c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
it would hurt him to know she had felt that way for a while, that her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Loneliness was like an ogre hovering over those activities
— Mitch Albom, The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto
Lupita thought that people who didn’t dance were selfish and lonely.
— Laura Esquivel, Pierced by the Sun
Maybe my time's running out, but at least I'm living. And if that's what it is for you, being here inside where nothing ever happens, where you think you're safe, then stay. Stay right here and you let me know how that works for you.Bacause I'm gessing it'll never be enough.
— John Corey Whaley
When you are alone you can easily judge yourself.
— ArslanHaider
At some point, loneliness become less a condition than a habit. In time, you stop looking at your phone wondering why you can't think of anyone to call, stop getting you hair cut, stop working out, stop thinking that tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life. Because tomorrow is today, and today is yerterday, and yesterday beat the shit out of you and brought you to your knees. The only way to stay sane is to stop hoping for something better.
— Jonathan Tropper, One Last Thing Before I Go
He looked down the slope and, at the base, in the shadow of the wall of the Park, he saw some human figures lying. Those venal and furtive loves filled him with despair. He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt that he had been outcast from life’s feast.
— James Joyce, Dubliners
the pavement makes no soundas it touches your feetcalm and constantlike silence on repeatlanguidly your thoughts bleedinto the evening airin crimson red the words read'some things are beyond repair
— Anna Jae
Because in some men, it is in them to give up everything personal at some time, before it ferments and poisons - throw it to some human being or some human idea.
— Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
And what’s the use of talking, if you already know that others don’t feel what you feel?
— Louise Bourgeois
She raised her head and stared at the birds with him, caught in a web of awe and loneliness.
— Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi
Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
It was a lonely place. A place for the dark-hearted. It's where I deserve to be, Maleficent told herself every time she arrived. For only someone with a heart as dark as mine could do something so evil to a girl with a heart as light as Aurora's.
— Elizabeth Rudnick, Maleficent
NocturneWhere are you now,my poems,my sleepwalkers?No mumbles tonight?Where are you, thirst,fever, humming tedium?The sodium streetlightsburr outside my window,steadfast, unreachable,little astonishmentslighting the way uphill.Where are you now,when I need you most? It’s late. I’m old. Come soon, you feral cats among the dahlias.
— W. S. Di Piero
I love my loneliness as it helps me gather strength to deal with people.
— Amit Abraham
But he was absolutely alone. No one ever wrote to him. Visited him. Totally alone. And I believe the happiest man I have ever met.
— John Fowles, The Magus
For me, it was a lonely season. Whenever I got home and took off my clothes, I felt as if any second my bones would burst through my skin. Like some unknown force inside me had taken a wrong turn somewhere, and was leading me off in some strange direction to another world
— Haruki Murakami, Pinball, 1973
For some years he had felt weighing on him the burden of loneliness which sometimes overwhelms old bachelors. He had been strong, active and cheerful, spending his days in sport, and his evenings in amusement. Now he was growing dull, and no longer took interest in anything. Exercise tired him, suppers and even dinners made him ill, while women bored him as much as they had once amused him.
— Guy de Maupassant, 88 Short Stories
You could climb to the top of the world and jump into the deepest of ravines, but if you don’t have someone to share it with you’ll always be looking back.
— Saim Cheeda
For me, it was a lonely season. Whenever I got home and took off my clothes, I felt as if any second my bones would burst through my skin. Like some unknown force inside me had taken a wrong turn somewhere, and was leading me off in some strange direction to another world could go on like this forever, but would I ever find a place that was meant for me?
— Haruki Murakami, Pinball, 1973
We walked side by side to the station. The sweater kept me comfortable in the night air.“Okay, I’ll keep plugging away,” she said.“Wasn’t much help, was I?”“No, actually, it took a load off me just to be able to talk.”We caught trains going in opposite directions from the same platform.“You’re really not lonely?” she asked one last time. And while I was searching for a good reply, her train came.
— Haruki Murakami, Pinball, 1973
In the streets outside everything was still. The hour before five was the only time of day this city slept. In my earlier life, during the twelve years I had lived in Bergen I used to stay up at night as often as I could. I never reflected on this, it was just something I liked and did. It had started as a student ideal, grounded in a notion that in some way night was associated with freedom. Not in itself but as a response to the nine-to-four reality which I, and a couple of others, regarded as middle-class and conformist. We wanted to be free, we stayed up at night. Continuing with this had less to do with freedom than a growing need to be alone. This, I understood now, I shared with my father. In the house where we lived he had a whole studio apartment to himself and he spent more or less every evening there. The night was his.
— Karl Ove Knausgård
He lived a quiet existence where the future was easy to predict and the past was a cancer in remission. It was meaningful, of course. But it was lonely.
— Adelheid Manefeldt, Consequence
When he stepped into the shower, the hit 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
He's the only person who's entered my world apart from me.
— Mika Yamamori, ひるなかの流星 7 [Hirunaka no Ryuusei 7]
I wish to spend a lifetime near a lighthouse where loneliness will be the glimmer of luminous prancing upon ocean waves… rising and falling only for my breathing.
— Munia Khan
The way I need you is a loneliness I cannot bear
— Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
[He] used to be so insignificant that one literally felt alone in his presence.
— Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories
Underwater, we're drowning victims, struggling over and under each others' bodies. But above, we bob with the tide,undercurrents pulling us just far enough apart ,so that we're drifting parallel but not together.
— Craig Thompson, Blankets
I have a very childlike rage, and a very childlike loneliness.
— Richey Edwards
See how community is only a good thing when you're a part of it.
— Sara Baume
Am I creating my own isolation? It seems to me that most of my acts are acts of integrity. So much takes place within me each day that by comparison I find a paucity, a stinginess, a silence in people which drives me to excess.
— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955
Rooms are never alone," said the Doctor with a laugh. "Only the people who live them can be alone.
— Charles Lambert, The Children's Home
That autumn, I kept coming back to Hopper’s images, drawn to them as if they were blueprints and I was a prisoner; as if they contained some vital clue about my state. Though I went with my eyes over dozens of rooms, I always returned to the same place: to the New York diner of Nighthawks, a painting that Joyce Carol Oates once described as “our most poignant, ceaselessly replicated romantic image of American loneliness”...Green shadows were falling in spikes and diamonds on the sidewalk. There is no colour in existence that so powerfully communicates urban alienation, the atomisation of human beings inside the edifices they create, as this noxious pallid green, which only came into being with the advent of electricity, and which is inextricably associated with the nocturnal city, the city of glass towers, of empty illuminated offices and neon signs.
— Olivia Laing
[He] used to be soinsignificant that one literally felt alone in his presence.
— Franz Kafka
Aloneness exaggerates our emotions and sensitivity.
— Beth Moore, To Live Is Christ
But how much love, oh, Lord, how much love I experienced at times in those dreams of mine, in those “escapes into everything beautiful and sublime.” Even though it was fantastic love, even though it was never directed at anything human, there was still so much love that afterward, in reality, I no longer felt any impulse to direct it: that would have been an unnecessary luxury.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Isolation might be more hazardous than splendor.
— Barbara W. Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914
It was lousy in the park. It wasn't too cold, but the sun still wasn't out, and there didn't look like there was anything in the park except dog crap and globs of spit and cigar butts from old men, and the benches all looked like they'd be wet if you sat down on them. It made you depressed, and every once in a while, for no reason, you got goose flesh while you walked. It didn't seem at all like Christmas was coming soon. It didn't seem like anything was coming.
— J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
When it became clear that nothing of the kind was forthcoming, I took more direct action. I prayed for the city to be cleared of people, for the gift of being alone—a-l-o-n-e: which is the one New York prayer that rarely gets lost or delayed in channels, and in no time at all everything I touched turned to solid loneliness. - De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period (1952)
— J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
No one understands the lines you are writing, and after 25 years you are the only one that speakes that languge .
— Adel Abouhana
I was afflicted with a familiar attack of discovering my own loneliness. From time to time I suffer this emotional attack, especially when I am happy, when I have succeeded at something, and on those rare occasions when I am pleased with myself. Immediately, a gentle and soothing sorrow engulfs my entire being.
— Shahriar Mandanipour, Censoring an Iranian Love Story
I ask myself everyday what my life is doing to me and I realize I don't have anybody I can talk to.""You should have" said the Doctor "everybody should.
— Henning Mankell, The Dogs of Riga
my heart, sometimes singing in the afternoon, the most haunting song of solitude
— John J. Geddes
Sometimes I think, What a man gonna do with all this media publicity, Photos in newspapers, photography in and among the industry, references and contacts when he cannot help a friend, when he has no family life, and not Even a dog to welcome him after work hours!
— Himmilicious
Within perfect walls there is nothing worth protecting. There is, in fact, nothing. And so we exchange privacy for intimacy.
— Max Barry, Lexicon
What good were special talents when there was no one to share them with?
— Dave Cullen, Columbine
The tyranny of an object, he thought. It doesn't know I exist.
— Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
I wish I could see a cherry blossom or a lotus flower. Where could they be?
— Susumu Katsumata, Red Snow
He liked the electric darkness and the hot dirty air and the blasts of noise and traffic and the manic barking sirens and the crush of people. It helped a lonely man feel connected and isolated both at the same time.
— Lee Child, The Hard Way
It was a desire, an echo, a sound; she could drape it in color, see it in form, hear it in music, but not in words; no, never in words. She sighed, teased by desires so incoherent, so incommunicable.
— Virginia Woolf
The kind of society we live in can contribute to loneliness. Mobility and constant change tend to make some individuals feel rootless and disconnected.
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
I am never lonely when I am praying, for this brings me into companionship with the greatest friend of all—Jesus Christ. He said, “I call you not servants; . . . but . . . friends” [John 15:15 KJV].
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
There are thousands of lonely people who carry heavy and difficult burdens of grief, anxiety, pain, and disappointment; but the loneliest of all is one whose life is steeped in sin.
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
God didn’t make Adam and Eve because He was lonely or because He needed someone to love Him in return. God is complete in Himself
—  He lacks nothing. God’s love compelled Him to create [humanity]. His love was expressed in the creation of the human race.
I have often said that loneliness is the predominant attitude in our culture. A person can be lonely in the midst of a party
—  he can be lonely in a crowd. Loneliness may be experienced by the rich and famous or the poor and unknown.
With Christ as your Savior and constant Companion, you, although alone, need never be lonely.
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
I am never lonely when I am reading the Bible. Nothing dissolves loneliness like a session with God’s Word.
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
I am never lonely when I am sharing [Christ] with others. There is a great exhilaration in talking to others about [Him].
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
One kind of loneliness is the loneliness of solitude. If you have repented, surrendered, and committed your heart and life to Him, Christ forgives . . . and takes you into His family; He brings you to the hearth, and you feel the warmth of the fire. If you are lonely today, seek Christ and know the fellowship that He brings.
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
When God became lonelyhe created man,or was itwhen man became lonelyhe created God.
— Melanie Exler
Life in this village is like that of a louse hanging on to a wrinkle in a loincloth.
— Susumu Katsumata, Red Snow
Loneliness is no respecter of persons. It invades the palace as well as the hut.
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
I’m mad with loneliness and you’ve been haunting me all day
— John J. Geddes
The thing you did to alleviate the loneliness was to take off your clothes and touch someone, even if you didn’t really know the person well.
— Rick Moody, Hotels of North America
Life is for the loved, not the lonely." She lamented. "Although it's the lonely who try to make the world and its inhabitants less so.
— Donna Lynn Hope
One is alone when the last one who remembers is gone. I have nephews and nieces and kind friends---but there's no one who knew me as a young girl---non one who belongs to the old days. I've been alone for quite a long time now.
— Agatha Christie
I just never noticed how little of me existed before. I was a shadow without a person.
— Michael J. Sullivan, The Death of Dulgath
But also . . . I have plenty of people around me to talk to, and no one to be honest with.
— Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird
Nos·tal·gia (n):A feeling that lingers long after the taste is gone.
— Jenim Dibie, The Calligraphy of God
We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that "I myself" is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body—a center which "confronts" an "external" world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange. Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. "I came into this world." "You must face reality." "The conquest of nature." This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated "egos" inside bags of skin.
— Alan W. Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
The main thing about aliens is that they are alien. They feel no responsibility for fulfilling any of your expectations. (Dark City Lights)
— Robert Silverberg
I also often ask my guests about what they consider to be their invisible weaknesses and shortcomings. I do this because these are the characteristics that define us no less than our strengths. What we feel sets us apart from other people is often the thing that shapes us as individuals. This may be especially true of writers and actors, many of whom first started to develop their observational skills as a result of being sidelined from typical childhood or adolescent activities because of an infirmity or a feeling of not fitting in. Or so I’ve come to believe from talking to so many writers and actors over the years.
— Terry Gross, All I Did Was Ask: Conversations with Writers, Actors, Musicians, and Artists
Confronted by too much emptiness, said Adam One, the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?
— Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood
Every once in a while, large cities have narrow streets, silent passageways that allow your footsteps to echo in the stillness of the night, and it seems like everything is going back to the way it was, when there were only a few of us and we all knew each other and greeted each other on the street.
— Jaume Cabré
Margie Flynn was in my head like a bad cold, blurring everything. It was a new kind of loneliness, a hurt I couldn’t stop picking at.
— Chris Fuhrman, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys
In America the vast spaces accentuate the vast spaces between people, deserts which stretch between human beings. It is a void which has to be spanned by the automobile. It takes an hour to reach a movie, two hours to reach a friend. So the coyotes howl and wail at the awful emptiness of mountains, deserts, hills.
— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955
He was smarter than most, more sensitive. In that regard he was more prepared for the loneliness of senescence than she was. He'd been a stranger in the world for most of his life.
— Matthew  Thomas, We Are Not Ourselves
And I'm okay with drowning.
— pleasefindthis, I Wrote This For You
Afraid to die loveless. Because I think if you die without knowing love in this life, that's how you'll spend eternity. Alone. Frozen. Do you think hell is fiery? I don't. I think hell is frozen.
— Ellen Hopkins, Identical
What happiness to sit in intimate conversation with someone of like mind, warmed by candid discussion of the amusing and fleeting ways of this world ... but such a friend is hard to find, and instead you sit there doing your best to fit in with whatever the other is saying, feeling deeply alone.
— Kenkō Hōshi (Yoshida Kenkō)
And that is one of the worst things about this life. As a liar, a pretend person, you cannot really truly ever be someone's friend. My American life, it is lonely. Often, it is very, very lonely.
— Jillian Cantor, Margot
We go from curiosity to a search for communion.
— Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
Adam was not always alone, but he was always lonesome. Even in a group, he was slowly perfecting the skill of holding himself separate. It was easier than one might expect; the others allowed him to do it.
— Maggie Stiefvater, Blue Lily, Lily Blue
There’s a line you never get to cross, as long as you live. The edge of your body. You’re trapped inside your skin, and no matter how many times you reach out to touch a friend or a lover, no matter how close you hold someone or how fiercely you make love, when it begins, when it ends, and all the moments in between, you are still yourself, alone. I know you knew this. It was in all the love songs you wrote. I think it was the hidden impulse we both had, down inside, that made us take razors to our skin, that desire to open up and let the world in, to let ourselves out, to take that sharp thin line of flesh and erase it.
— Michael Montoure, Still Life
I thought about how often this was needed in everyday life. How we feel lonely, sometimes to the point of tears, but we don't let those tears come because we are not supposed to cry.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
By Fortune's adverse buffets overborneTo solitude I fled, to wilds forlorn,And not in utter loneliness to live,Myself at last did to the Devil give!
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust
Art is made by the alone for the alone.
— Luis Barragán
I knew I didn’t want to be alone anymore.
— Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family
There is no Beatitude for the lonesome.The Book doesn't say they are blessed.
— James Leo Herlihy, Midnight Cowboy
Take hands.There is no love now.But there are hands.There is no joining now,But a joining has beenOf the fastening of fingersAnd their opening.More than the clasp even, the kissSpeaks loneliness,How we dwell apart,And how love triumphs in this.
— Laura Riding Jackson, The Poems of Laura Riding: A Newly Revised Edition of the 1938/1980 Collection
Solitude is a terrible thing, for it permits the imagination to picture, in detail, that which perhaps should never be articulated.
— Patrick McGrath, The Grotesque
I can’t help but imagine what that would be like—to be all alone on this island with eternity taunting me with loneliness. To say goodbye to the last human you will ever see—there is no crueler hand of fate.
— Jennifer Arnett, Day One: A Novella
Each time I reach outside my skin/I just get lonesome for what's within.
— Fred Chappell, River: A Poem
Maybe this is what alone really is — finding out how tiny your world is, and not knowing how to get anywhere else.
— David Levithan, Another Day
It was at this period that Drogo realised how far apart men are whatever their affection for each other, that if you suffer the pain is yours and yours alone, no one else can take upon himself the least part of it; that if you suffer it does not mean that others feel pain even though their love is great: hence the loneliness of life.
— Dino Buzzati, The Tartar Steppe
Watching across the aisles, the Nevers' faces began to change. One by one, their scowls turned sorrowful, their eyes melted to hurt. Hort, Ravan, Anadil, even Hester...as if they too wished they could have such joy. As if they too wished they could feel as wanted. Gone was their will to fight, lost to broken hearts, and the villains shrank into silence, snakes drained of venom.
— Soman Chainani, The School for Good and Evil
Once I accepted the fact that I was bad luck, I shied away from group activities. And groups. And activities. I started spending a lot of time in my room, tucked under my covers reading books. There’s only so much damage a book can do, and I wasn’t worried about hurting myself. Accidentally hurting yourself is way better than hurting other people.Sure, I got lonely for a while. But getting invited to slumber parties just wasn’t worth the stress of wondering if I might accidentally burn down the house with my flat iron or be the only survivor of a freak sleepover massacre. And loneliness is just like everything else—if you endure it long enough, you get used to it.
— Paula Stokes, Girl Against the Universe
I believe that individuals nowadays are probably more aware of their inner loneliness than has ever been true before in history.
— Carl R. Rogers, On Encounter Groups
The only antidote to the loneliness of the streets was the streets themselves.
— Orhan Pamuk, A Strangeness in My Mind
I was so used to pretending to be something I wasn't, it shocked me to be seen for what I was.
— Kim van Alkemade, Orphan Number Eight
Ignore the loneliness, enjoy your presence.
— M.F. Moonzajer, A moment with God ; Poetry
Isolated people, those who live alone, are always conscious of their condition in the homes of families.
— Patrick McGrath, Trauma
When you fill a void, isn't the void still there?
— Marty Rubin
Sometimes the word ‘Desire’ may leave you in a tizzy. Many of us are banking on this word to drive our life forward. These ‘Desires’ may be the single factor that guide and enrich your life. But, there’s a trap.Surgeon Atul Gawande puts it like this in his book ‘Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, “When we have only our desires to guide us, and they are fleeting, capricious, and insatiable, they provide, ultimately, only torment.”So beware of ‘Desires’. You need to redefine it in a way that makes your life to be endurable.
— Dipin Damodharan
Life on the farm had fed his soul since he was a child. he was ever grateful to Gott for giving him a chance to work the land and live by the seasons. It was a good life...but a lonely one for a man his age, a man too old to be living with his family.
— Rosalind Lauer, A Simple Autumn
Hey, I wish we hung out more in high school. Why didn’t we?”“I was hiding,” Jake said thoughtfully.“Me too.”“You?”“In my own way.”Hearing that made Jake wonder if they’d all been in hiding, if he hadn’t been the only one who’d felt alone for so much of high school.
— Carolyn Mackler, Infinite in Between
There's nothing like standing kissing-close to a beautiful stranger to make you really feel your loneliness.
— Phoebe  Rose, Rescued
Love and loneliness, they are both coincidences.
— M.F. Moonzajer, LOVE, HATRED AND MADNESS
Prepare for a radio, for nothing is silent like the grave
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, The Great Pearl of Wisdom
Don't forget - you're the one who swam across the freezing sea at night.
— Haruki Murakami
I was much younger, much hungrier, much more alone. But I was myself, pared down to the essentials.
— Haruki Murakami
At home, Tommy tried to avoid looking too long at himself in the mirror, for his reflection stirred in him a feeling of great loneliness and a fear that this loneliness might be permanent.
— Aryn Kyle
What if our loneliness is the result not simply of needing a partner but of needing people? We are made in the image of a relational God
—  it makes sense that we possess the desire to be together.
She'd been cross so much of the time and often about small things. Looking back at herself, she thought that her crossness was like a shapeless overcoat, covering loneliness, and it wasn't the old loneliness she'd felt after her mother died, or even an adult version of it, but something different and more punishing.
— Rosamund Lupton, The Quality of Silence
Loneliness is a shadow of death
— Bangambiki Habyarimana
Most people never realize that loneliness is a gift from God. Not only can it draw us closer to Jesus, it can teach us to cherish a long-awaited marriage relationship all the more.
— Eric Ludy, When God Writes Your Love Story: The Ultimate Approach to Guy/Girl Relationships
I realised I really was shy. And once I was in it, I couldn't escape. I'd go to talk and find my face was made of cement. Nothing would come out. On winter days, I'd feel myself turning grey at the edges and fading into the walls.Was this defensive strategy? It was paralysing. And it went on for years.
— Janet E. Cameron, Cinnamon Toast and the End of the World
Loneliness—since I was trying to escape it—was hell; and yet for the hermit who seeks it, it is apparently happiness.
— Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another
No life is a waste. The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.
— Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven
Ged saw all these things from outside and apart, alone, and his heart was very heavy in him, though he would not admit to himself that he was sad. As night fell he still lingered in the streets, reluctant to go back to the inn. He heard a man and a girl talking together merrily as they came down the street past him towards the town square, and all at once he turned, for he knew the man's voice.He followed and caught up with the pair, coming up beside them in the late twilight lit only by distant lantern-gleams. The girl stepped back, but the man stared at him and then flung up the staff he carried, holding it between them as a barrier to ward off the threat or act of evil. And that was somewhat more than Ged could bear. His voice shook a little as he said, "I thought you would know me, Vetch."Even then Vetch hesitated for a moment."I do know you," he said, and lowered the staff and took Ged's hand and hugged him round the shoulders-" I do know you! Welcome, my friend, welcome! What a sorry greeting I gave you, as if you were a ghost coming up from behind– and I have waited for you to come, and looked for you-
— Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
It's bad to be unable to stand solitude.
— Leo Tolstoy
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, A Whispering Leaf. . .
The world itself, like the mask, began to seem difficult to believe in, and I was stricken with an unutterable sense of loneliness.
— Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another
Clever of you, Hemul. But, on the other hand, think how lonely the Groke is because nobody likes her, and she hates everybody. The Contents is perhaps the only thing she has. Would you now take that away from her too -- lonely and rejected in the night?" Sniff became more and more affected and his voice trembled. "Cheated out of her only possession by Thingumy and Bob." He blew his nose and couldn't go on.
— Tove Jansson, Finn Family Moomintroll
Sad truth is. . . we all end up alone on some death bed. Yeah? No way to take anybody else's place and no way we can be lying on the same one.”I was at the edge of the white-wed cloth. My shoes filled with concrete, as did my head, looking at the empty shell of what was once a woman full of wonder.“Any way to make someone feel not so alone?” she asked. “The only thing anyone can ever do is help someone feel a little less lonely before they get there.”“How does someone do that?” “Memories. Help create memories. Better ones. Ones to replace the old.
— S.D. Lawendowski, Snapped
I stood where they'd left me. I watched them get smaller and smaller as they went down the hallway, leaving me there without a word, not even looking back. Only I was getting smaller and smaller, being swallowed up in the suffocating emptiness of the silent house; so that by the time they came back again, I would have disappeared.
— Joan D. Vinge, Catspaw
Days feels like years when you're alone.
— Auliq Ice
The barriers between animal and human come down very easily. We belong to a single great family, and if we are lonely and unhappy we gladly accept the friendship of our distant relations.
— Marlen Haushofer
The Groke looked at the hat. Then she looked at Thingumy and Bob. Then she looked at the hat again. You could see that she was thinking with all her might. Then suddenly she snatched the hat and, without a word, slithered like ann icy grey shadow into the forest. It was the last time she was seen in the Valley of the Moomins, and the last they saw of the Hobgoblin's Hat, too. At once the colors became warmer again and the garden was filled with the sounds and scents of summer.
— Tove Jansson, Finn Family Moomintroll
You are the least-alone person I have ever known. Your heart has always included within it everyone who let you love them, and many who did not.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender in Exile
Don’t put all of your focus on dating. Typically, if you’re involved in outside activities and causes that you are passionate about, chances are that you’re meeting people with similar interests.
— Auliq Ice
Sadly enough, sometimes you and Lenny are the only real human interactions that I have all day. The rest of the day I'm just like a machine that mechnically computes and producesAlso in "Stories and Scripts:An Anthology
— Zack Love, The Doorman
Yes, I do think that not everything from the past is outmoded. Giving yourself a chance to possess something very good, taking your time, that's important. Yes, I think everything goes by too fast these days. We talk too fast. We think too fast -- if we think at all, that is! We send e-mails and texts without reading them through, we lose the elegance of proper spelling, politeness, the sense of things. I've seen children publish pictures of themselves vomiting on Facebook. No, no, i'm not against progress; I'm just afraid it will isolate people even more.
— Grégoire Delacourt, La liste de mes envies
Sometimes in utter hopelessness I put my cheek on the table like it was someone. I wanted to wake my brain up and be loved.
— Eileen Myles, Inferno
Did I read because I was lonely, or was I lonely because I started to read?
— Grace Metalious
People say how do you live alone? My response-I have time for myself not for loneliness...
— Ankit_pandey
She would never forget how his soul was lonely as the moon they’d met under, and how, for several brief moments, she’d been able to chase the loneliness away.
— Katherine McIntyre, Soul Solution
Do not be sad that all odds are against you
—  be happy that your real purpose is by you
Bukowski was dead wrong, the man was drunk most likely when he said this. Sometimes you get so fucking lonely that it makes no sense whatsoever. That sense losses meaning and usage, that meaning losses context as the sky pushes down upon you and threatens you to act a little more like your fellow human beings or else it'll cut your throat. When one is this lonely insanity is the only logical route and im on it quite well.
— Samuel K
You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discovered it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky.
— James     Baldwin
I'm never going to be happy, but I could get close now, I think. I could be almost normal. I could have a friend.
— Alyssa Brugman, Alex As Well
No one is materialistic by birth. It the loneliness of that person which makes him, love things that can never love him back.
— Srinivas Shenoy
Seek me not in your richness, O dear, search not amidst the words talkative. Find me in the moments of loneliness, in the silence of your mighty soul. Within the void of intimate being this is me, the majestic blue - the cessation of all; and here your are in the celestial path.
— Preeth Nambiar
She knew all the indices to the idle lonely, never bought a small tube of toothpaste, never dropped a magazine in her shopping card.
— Joan Didion
Truth be told, loneliness had seeped into her bones with the passing of time until it had become her normal way of life.
— Katherine McIntyre, Soul Solution
...you hold a poemthat functions half as personalnote and half as telescopeto the heightsawaiting us all.
— Kristen Henderson, Drum Machine
It is raining, perhaps clouds voiding their deepest longings! Upon the streams I have drove those paper boats to the farthest. Listening to the lonely drops of rain I am trying in vain to sing melodious, Alas the voice ends deep within! Were you the song within? O my dear, but I know you are silence that sings wordless, a melody hummed nameless!
— Preeth Nambiar, The Solitary Shores
Here, in my solitude, I have the feeling that I contain too much humanity.
— Ingmar Bergman
The loneliest thing in the world is lying awake beside someone asleep. ~ "The November Story
— Rebecca Makkai, Music for Wartime: Stories
None of them could help her. She had lost all of them. They would not find out about this; she would not put it into a letter. And because of this she understood that they would never know her now. Maybe, she thought, they had never known her, any of them, because if they had, then they would have had to realize what this would be like for her.
— Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn
I never feel alone realizing the fact that my life is my only life partner
— Munia Khan
Smallness is subversive, because smallness can creep into smaller places and wreak transformation at the most vulnerable, cellular level. In a time when largeness is threatening to topple us, I wish to remember and praise the beauty of smallness, in order to banish the Goliath of loneliness.
— Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater
A particular variety of loneliness, like peering deep into the darkness. It's only natural, when two separate universes touch.
— Banana Yoshimoto, The Lake
But this gives no proper idea of my feelings at all; and no one that has not lived such a retired stationary life as mine, can possibly imagine what they were: hardly even if he has known what it is to awake some morning, and find himself in Port Nelson, in New Zealand, with a world of waters between himself and all that knew him.
— Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey
[Sylvia Plath] was now far along a peculiarly solitary road on which not many would risk following her. So it was important for her to know that her messages were coming back clear and strong. Yet not even her determinedly bright self-reliance could disguise the loneliness that came from her almost palpably, like a heat haze. She asked for neither sympathy nor help but, like bereaved widow at a wake, she simply wanted company in her mourning.
— Al Álvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide
One dead and one alone. That's how the story ends.
— Karen Quan, Better to be able to love than to be loveable
I purely came over because I thought you looked extremely lonely. You have an extremely sensitive face.
— J.D. Salinger, For Esme - With Love And Squalor
The worst kind of loneliness, I think, is to be in the presence of those you love and have them treat you like you aren't there.
— John Burley, The Forgetting Place
Beware! devil occupies your soul with forbidden desires
— Muhammad Anwar Jalil
Two fears alternate in marriage, of loneliness and of bondage. The dread of loneliness being keener than the fear of bondage, we get married. For one person who fears being thus tied there are four who dread being set free. Yet the love of liberty is a noble passion and one to which most married people secretly aspire, -- in moments when they are not neurotically dependent -- but by then it is too late; the ox does not become a bull, not the hen a falcon.The fear of loneliness can be overcome, for it springs from weakness; human beings are intended to be free, and to be free is to be lonely, but the fear of bondage is the apprehension of a real danger, and so I find it all the more pathetic to watch young men and beautiful girls taking refuge in marriage from an imaginary danger, a sad loss to their friends ad a sore trial to each other. First love is the one most worth having, yet the best marriage is often the second, for we should marry only when the desire for freedom be spent; not till then does a man know whether he is the kind who can settle down. The most tragic breakings-up are of those couples who have married young and who have enjoyed seven years of happiness, after which the banked fires of passion and independence explode -- and without knowing why, for they still love each other, they set about accomplishing their common destruction.
— Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus
I wonder if I might be lonelierif I didn't have loneliness
— Kelli Russell Agodon, Hourglass Museum
He could see her, but dared not remain for fear of annoying her by seeming to be spying upon the pleasures which she tasted in other company, pleasures which - while he drove home in utter loneliness, and went to bed, as anxiously as I myself was to go to bed, some years later, on the evenings when he came to dine with us at Combray - seemed illimitable to him since he had not been able to see their end.
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
There had never been any more between us thanchance had brought. But perhaps that makes a greater indebtednessand binds closer than much else
— Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades
The world is “sick” with loneliness in spite of multitudes of people living in it
— Sunday Adelaja
Could Denny have possibly appreciated the subjective nature of loneliness, which something nature of loneliness, which is something exist only in the mind, not in the world, and, like a virus, is unable to survive without a willing host.
— Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain
Dying, however, is lonely, the loneliest event of life. Dying not only separates you from others but also exposes you to a second, even more frightening form of loneliness: separation from the world itself.
— IRVIN D.YALOM
A man could be at the coffee-house every evening laughing and playing cards with his friends, he could have so much fun with his classmates that there is never a moment they arent´t exploding into laughter, he could spend every hour of the day chatting with his intimates, but if that man has been abandoned by God, he´d still be the loneliest man on earth.
— Orhan Pamuk, Snow
If you don't Understand the color of Darkness and Loneliness Then you must be Blind
— Yaganesh Derasari
To you who eat a lot of rice because you’re lonely, To you who sleep a lot because you’re bored, To you who cry a lot because you are sad, I write this down. Chew on your feelings that are cornerned like you would chew on rice.Anyway, life is something that you need to digest.
— Chun Yang Hee
Sometimes the rainfallsjust for you and meto be the violinplaying in the backgroundof our loneliness's song.
— Sanober  Khan, A touch, a tear, a tempest
Finally, she said: “I’m lonely” — it’s weird but you tell the wolves things, sometimes. You can’t help it, all these old wounds come open and suddenly you’re confessing to a wolf who never says anything back. She said: “I’m lonely,” and they ate her in the street.
— Catherynne M. Valente, The Bread We Eat in Dreams
The sun loved me again when it saw that the stars would not abandon me.
— Jenim Dibie, The Calligraphy of God
I have all these things that I want to say to her, like... Like how I can tell she's a lonely person, even if other people can't. Cause I know what it feels like to be lost and lonely and invisible.
— Richard Ayoade, The Double
They're sharing a drink called loneliness, but at least its better than drinking alone.
— Billy Joel
Longing was a feeling that was hard to live with. It didn’t ask permission. It didn’t pay attention to time or place. It was overwhelming and demanding, grasping and selfish. It clouded thoughts or made them too bright, too sharp. Longing demanded unconditional surrender. Lumikki tried to fight it and failed. She didn’t want to long and yet she longed. She didn’t want to remember, and yet her dreams and her body remembered, reminding her constantly.The longing was physical. It was dizziness. It was a seizing in her belly. It was the need to wrap her arms around herself alone in bed when there was no one else to do it for her. She felt the longing in her fingertips that yearned to stroke, to touch, to caress. The longing made her fingers restless, fiddling with the zipper of her jacket, the strings in her hoodie, fidgeting with whatever little thing happened to her hand. The longing made her teeth bite into her lower lip, leaving it chipped and almost bleeding. She knew she was being stupid. She knew her longing was pointless.
— Salla Simukka, As White as Snow
The small talk that sprang readily to their lips came to hers only with a tremendous effort. After an opportunity had come and gone, she often scolded herself for not saying this or doing that, for laughing too loud or smiling too little. Whenever she tried to re-create the moment of contact, she was easily rebuffed by the slightest gesture, withdrawing all too quickly if she thought she was in the way. The old stone-and-brick schoolhouse, with its four gabled roofs and round little windows, was the only thing that seemed steadfast to her, while the beings that populated its rooms and thundered down its corridors were unreal and unpredictable. It gripped her like a monstrous truth that she was condemned to lead life without belonging or feeling close to anyone.
— Erick Setiawan, Of Bees and Mist
You are my favourite part of me.
— Jenim Dibie
Why would you want any other, when you’re a world within a world?
— Elliott Smith
I am always alone, pretending to be someone else or lost in a vast emptiness. I miss life. I miss conversation and laughter and shared joy and hurt. I miss dancing and painting. I miss waking up to a day with no evil in it - at least, none that I can see.
— Stacey Jay, Juliet Immortal
In truth, she disliked books. She felt a peculiar disquiet when opening the pages. She had felt it since childhood. She did not know why. Something in the act itself, the immersion, the seclusion, was disturbing. Reading was an affirmation of being alone, of being separate, trapped. Books were like oubliettes. Her preference was for company, the tactile world, atoms.
— Sarah Hall, The Beautiful Indifference: Stories
Far rather would she that he were dead! She could not sit beside him when he stared so and did not see her and made everything terrible; sky and tree, children playing, dragging carts, blowing whistles, falling down; all were terrible. And he would not kill himself; and she could tell no one. "Septimus has been working too hard"––that was all she could say to her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she thought. She could tell nobody, not even Septimus now, and looking back, she saw him sitting in his shabby overcoat alone, on the seat, hunched up, staring. And it was cowardly for a man to say he would kill himself, but Septimus had fought; he was brave; he was not Septimus now. She put on her lace collar. She put on her new hat and he never noticed; and he was happy without her. Nothing could make her happy without him! Nothing! He was selfish. So men are.
— Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Every avalanche was once a lonely snowflake, every flood was once an aching raindrop.
— Jenim Dibie
The joy we feel to be together seems worthy of a fairy tale, from the moment our eyes met we felt the crush of love. This is not a passing infatuation, ours is love of truth.
— Auliq Ice
Maybe you've understood by now that for men like myself, that is, melancholy men for whom love, agony, happiness and misery are just excuses for maintaining eternal loneliness, life offers neither great joy nor great sadness.
— Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red
Darling, i wish someone would realize im not happy. im alone and in pain because of you leaving me and never coming home. im nothng compared to you but i feel like im everything better than you. im sick of you and your judgement and you knowing exactly nothing about me at all. so tell me why should i i get know who you really are when your the person who need to get to know me?
— Jessica Holt
My father moved out a week later. I hugged him at our front door and couldn't bear to watch him leave with so much luggage.
— Alison Espach
It is not they who have closed but I. I've cut myself away. I'm alone, and lonely. What frightens me is that I've not become lonely now, but have looked inside and seen that I was, already. How long has that been going on?
— China Miéville, Looking for Jake
The meeting of the two lonely souls is the meeting of the dark sea with the moonlight.
— Mehmet Murat ildan
All people are lonely in some ways. Some people are lonely in all ways."Now, Voyager" - Movie, 1942.
— Casey Robinson
No matter how much I think, no matter how much I try, I can't fill this void of loneliness in my heart.
— Auliq Ice
...At least you got Soda. I ain't got nobody.' 'Shoot,' I said, startled out of my misery, 'you got the whole gang. Dally didn't slug you tonight cause you're the pet. I mean, golly, Johnny, you got the whole gang.' 'It ain't the same as having your own folks care about you,' Johnny said simply. 'it just ain't the same.
— S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders