliness is personal, and it is also political. Loneliness is collective; it is a city. As to how to inhabit it, there are no rules and nor is there any need to feel shame, only to remember that the pursuit of individual happiness does not trump or excuse our obligations to each another. We are in this together, this accumulation of scars, this world of objects, this physical and temporary heaven that so often takes on the countenance of hell. What matters is kindness; what matters is solidarity. What matters is staying alert, staying open, because if we know anything from what has gone before us, it is that the time for feeling will not last.
— Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
Why do you put yourself in unsafe places? Because something in you feels fundamentally devoid of worth.
— Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
It was books that made me feel that perhaps I wasn't completely alone.
— Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince
To be so lonelyyou told yourself you liked to be this way& almost believed it was true.
— Natalie Wee, Our Bodies & Other Fine Machines
Though he was not as dastardly as Esmé or Count Olaf or the hook-handed man, Jerome was still an ersatz guardian, because a real guardian is supposed to provide a home, with a place to sleep and something to wear, and all Jerome had given them in the end was "Good luck." Jerome reached the end of the block and turned left, and the Baudelaires were once again alone in the world.
— Lemony Snicket, The Ersatz Elevator
She had collected experiences, I realized, as much as she had collected all these things. As we moved her out of her own life, she seemed lonelier that I hope I'll ever be.
— Jenny Moore
What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast.
— Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
The study showed that chronic loneliness impacts out bodies as negatively as smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. Not the same way, of course, just the life risk part. And there's more bad news. The article went on to say that lonely people had worse reactions to flu shots that non-lonelies (I think I just made up that word; my computer put a red squiggly line under it) and that loneliness depresses the immune system. On other words, if you're lonely, not even your body wants to be around you, so it tries to off itself.
— Richard Paul Evans, The Mistletoe Secret
My loneliness is a choice, not a situation.
— Kavipriya Moorthy, Dirty Martini
My loneliness was an important part of my own little universe, not some pathological disease that needs to be gotten [sic] rid of.
— Banana Yoshimoto, Amrita
I'm alone and nobody is in the mirror
— Jorge Luis Borges, Poems of the Night
She's one in a million. And that's why she's lonely.
— Joyce Rachelle
Loneliness kills. It becomes more conspicuous in the crowd.
— Girdhar Joshi, Some Mistakes Have No Pardon
Loneliness is a state when you have not yet grown to love yourself enough.
— Robert  Black
I know what you might think; that being alone is a sign of loneliness. But the way I see it, sometimes being alone serves as a period of insight as to who you really are. Think about it.
— Lauren Lola, An Absolute Mind
We are not lonely, because we chose to be alone.We are not lost, because we chose to disappear.
— Steven Wilson
some people are lonely for all the right reasons.
— Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now
You give the shirt off your back, no questions asked, and you stand alone at the cavernous mouth of your suburban closet—your entire life spent wonderingwhere your clothes went.
— Kris Kidd, Down for Whatever
And whatever troubled him and showed in his face might have been the same old trouble - the problem of occupying space in the world and having a name people could call you by, being somebody they thought they could know.
— Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman
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, Children of Las Vegas: True Stories of Growing up in the World's Playground
There are times when you are home to yourself and you long for company.
— Srividya Srinivasan
I gave them everything I had, and I guess it feelsalright.I gave them my body,and they use it every night.
— Kris Kidd, Down for Whatever
But I came to see that Las Vegas is not a freak but is, instead, deeply integrated with the rest of the country, and the world beyond. It is symptom, mirror, metaphor.
— Timothy O'Grady, Children of Las Vegas: True Stories of Growing up in the World's Playground
He had a strange relationship with books. He had the notion that people who wrote novels were also lonely. He believed this more and more, reading between the lines of the novels he'd loved. Most books were about one kind of loneliness or another, about people who couldn't get what they wanted, people who found things hard, who were slow, or sad, or difficult. So he read most evenings, finding a comfort in following words written by someone like him.
— Monique Roffey, Sun Dog
Very often I realize that the time people spend apart is as important in maintaining relationships as the time they spend together.
— Joyce Rachelle
Eagle's flight of loneliness soars so high Around its sigh, no more alone the sky Other birds remain away, clouds pass byBetween shrouds of life and haze sun rays die
— Munia Khan
I was ready to leave with every load, with every worthy individual of respectable appearance hiring a cab; but absolutely nobody invited me, not one; it was as if they had forgotten me, as if I was actually something alien to them!
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, A Gentle Creature and Other Stories
I felt alone, my loneliness suffocated me, and I craved to scream, shout and kill me while seeing all this. However, self-hatred also occupied me.
— Shaikh Ashraf, Friendship, Love & Sacrifice
Wouldn't it be nice to be done with it? To be done with sex and longing? Mitchell could almost imagine pulling it off, sitting on a bridge at night with the Seine flowing by. He looked up at all the lighted windows along the river's arc. He thought of all the people going to sleep or reading or listening to music, all the lives contained by a great city like this, and, floating up in his mind, rising just above the rooftops, he tried to feel, to vibrate among, all those million tremulous souls. He was sick of craving, of wanting, of hoping, of losing.
— Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot
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, Housekeeping
You must always see your loneliness as an opportunity to meet something good unexpected, something new unknown before, something interesting not happened yet!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
I have a hundred million fans, Angela, but I have very few friends.
— Raynetta Manees, All for Love
Driving a desk was sometimes lonely, but Eddie had been in the drivers'-seat himself more than once, his aspirator riding there with him on the dashboard, its trigger reflected ghostly in the windshield (and a bucket-load of pills in the glove compartment), and he knew that real loneliness was a smeary red: the color of the taillights of the car ahead of you reflected on wet hottop in a driving rain.
— Stephen King, It
I think one of the reasons why people tend to fake an entire relationship is maybe they are just afraid of being alone or are lonely right now!
— Saif Ullah
I think loneliness is much better than companionship of a selfish.
— Tanmaya Guru
Mr. Heathcliff, you have nobody to love you; and, however miserable you make us, we shall still have the revenge of thinking that your cruelty rises from your greater misery! You are miseable, are you not? Lonely, like the devil, and envious like him? Nobody loves you - nobody will cry for you, when you die! I wouldnt't be you!
— Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
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
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 Girls
I expect you to vanishup and up into the tree,a shake of the branchesand gone like youhad never happened.But you came down and handed me a leaf"from seven limbs up,already yellow," you said,and then you walked awayand you were still real.
— Karen Finneyfrock, The Sweet Revenge of Celia Door
Well, I’m just going to say it.I’m listening, Louis said.I wonder if you would consider coming to my house sometimes to sleep with me.
— Kent Haruf, Our Souls at Night
Whether Neil left today or tomorrow or next week, he'd leave alone. Two, five, ten years from now, if Neil was even still alive, he'd still be alone. He could be anyone, anywhere in the world, but he'd be alone until the day he died. He'd never trust anyone enough to let them in.
— Nora Sakavic, The Foxhole Court
Happiness is often presented as being very dull but, he thought, lying awake, that is because dull people are sometimes very happy and intelligent people can go around making themselves and everyone else miserable. He had never found happiness dull. It always seemed more exciting than any other thing and capable of as great intensity as sorrow to those people who were capable of having it. This may not be true but he had believed it to be true for a long time and this summer they had experienced happiness for a month now and, already, in the nights, he was lonely for it before it had ever gone away.
— Ernest Hemingway, Islands in the Stream
People bear loneliness every day. They think they won't be able to, that they won't survive, but somehow one second slips into another, becomes an hour, a day, a week, and they are still living. They are still alone, even in the middle of a crowd of people. Even with a partner, a child.
— Laura  Barnett, The Versions of Us
Stars, too, were time travelers. How many of those ancient points of light were the last echoes of suns now dead? If all the suns but ours collapsed tonight, how many lifetimes would it take us to realize we were alone?
— Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
we used to talk all nightand do things alone togetherand i’ve begun(as a reaction to a feeling)to balancethe pleasure of lonelinessagainst the painof loving you
— Nikki Giovanni, Love Poems
I, for instance, was triumphant over everyone; everyone, of course, was in dust and ashes, and was forced spontaneously to recognise my superiority, and I forgave them all. I was a poet and a grand gentleman, I fell in love; I came in for countless millions and immediately devoted them to humanity, and at the same time I confessed before all the people my shameful deeds, which, of course, were not merely shameful, but had in them much that was "sublime and beautiful" something in the Manfred style. Everyone would kiss me and weep (what idiots they would be if they did not), while I should go barefoot and hungry preaching new ideas and fighting a victorious Austerlitz against the obscurantists. Then the band would play a march, an amnesty would be declared, the Pope would agree to retire from Rome to Brazil; then there would be a ball for the whole of Italy at the Villa Borghese on the shores of Lake Como, Lake Como being for that purpose transferred to the neighbourhood of Rome; then would come a scene in the bushes, and so on, and so on — as though you did not know all about it?
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
By now he had learned. Choices are made in brief seconds and paid for in the time that remains.
— Paolo Giordano, The Solitude of Prime Numbers
Just slowly, among his growing riches, Siddhartha had assumed something of the childlike people's ways for himself, something of their childlikeness and of their fearfulness. And yet, he envied them, envied them just the more, the more similar he became to them. He envied them for the one thing that was missing from him and that they had, the importance they were able to attach to their lives, the amount of passion in their joys and fears, the fearful but sweet happiness of being constantly in love. These people were all of the time in love with themselves, with women, with their children, with honours or money, with plans or hopes.
— Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
And then, for an hour, he became aware of the strange life he was leading, of him doing lots of things which were only a game, of, though being happy and feeling joy at times, real life still passing him by and not touching him. As a ball-player plays with his balls, he played with his business-deals, with the people around him, watched them, found amusement in them; with his heart, with the source of his being, he was not with them. The source ran somewhere, far away from him, ran and ran invisibly, had nothing to do with his life any more. And at several times he suddenly became scared on account of such thoughts and wished that he would also be gifted with the ability to participate in all of this childlike-naive occupations of the daytime with passion and with his heart, really to live, really to act, really to enjoy and to live instead of just standing by as a spectator.
— Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Loneliness isn't a disease, it is only a moment to learn something better
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Don't be afraid of the dark." She tousled his hair tolerantly. "I've never known a man who wasn't scared of more things than I was.
— Edward Hoagland, In the Country of the Blind: A Novel
I’m considering keeping the shutters open, even if people are spying on me at night from the apartment across the street. Especially if they are spying on me. It makes me feel less alone. I have a mental camaraderie with that imaginary person and their imaginary gaze. I find myself performing myself for them and exaggerating my facial expressions so they can see me more clearly, like actors project their voices on stage. I’m miming myself.
— Jalina Mhyana
Although it's great to appear to a feast, home is always sweet, though it may be lonely and cold like death
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity
I wanted very much not to be where I was. In fact part of the trouble seemed to be that where I was wasn’t anywhere at all. My life felt empty and unreal... I felt like I was in danger of vanishing, though at the same time the feelings I had were so raw and overwhelming that I often wished I could find a way of losing myself altogether, perhaps for a few months, until the intensity diminished.
— Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
When we suffer in silence, we think that we are alone, different, separate. When we share our stories of suffering, we find that we are the same.
— Vironika Tugaleva
I am isolated. I sit in a glass ball, I see people through a glass wall. I scream, but they do not hear me.- Ellen West
— Carl R. Rogers, A Way of Being
When he stepped into the shower, the hot water scalded him. He let it run over his face, burning his eyelids. He put up with the pain, his jaw clenched and his muscles taut, suppressing the urge to howl with loneliness in the suffocating steam. For four years, one month, and twelve days, Nikon always got into the shower with him after they made love and soaped his back slowly, interminably. And often she put her arms around him, like a little girl in the rain. One day I'll leave without ever really knowing you. You'll remember my big, dark eyes. The reproachful silences. The moans of anxiety as I slept. The nightmares you couldn't save me from. You'll remember all this when I'm gone.
— Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Club Dumas
The memory of having sat at someone’s feet will later make you want to trample him underfoot. I’m trying to fend off your admiration for me, you see, in order to save myself from your future contempt. I prefer to put up with my present state of loneliness rather than suffer more loneliness later. We who are born into this age of freedom and independence and the self must undergo this loneliness. It’s the price we pay for these times of ours.
— Sōseki Natsume, Kokoro
Speech failures, communication breakdowns, misunderstandings, mishearings, episodes of muteness, stuttering and stammering, word forgetfulness, even the inability to grasp a joke: all these things invoke loneliness, forcing a reminder of the precarious, imperfect means by which we express our interiors to others. They undermine our footing in the social, casting us as outsiders, poor or non-participants.
— Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
Giving up on a purposeful journey of life is as deadly as death! When you pursue with tenacity, and strive through the adversities and the vicissitudes of life with a mind of fortitude and get to the end of the journey, you shall surely see life. Awake! Arise and go! Never ever give up!!!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Listening to their argument made me aware of how empty my life was, and I hated the life I was living all the more. It was quite obvious to me this lady was deeply in love, for she was fighting for what she thought to be hers. Even though I was dating two females at the time, and stringing a third one along, yet I’ve yet to discover that kind of love. I guess this was why my favorite song was ‘I wane be love’, by the Jamaican reggae super star Buru Banton.
— Drexel Deal, The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father
But in her loneliness in the palace she learned to know him, they learned to know each other, and she discovered with great delight that one does not love one’s children just because they are one’s children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.
— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
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, Kitchen
I am lonely here sometimes. I'm like the gate, swinging in the breeze when I long for someone to just secure the latch and stop me from flailing about
— Sarah Jio, Goodnight June
Jack looked around for understanding, but found only respect.
— William Golding, Lord of the Flies
Loving each other began with longing, weaving her loneliness into his.
— Leah Kaminsky, The Waiting Room
With solitude, however, fervently it is desired and embraced, comes loneliness. T. H White, the author, offered advice to those in sadness -- learn something new.
— Carolyn G. Heilbrun, The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty
Out in the cold I stand,Looking on at the world sitting tight,With its people in their nice little worlds,And the friends who don’t even know me.It really makes no difference to their world where I am.If I'm there, it keeps going.If I’m not, it goes on.While I walk around, wandering, wondering,My mind a mass of mixed-up machinery,Clashing with conflicts and unanswered questions.I don’t ask the world if it is real-It sits up there on its foundations,Secure, concrete, hard, stone and real.But maybe I’m not realOr if I am, maybe I shouldn’t be.They answer, ‘Smile, God loves you’,But I can’t smile.I’m numbed by cold inside and out.Even the heat in the square brick buildingsWould only warm my body, nothing else.I’m alone in a world full of people,Apart, shut up inside myself,Cold, unfeeling, in a cold unfeeling world.
— Andrea Lovestrand Hanna
,,, 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, Mindfulness Is Better Than Chocolate: A Practical Guide to Enhanced Focus and Lasting Happiness in a World of Distractions
The greatest tragedy is not death but a life without love
— Robin Dabhi
In any case, there was only one tunnel, dark and lonely, mine, the tunnel in which I had spent my childhood, my youth, my whole life. And in one of those transparent lengths of the stone wall I had seen this girl and had gullibly believed that she was traveling another tunnel parallel to mine, when in reality she belonged to the broad world, to the world without confines of those who do not live in tunnels; and perhaps she had peeped into one of my strange windows out of curiosity and had caught a glimpse of my doomed loneliness, or her fancy had been intrigued by the mute language, the clue of my painting.And then, while I advanced always along my corridor, she lived her normal life outside, the exciting life of those people who live outside, that strange, absurd life in which there are dances and parties and gaiety and frivolity. And it happened at times that when I walked by one of my windows she was waiting for me, silent and longing (why was she waiting for me? why silent and longing?); but other times she did not get there on time, or she forgot about this poor creature hemmed in, and then I, with my face pressed against the glass wall, could see her in the distance, smiling or dancing carefree, or, what was worse, I could not see her at all and I imagined her in inaccessible or vile places. And then I felt my destiny a far lonelier one than I had imagined.
— Ernesto Sabato, El túnel
How sad it was to realize that sometimes you never got there. That sometimes you lived a whole life skittering across the surface as the years passed, unblessed.
— Emma Cline
It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one's solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem. Can blue solve the problem, or can it at least keep me company within it?—No, not exactly. It cannot love me that way; it has no arms. But sometimes I do feel its presence to be a sort of wink—Here you are again, it says, and so am I.
— Maggie Nelson, Bluets
I remember arriving by train in a small Swiss town. I had walked up a steep, cobblestoned street that offered a sweeping view of the village below and a lake, which, in the late afternoon light, was like a great cloudy opal. And I remember thinking, with a sense of mounting joy, that not a single soul knew where I was at that moment. No one could find me. No one could phone me. No one could see me who knew me by name.For someone whose childhood experiences had pounded home the Sartrian concept that hell, truly, is other people, that was an awesome moment. I knew, at least for an instant, that I was free.That feeling is one I've sought to find again and again. Often I've succeeded, other times, for no reason I can figure out, the feeling of elation and freedom degenerates into a profound loneliness and sense of bitter isolation. But there is still something about arriving in a strange or unexplored city, in Hong Kong or Paris or Sydney, wandering streets one has never walked before, in a place where, only against the most astronomical odds, would one encounter a familiar
— Lucy Taylor
The supermarket is still open; it won't close till midnight. It is brilliantly bright. Its brightness offers sanctuary from loneliness and the dark. You could spend hours of your life here, in a state of suspended insecurity, meditating on the multiplicity of things to eat. Oh dear, there is so much! So many brands in shiny boxes, all of them promising you good appetite. Every article on the shelves cries out to you, take me, take me; and the mere competition of their appeals can make you imagine yourself wanted, even loved. But beware - when you get back to your empty room, you'll find that the false flattering elf of the advertisement has eluded you; what remains is only cardboard, cellophane and food. And you have lost the heart to be hungry.
— Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man
Try listening to yourself sometime, alone in a transient room in a strange town. The worst is when you draw a blank, and the ash-blonde ghosts of the past carry on long twittering long-distance calls with your inner ear, and there's no way to hang up.
— Ross Macdonald
72. It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one's solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem. Can blue solve the problem, or can it at least keep me company within it?—No, not exactly. It cannot love me that way; it has no arms. But sometimes I do feel its presence to be a sort of wink—Here you are again, it says, and so am I.
— Maggie Nelson
...accustomed like the white blackbird to the loneliness of eccentricity yet never quite reconciled to it, they found in each other's oddness a most comforting compatibility.
— Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch
Loneliness made or ruined a man. It frightened him so that he must either sing and build in the face of the dark, like a bird or a beaver, or hide from it like a beast in his den. There were perhaps always only the two ways to go, God or the jungle.
— Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch