c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
in the end, everyone can understand themselves only. You are the only one to which you never have to explain what you mean. Everything else is misunderstanding.
— Renate Dorrestein, Buitenstaanders
She wondered what life would be like if there was always an arm around her shoulder and if there was a back that welcomed her hug all the time.
— Deirdre Riordan Hall, In the Desert
Nothing has the power to remind you how alone you are like walking through a conglomeration of empty skyscrapers.
— Matthew Tysz, The Last City of America
The animals feel that this urgency is mutual. Their own suffering has made them aware of human suffering. More frequent contact with us has sensitized them to what troubles us. They feel our anxiety and our confusion and, most of all, our loneliness. The pain of being disconnected from the Earth, from each other, from our fellow creatures, and from the Source of all life is the worst pain they can imagine, and they are concerned about us. They understand even better than we do that the suffering we inflict on them is an expression of our own suffering, and that their physical situation cannot get better unless the human spiritual condition gets better. They want to help.
— Linda Bender, Animal Wisdom: Learning from the Spiritual Lives of Animals
The return of solitude was not quite as Dina expected it to be. These many years I made a virtue of inescapable reality, she thought, calling it peace and quiet.
— Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance
Loneliness is not lack of company. Loneliness is lack of purpose.
— Guillermo Maldonado
This is just a nigger talkin', an' a busted-back nigger. So it don't mean nothing, see? You couldn't remember it anyways. I seen it over an' over-a guy talkin' to another guy and it don't make no difference if he don't hear or understand. The thing is, they're talkin', or they're settin' still not talkin'. It don't make no difference, no difference.
— John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men
How lonely I was, even when I was with him. How it felt, him not making love to me, being affectionate, making me feel desired or desirable. How much it bothered me that, even though I'd talked to him about all of this, even wrote him other e-mails, it didn't ever seem to penetrate.
— Kristen Ashley, The Gamble
I don't know what I'm doing in Santa Teresa," Amalfitano said to himself after he'd been living in the city for a week."Don't you? Don't you really?" he asked himself."Really I don't," he said to himself. And that was as eloquent as he could be.
— Roberto Bolaño, 2666
Could my proud loneliness be merely an illusion?
— Nicola Lecca, Ritratto notturno
Frankie," she said softly, "do you know what my idea of heaven is? A place where the windows are always clean, and the people I want can always come to dinner.
— Helen Hudson, The Listener and Other Stories
She pulls up to the drive wayParks the car, Gets Out, Walks up to the door, And embraces me with an iron holdShe is a friend and hugs me the same way she used to, Her hands sliding into their old creases along my bodyI let her into the house, knowing I could never refuseAs she walks through my doors, she reminds me why she stands in my living roomShe tells me that she has returned because of my actions I didn’t learn from the last timeIts my faultI should have been better, she berates meI should have let people in, she tells meI should not have gotten mad, she shares with meI should not have locked myself away, she lets me knowI silently bear all the responsibility for her returnAs we start to get deep into conversation, I realize she has brought her bagsSuitcase after suitcase lets me know she is here to stayShe tells me she will run my life from now onShe will make my scheduleShe will direct how I actShe has come to my doors, breached my walls, destroyed my defenses, and announced her ownership.Crownless in my own kingdomI am defeated.This old friend is called Loneliness
— Anonymous
She's clearly gone too long without male companionship if any brute who walked her way made her sit up and take notice.
— Cari Quinn, Hot Text
loneliness doesn't kill you, but it becomes extremely different when you find it among the crowd.
— Nobody
I think how we are all broken over one thing or another, how we all limp about, dragging our sorrows & troubles, our failures & disappointments, our perfect loneliness, & how it is when we suddenly open our eyes & see someone next to us dragging their own smashed bones. It seems only natural that we would want to crawl in their direction holding out our hands.
— Lynne Branard, The Art of Arranging Flowers
I wasn't sure of it, but I was almost certain that loneliness was a disease. An infectious, disgusting illness that was slow to creep into your system and overtake you, even though you tried to fight it off the best you could.
— Brittainy C. Cherry, Loving Mr. Daniels
All of us are lonely at some point or another, no matter how many people surround us. And then, we meet someone who seems to understand. She smiles, and for a moment the loneliness disappears. Add to that the effects of physical desire-and the excitement you spoke of-and all good sense and judgement fall away. The Rabbi paused, then said, But love founded only on loneliness and desire will die out before long. A shared history, tradition and values will link two people more thoroughly than any physical act.
— Helene Wecker, The Golem and the Jinni
Being all alone is like the feeling you get when you stand at the mouth of a large river on a rainy evening and watch the water flow into the sea. Have you ever done that? Stand at the mouth of a large river and watch the water flow into the sea?
— Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
We are like puzzle pieces who are perfectly suited to make a giant picture together, but we are assembling ourselves in the dark.
— Vironika Tugaleva, The Love Mindset: An Unconventional Guide to Healing and Happiness
He thought that fat boys were probably only allowed to love pretty girls inside. If he told anyone how he felt (not that he had anyone to tell), that person would probably laugh until he had a heart-attack.
— Stephen King, It
Anyone who is desperate or alone will agree there is comfort in routine.
— Simon Van Booy, The Illusion of Separateness
Get married, my friend, you don't know what it means to live alone, at my age. Nowadays feeling alone fills me with appalling anguish; being alone at home, by the fire, in the evening. It seems to me then that I'm alone on the earth, dreadfully alone, but surrounded by indeterminate dangers, by unknown, terrible things; and the wall, which divides me from my neighbour, whom I do not know, separates me from him by as great a distance as that which separates me from the stars I see through my window. A kind of fever comes over me, a fever of pain and fear, and the silence of the walls terrifies me. It is so profound, so sad, the silence of the room in which you live alone. It isn't just a silence of the body, but a silence of the soul, and, when a piece of furniture creaks, a shiver runs through your whole body, for in that dismal place you expect to hear no sound.
— Guy de Maupassant, Bel-Ami
Love is something totally new every day, but pleasure is not, pleasure has continuity. Love is always new, and therefore it is its own eternity.
— Jiddu Krishnamurti, On Love and Loneliness
When you lose your freedom, you lose, first and foremost, the opportunity to choose the company you keep.
— Masha Gessen, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot
She was not yet dead. But I was already alone.
— Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way
Nothing," I said. "It's quiet. It's like― I don't know. It's like falling off a cliff." I laughed. "I guess my life will just stop when I get married."It didn't. It wasn't quiet either. And in the end, I lost him. I did it on purpose, the way Garance lost Baptiste in the crowd. I needed to be alone, I felt. I wanted to be going on alone to my future.
— Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted
One by one they are being picked off around him: in his small circle of colleagues the ratio slowly grows top-heavy, more ghosts, more each winter, and fewer living... and with each one, he thinks he feels patterns on his cortex going dark, settling to sleep forever, parts of whoever he's been losing all definition, reverting to dumb chemistry...
— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
The cheese stands aloneThe cheese stands aloneHeigh-ho the merry-oThe cheese stands alone
— Robert Cormier
I had no idea that "letting go" would be so complicated; that it would sometimes feel liberating and other times more sorrowful and lonely. In the long run, most of it was like standing on the shore, watching your family set sail for America, and they're smiling and waving good-bye, and getting smaller and smaller, but you are still the same size with no one to talk to.
— Dee Williams
What had happened in these ten years for there suddenly be so much to say — so much so pressing that it couldn’t wait to be said? Everywhere I walked, somebody was approaching me talking on a phone and someone was behind me talking on a phone. Inside the cars, the drivers were on the phone. When I took a taxi, the cabbie was on the phone. For one who frequently went without talking to anyone for days at a time, I had to wonder what that had previously held them up had collapsed in people to make incessant talking into a telephone preferable to walking about under no one’s surveillance, momentarily solitary, assimilating the streets through one’s animal senses and thinking the myriad thoughts that the activities of a city inspire. For me it made the streets appear comic and the people ridiculous. And yet it seemed like a real tragedy, too. To eradicate the experience of separation must inevitably have a dramatic effect. What will the consequence be? You know you can reach the other person anytime, and if you can't, you get impatient—impatient and angry like a stupid little god.
— Philip Roth, Exit Ghost
You have to face the very thing you fear.--tdf
— Tonya D. Floyd, It Is What It Is--Epiphany
The perfection of loneliness is you can do whatever you want by yourself.
— M.F. Moonzajer, LOVE, HATRED AND MADNESS
I doubt even you can begin to understand the depths of her.
— Samantha Young, Shades of Blood
Loneliness is that feeling to understand your own Self
— Samar Sudha
Even in your closest friendships, you're alone. Maybe it's your best friend who, in fact, reminds you, just by making it her business to try to know your heart, that no one can - that our fate is to suffer in isolation and then die. But it's our collective fate! So I guess I'm an optimist.
— Lauren Fox, Friends Like Us
I enjoy controlled loneliness. I like wandering around the city alone. I’m not afraid of coming back to an empty flat and lying down in an empty bed. I’m afraid of having no one to miss, of having no one to love.
— Kuba Wojewódzki
Until you get comfortable with being alone, you’ll never know if you’re choosing someone out of love or loneliness.
— Mandy Hale
We are a singularity that makes music out of noise because we must hurry. We make a harvest of loneliness and desiring in the blank wasteland of the cosmos.
— Jack Gilbert, Collected Poems
He liked lonely places, because he never really felt alone.
— Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries
Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamn lonely anymore.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage
Don’t you realize the Internet is just a way for millions of sad people to be completely alone together?
— Wayne Gladstone, Notes from the Internet Apocalypse
The loneliness I endured during that time of my life is something I hope never to experience again.It's more than just the feeling of being isolated. I was disconnected mentally, physically and emotionally from the entire human race, it seemed; I didn't even feel part of it. I was a subspecies of the people who walked the streets and went about their daily lives. I was not part of the world they'd built and lived in. I was like a half-formed variety of what they were; a critter that was intended to be like them but was never finished. I was unworthy of the space I took up in that world and the lies I showcased in order to fit in.
— Leanne Waters, My Secret Life
Life’s harrowing echo only to be faded into exiled loneliness
— Munia Khan
I had failed him; I knew it. But I could do no more. It was beyond my strength.That night, I think, he explored the uttermost depths of his loneliness.
— Christopher Isherwood, Prater Violet
My intention had not been to find her, for I had been busy being lonely with someone else.
— Ben Marcus, Leaving the Sea
Religion is what an individual does with his solitariness.
— Alfred North Whitehead
Aloneness was like riding a bike. At gunpoint. With the gun in your own hand. Aloneness was the air in your tires, the wind in your hair. You didn't have to go looking for it with open arms. With open arms, you fell off the bike: I was drinking my wine too quickly.
— Lorrie Moore, Bark: Stories
True, I was rather alone, but loneliness isn't proof of not being right.
— Krleža, Miroslav
If you had forgotten, it would quickly come back to you. Aloneness was like riding a bike. At gunpoint. With the gun in your own hand. Aloneness was the air in your tires, the wind in your hair. You didn't have to go looking for it with open arms. With open arms, you fell off the bike: I was drinking my wine too quickly.
— Lorrie Moore, Bark: Stories
The whole problem of life is this: how to break out of one's own solitude, how to communicate with others.
— Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere: Diario 1935-1950
I’m not a good kid. Yeah, look, I’m just a piece of paper with the word sad and a bunch of cuss words written on it.A lousy piece of paper. That’s me.A piece of paper that’s waiting to be torn up.
— Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Last Night I Sang to the Monster
Being brave and being alone aren't the same thing.
— Lyndsay Faye, Seven for a Secret
But a lonely man is an unnatural man, and soon comes to perplexity. From perplexity to fantasy. From fantasy to madness.
— Daphne du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel
Do you have a shoulder to cry on?Someone who would listen to your deepest woes without judging you?Or is it just you and the image in the mirror?
— Sanhita Baruah
—Alone, quite alone. You have no fear of that. And you know what that word means? Not only to be separate from all others but to have not even one friend.—I will take the risk, said Stephen.—And not to have any one person, Cranly said, who would be more than a friend, more even than the noblest and truest friend a man ever had.
— James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
There was a large crowd around us, and every face in it looked happy. We had little opportunity to talk until we reached the woods, where there were no flowers and no people.
— Sōseki Natsume, Kokoro
Touch my song with your lips, make it immortal,be my beloved, make my love immortal.No restriction of age, not the bond of lives,when someone love should see only the soul,by carving new trend, make the trend immortal.Loneliness of the sky is in my lone heart,with rattleing paayal enter into my life,by giving own breaths make the music immortalmake the music immortal, make my song immortal.World snatched from me, whatever was beloved to me,all won from me, I lost at every moment,by losing your heart you make my victory immortal.written By "Honthon Se Chhoo Lo Tum - Jagjit Singh
— Nirav Sanchaniya
Is this how it is for a species that senses it is going extinct? Is there a feeling of loneliness, or unease, each morning, upon awakening?
— Rick Bass, The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness
El, you are telling me to run away with a man to become his mistress.""I am telling you to be happy. Even if it lasts only a little while. We must snatch what we can when we have the chance. Life is so very lonely when we don't.
— Jennifer Ashley, The Many Sins of Lord Cameron
When traversing the vast sea of loneliness, Oneness is the only true safe harbor.
— Gary   Hopkins
Nothing was permanent. . . Nothing will be permanent. . . Nothing is permanent. . .~Ramy(n)
— Ramy. . .
She needed intimacy and a sense of partaking in, not just observing, real life.
— Eiji Yoshikawa, Musashi
I look at old photos and it gives me joy and and tells me about the best time I spent with people but they always left a feeling of loneliness & things I missed and I don't feel connected to them at all.
— Neetesh Dixit
As I was looking at myself in the bathroom mirror, it occurred to me that if all else failed, a man could at least kiss himself, and I stared in to the mirror, conjuring up the memory of the couple in the film. I couldn't get the image of their lips out of my mind. But by now I'd realised I'd not even be kissing myself; I'd be kissing the mirror.
— Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book
Loneliness is just a passing disillusion we can conquer by acknowledging those around us.
— Jenny Cutler Lopez, Who I Am: American Scar Stories
To the turtle, the concept of "loneliness" is incomprehensible. She always has been alone, and any other social state is unthinkable.
— Robert H. Baker
I do not worry about the beauty of the world, neither do I care, but it is all dark and dirty when you are not around.
— M.F. Moonzajer, LOVE, HATRED AND MADNESS
Of course every girl wishes she could be one of those pop star babes who wave their hands in the air yelling about being survivors but when love sits on one side of you and loneliness on the other, it’s hard to stop the touching and the kissing.
— Lisa O'Donnell, The Death of Bees
My father could talk about the Romany way of life and its culture. He could talk about freedom and the Scottish spirit. But that was all he could talk about. I was desperate for someone to talk to but there was just nobody there.
— Sara Sheridan, The Blessed And The Damned
Lately Mirabelle had reflected wistfully if people even noticed her – a smartly dressed woman who came and went along the Promenade, always alone.
— Sara Sheridan, London Calling
Camus had said in his 'Carnets' that the lives of others appear always, from the outside, to have a completion our own dismally lacks. Only when we understand this as a projection - that our lives, too, are unclosed and contingent - do we approach maturity. Alice felt immature. She felt that she was a spy in the cold.
— Gail Jones, Dreams Of Speaking
I want to dive in the deepest trench, get locked in the darkest room,get lost in the biggest maze,travel longest to the furthest placebut keep my heart on the safest place...
— khushboo suneja
She lives in a world of her own – a world of – little glass ornaments…
— Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie
When we have no reason to be happy we often think to end ourselves, We often think we have no one in this world, it happens when our loved ones leave us and make us alone in this vast universe.
— Debolina
Back at home I spent so much time on my own, but never once felt lonely. Here, even though I see hundreds more people each day, I've never felt lonelier.
— Giovanna Fletcher, Billy and Me
Sometimes I feel that I could stand in the middle of the square and scream and thrash about like a wildling, and no one would notice.
— Kerrigan Byrne, Unwanted
Look at that party the other night. Everybody wanted to have a good time and tried real hard but we all woke up the next day feeling sorta sad and separate.
— Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
One need not be a chamber to be haunted,One need not be a house;The brain has corridors surpassingMaterial place.Far safer, of a midnight meetingExternal ghost,Than an interior confrontingThat whiter host.Far safer through an Abbey gallop,The stones achase,Than, moonless, one's own self encounterIn lonesome place.Ourself, behind ourself concealed,Should startle most; Assassin, hid in our apartment,Be horror's least.The prudent carries a revolver,He bolts the door,O'erlooking a superior spectreMore near.
— Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
He was free and unencumbered. Which is to say alone and unemployed.
— Tim Winton, Eyrie
Sometimes I feel as if I'm racing with my own shadow
— Haruki Murakami, After Dark
My shadow is tired walking with me; but I have yet to be bored walking with myself, all by myself...
— Munia Khan
People were infected with the concept that happiness was something outside themselves, and a new and powerful form of loneliness was born. Mix loneliness with stress and enervation, and all sorts of madness can occur. Anxiety increases, and in order to obliterate the anxiety, people turn to extreme sex, violence, and even murder.
— Ryū Murakami, Audition
I hate the thought of someone never being missed,' said Ianto sadly. 'It's the ultimate humiliation, surely. So unimportant in life that no one even notices when you die.
— Trevor Baxendale, Something in the Water
Deep down, the young are lonelier than the old.' I read that in a book somewhere and it's stuck in my head. Maybe it's true. Maybe it's not true. More likely, the young and the old are lonely in different ways, in their own ways...
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
paradise seemed further away than India, but Hell had become a bit closer
— V.S. Naipaul
Steve, on the other hand, has plenty of friends, but he wouldn't bleed for any of them, because he wouldn't trust them to bleed for him. In that way he's just as alone as me.
— Markus Zusak, Underdogs
I looked deeply into the fire, and the timeless, eternal dance of colors I saw there was so beautiful, I wanted to cry. Cal's deep voice floated toward me as clearly as a whisper in a tunnel, as if his words were meant for me alone, and the found me unerringly even as the group dissolved into talking. He said the words under his breath, his gaze fixed on my face. "I banish loneliness.
— Cate Tiernan, Book of Shadows
I hate those people who say you always find the one when you stop looking for her. It is the advice you least want to hear when what you think you need most is someone to love. At best, it comes off like being asked to not think of a white elephant. The elephant becomes the only thing you can think of.
— Thomm Quackenbush, Find What You Love and Let It Kill You
I had grazed along the surface of her actions and made deep judgments. Rejecting someone because you couldn't understand their love, that was a new one. The more I thought about it the longer the shadow of doubt stretched over all my conclusions. More often than not, things were as they seemed. But as I stared at her, she wasn't as bad looking as I had once thought. I realized how all this time I had seen her the wrong way, and how one's character affects one's appearance. Although she wasn't my type she was attractive. As I thought about her - the vulnerable intelligence, the violent honesty, and the fact that in the entire city she was the only one who took me in and fed me - she became more and more irresistible. Baited by an obscure beauty, trapped by an intense sorrow - all prior definitions had been overruled: this was love.
— Arthur Nersesian, The Fuck-Up
Too bad I didn't know you back then, I would have come and rescued you." Like he was Prince Charming or something. Which he is, in a way, because he rescued me from the simple, uncomplicated life I thought I liked until I realized how much I was missing. How lonely that life had been: going to work, going home, and watching TV, going places by myself on weekends.
— Wally Lamb, We Are Water
Gradually, after being the target a few times of a similar capriciousness, which he discerned as default behavior for most people, and not liking it, Paul learned to not be more generous or enthusiastic or attentive that he could sustain regardless of his mood and to not talk to people if his only reason to was because he felt lonely or bored.
— Tao Lin, Taipei
I often stood in front of the mirror alone, wondering how ugly a person could get.
— Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye
there's no clarity.there was never meant to be clarity.
— Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense
darkness falls upon Humanityand faces become terriblethingsthat wanted more than therewas.all our days are marked withunexpectedaffronts - somedisastrous, othersless sobut the process iswearing andcontinuous.attrition rules.most givewayleavingempty spaceswhere people shouldbe.and nowas we ready to self-destructthere is very little left tokillwhich makes the tragedyless and moremuch muchmore.
— Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense
I wished a companion to lie near me in the starlight, silent and not moving, but ever within touch. For there is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.
— Robert Louis Stevenson
My dear girl, is it that you are so lonely that you had to create this?
— Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
Loneliness is more painful than being hurt
— Eiichiro  Oda
when you're younga pair offemalehigh-heeled shoesjust sittingalonein the closetcan fire yourbones
— when you're oldit's justa pair of shoeswithoutanybodyin themandjust aswell.
It is lonely behind these boundaries. Some people-particularly those whom psychiatrists call schizoid-because of unpleasant, traumatizing experiences in childhood, perceive the world outside of themselves as unredeemably dangerous, hostile, confusing and unnurturing. Such people feel their boundaries to be protecting and comforting and find a sense of safety in their loneliness. But most of us feel our loneliness to be painful and yearn to escape from behind the walls of our individual identities to a condition in which we can be more unified with the world outside of ourselves. The experience of falling in love allows us this escapetemporarily. The essence of the phenomenon of falling in love is a sudden collapse of a section of an individual's ego boundaries, permitting one to merge his or her identity with that of another person. The sudden release of oneself from oneself, the explosive pouring out of oneself into the beloved, and the dramatic surcease of loneliness accompanying this collapse of ego boundaries is experienced by most of us as ecstatic. We and our beloved are one! Loneliness is no more! In some respects (but certainly not in all) the act of falling in love is an act of regression. The experience of merging with the loved one has in it echoes from the time when we were merged with our mothers in infancy. Along with the merging we also reexperience the sense of omnipotence which we had to give up in our journey out of childhood. All things seem possible! United with our beloved we feel we can conquer all obstacles. We believe that the strength of our love will cause the forces of opposition to bow down in submission and melt away into the darkness. All problems will be overcome. The future will be all light. The unreality of these feelings when we have fallen in love is essentially the same as the unreality of the two-year-old who feels itself to be king of the family and the world with power unlimited. Just as reality intrudes upon the two-year-old's fantasy of omnipotence so does reality intrude upon the fantastic unity of the couple who have fallen in love. Sooner or later, in response to the problems of daily living, individual will reasserts itself. He wants to have sex; she doesn't. She wants to go to the movies; he doesn't. He wants to put money in the bank; she wants a dishwasher. She wants to talk about her job; he wants to talk about his. She doesn't like his friends; he doesn't like hers. So both of them, in the privacy of their hearts, begin to come to the sickening realization that they are not one with the beloved, that the beloved has and will continue to have his or her own desires, tastes, prejudices and timing different from the other's. One by one, gradually or suddenly, the ego boundaries snap back into place; gradually or suddenly, they fall out of love. Once again they are two separate individuals. At this point they begin either to dissolve the ties of their relationship or to initiate the work of real loving.
— M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
sometimes all we need to be able to continue aloneare the deadrattling the wallsthat close us in.
— Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense
When you are a long way from where you think you belong, you will attach yourself to people you would otherwise ignore or even dislike.
— Russell Banks, Trailerpark
But what I did sense was an emptiness like a black hole inside of him, and there was no predicting what might emerge from a place like that.
— Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup
In the basement, with Ruth, I began to learn that anger, hate, fear and loneliness are all one button awaiting the touch of just a single finger to set them blazing toward destruction.
— Jack Ketchum, The Girl Next Door
Our mind is a crazy nightclub of cacophonous sound filled with strange images and one-night stands: our mind tells us lonely, loveless tales that leave us frightened but really have no lasting power
— Lauren Roedy Vaughn, OCD, the Dude, and Me
There is a loneliness that must be particular to monsters, I think, the feeling that each is the only child of a species. And now that loneliness was over.
— Karen Russell, Vampires in the Lemon Grove
Perhaps she would have liked to confide all these things to someone. But how tell an undefinable uneasiness, variable as the clouds, unstable as the winds? Words failed her—the opportunity, the courage.
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
I bask in that sympathy because it's nice to have somebody who cares, even if it's the wrong person for the wrong reasons.
— Nenia Campbell, Tantalized
Deprived of human intercourse, I inevitably overvalue the imagination and expect it to make the mundane glow with an aura of self-transcendence.
— J.M. Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country
When other girls were dreaming about love, she dreamt of love too, but in an entirely different context - the ones they took for granted.
— Donna Lynn Hope
You don't have to know someone your whole life to know them. Not really. Lonely is the same everywhere.
— Lamar Giles, Fake ID
I write small poems— the kind that fit on a postcard… and still can break your heart
— John Geddes
I've seen women-and men too, sometimes-as canna bear the sound of their own thoughts, and they maybe dinna make such good matches with those who can.
— Diana Gabaldon, Drums of Autumn
And because no one answered or cared and a conversation went on without her she felt profoundly lonely, suspecting once more for herself a particular doom of exclusion. Something of the trees in their intimacy of shadow was shared by the husband and wife and their host in the tree-shadowed room. She thought of love with its gift of importance. "I must break in on all this," she thought as she looked around the room.
— Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September
All the hungers will kill, but hunger of loneliness turns you into a philosopher.
— M.F. Moonzajer, LOVE, HATRED AND MADNESS
For once in my life, I wished Mr. Bradshaw had slipped a tracker into my shoe or my coat pocket. I wished that he was still keeping tabs on me, even when I told him that I didn’t need him to, or that I could take care of myself.	Because the truth was that I knew I’d always need help along the way. I needed help now, and at some point in my life I’d need help again.
— Embee, Tess Embers
Let’s just say, by the end of her second quarter Beli could walk down the hall without fear that anyone would crack on her. The downside of this of course was that she was completely alone.
— Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
...it’s not just the person who fills a house, it’s their I’ll be back later!s, their toothbrushes and unused hats and coats, their belongingnesses.
— David Mitchell, Black Swan Green
I AM ALWAYS ALONE. BUT JUST NOW I WANT TO BE ALONE BY MYSELF.
— Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man
I was just thoughts, just air. There was nothingness all around me. Was this what it was like to be dead? When you died, did you still sense everything going on around you, only it was happening so far away that you didn't care about it? You were floating through space and time, and nothing that happened to you mattered because nothing really could happen to you because you didn't exist?
— Melissa Kantor, Maybe One Day
This bed yawnsbeneath the weightof our absent selves.
— Maya Angelou, The Complete Collected Poems
Humans are almost always lonely.
— Frank Herbert, Dune
Loneliness is not lack of companion
—  it is the absence of the right people in our life. That is why we are alone even among the people.
She loved sinking into her bed on evenings like this, but apparently she shouldn't, because it worried her aunts, who thought she ought to be out dancing. It worried her a little bit, too, because what if they were right, and because sometimes a great loneliness welled up in her and threatened all the dams she built to hold it back. You couldn't cure loneliness by wallowing in it, up above the world, on an island removed from everything. She knew that. But she had such a hard time with all the cures. They seemed rough and brusque and brutal, as if they abused her skin with a pot scrubber . . . forcing herself into a mass of people, a stranger among strangers. . . . But it was much more tempting to curl up with a book under her thick white comforter.Still, sometimes after she curled up, she regretted her lack of courage and felt bleakly l
— Laura Florand, The Chocolate Kiss
let us sleep," he said and he felt the long light body, warm against him, comforting against him, abolishing loneliness against him, magically, by a simple touching of flanks, of shoulders and of feet, making an alliance against death with him.
— Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
Love was the result of having caught a glimpse of another's loneliness.
— Nadeem Aslam, The Blind Man's Garden
I kept my whole life in suitcase, Never really stayed in one place,Maybe that's the way it should be,You know I live my life like a gypsy.
— Shinedown
As Sicknes is the greatest misery, so the greatest misery of sicknes, is solitude...Solitude is a torment which is not threatened in hell itselfe.-DONNE
— Oliver Sacks, Awakenings
A man travels fastest who travels alone.
— Agatha Christie, The Moving Finger
In the developed countries there is a poverty of intimacy, a poverty of spirit, of loneliness, of lack of love. There is no greater sickness in the world today than that one.
— Mother Teresa
In any ten step instruction manual and every book of doctrines, there is complex advice that serves the very simple function of helping the lonely person find some similarity with the world around him.He connects and, suddenly, there is a burst of joy, a ray of hope. He believes that it was those steps or that book, specifically, that brought him happiness, when really he has simply been triggered into his natural state.
— Vironika Tugaleva, The Love Mindset: An Unconventional Guide to Healing and Happiness
I used to think I didn't need anyone. I used to think that I could be complete all alone. I tried to shut my eyes to how frozen I was becoming from the cold shards of glass, as they sank down into my heart and blinded me. I had nothing to be obsessed with, because I had no possessions. That was the only thing that comforted me against my fear of the dismal reality. But...I was lonely...I was sad. And I was desolate. I was supposed to be complete, even when alone...but I just couldn't be. I didn't even have someone's name to call out when I was all alone in the darkness. I wanted to tell that certain someone...because I only had one possession...because I was the only thing to protect or lose...I clasped it tightly to my chest. I couldn't afford to let anyone take it away from me. I wanted to tell that special person that I've only been gasping for breath on that painfully cold winter night, bundled up just like that. And I wanted to tell him that I never wanted to go back to that frozen, snow-covered world. And now, I long for our hearts to thaw together, side by side, flushed red and pulsing with love...and to soon become one.
— Hajin Yoo, Totally Captivated, Volume 4
-That's kind of sad.-I used to think so. Now I think: you're born a certain way. Later you get to decide how much you want to fight/change that. I don't mind being alone.-You must mind. If you didn't you wouldn't be doing this with me.
— Doug Dorst, S.
But most of those to whom Ender's Game feels most important are those who, like me, feel themselves to be perpetually outside their most beloved communities, never able to come inside and feel confident of belonging.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender's World: Fresh Perspectives on the SF Classic Ender's Game
When you’re accustomed to loneliness, you become in tune with the rhythms of yourself and your own mind—because you always have to answer yourself at the end of the day, to be alone with your thoughts. You’ll also know how important self-love and reliance is, to love yourself before you love someone else, but I think the universality of loneliness teaches us what that love is. To be lonely is to be human, to feel pain, to be forced to know yourself—and the universality of it binds us. Love is embracing that universality and surrendering to it. It’s looking out at a lonely universe and knowing it’s fabric makes you who you are.
— Nico Lang
Beauty is wishing for loneliness without any regret and complains.
— M.F. Moonzajer
I wasn't lonely. Loneliness, I think, has very little to do with location. It's a state of mind. In the centre of every city are some of the loneliest people in the world. If anything, because our whole planet was just outside the window, I felt even more aware of and connected to the seven billion other people who call it home.
— Chris Hadfield, An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth
Be my friend and love me, for the world is terrible lonely and I am sad.
— Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
What a fool she was ever to have imagined that there might be some place in the world where she could sink to the earth with the knowledge that there were people round her who understood, who perhaps even admired and loved her! She was fated to carry loneliness about with her as a leper carries his scabs. 'No one can do anything for me: no one can do anything against me.
— François Mauriac, Thérèse Desqueyroux
We have to live without sympathy, don't we? That's impossible of course. We act it to one another, all this hardness; but we aren't like that really, I mean...one can't be out in the cold all the time; one has to come in from the cold...d'you see what I mean?
— John le Carré, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold
I never wanted to be alone, but I always opted for loneliness. I am an emotional, sensitive and expressive creature. I cannot detach my feelings, never could I control. I fall in love and I can be easily broken.
— M.F. Moonzajer
That's the strange thing about a good story. No pleasure if you can't share it.
— Carsten Jensen, We, the Drowned
At the innermost core of all loneliness is a deep and powerful yearning for union with one's lost self.
— Brendan Francis
Love is an actual need, an urgent requirement of the heart," he read aloud from an old essay on marriage that he found in his files."Every properly constituted human being who entertains an appreciation of loneliness...and looks forward to happiness and content feels the necessity of loving. Without it, life is unfinished...
— Jan Karon, A Light in the Window
I stayed in bed for over an hour looked at things on my phone I felt slightly anxious about nothing particular I walked downstairs and poured coffee into a jar I asked a person on the internet if I should take drugs I took drugs before the person had time to respondI feel alienated by people who express concern about me without defining their concern in terms of a specific solution or goal I dont feel comforted by the idea of an afterlife I dont want to continue experiencing things after I dieI want someone to pull my hair because I like the idea of someone controlling my head without touching my headwhat is the difference between being an independent person and being a person who is accepting of loneliness?
— Mira González
A person could last a long while without touch, but once someone had experienced the comfort, joy, and sheer relief of another human body close, the desire to experience that again was hard to deny.
— Mary Johnson, An Unquenchable Thirst: A Memoir
The worst kind of loneliness in the world is isolation that comes from being misunderstood. It can make people lose their grasp on reality.
— Shyza Chaudhry
Beauty becomes tinged with sadness when experienced alone.
— Ava Zavora, Forever Elude Me
Arrogance and selfishness are not the only reasons behind our loneliness, but most often we used to be alone because of them.
— M.F. Moonzajer
Some people search out solitude without even thinking that they need to do so--it's an innate urge with them, something that they do as a matter of course, without even thinking about the psychological benefits of being alone. These people are very fortunate, for they help themselves in a very important way on a regular basis. Other people are given solitude involuntarily--with me it came from my insecurities and my inability to fit in with others. For me, solitude was very often loneliness, and very often painful. But I know now that I made it painful because of my perspective, and I regret losing so many opportunities that being on my own opened up to me--I'll never be able to get them back. Find or make time for yourself to be with yourself. Spend time thinking about who you are and who you want to be. Examine your strengths and focus on possibilities. Find the friend inside who has accomplished a lot, and learn to love yourself on your own terms. If you can do this, you've taken a very important step towards being able to help others to learn about themselves and to be more content with life.
— Tom Walsh
sunset and evening star hunching and bending sleeping and slipping virus pneumonia coughing and crying hope in the small things heaven looks brighter aching and falling earth is still darkness slip into sleeping sleepings of death dead now and buried cold now and crumbling dust now and hope-filled heaven is hope (and loneliness lingers in those left behind)
— Chila Woychik, On Being a Rat and Other Observations
I had the impression that her place was near mine, but even by bus it took about twenty minutes. She lived alone in an apartment house, square and white like a block of tofu, on the edge of town.
— Banana Yoshimoto, N.P
If you try you would never be alone
—  because the whole world is tired of loneliness.
I love my loneliness as you do love your virginity.
— M.F. Moonzajer
Yeah, it’s hard, babyIt’s hard right down to the boneI said Oh, it’s hard babyIt’s hard right down to the very boneIt’s hard when you’re a womanAnd you find yourself all aloneI’ve been flapping and scrappingAnd running from door to doorYou know I’ve been flapping and scrapping, honeyRunning from door to door
— Walter Dean Myers, Street Love
On Love and Happiness:When someone embarks on his research, if he ever makes it, (there is, in addition, a contingency that he/she will never embark on it), then he sails on a journey, a course that incubates various events.It's like opening a precious gift that hides myriads of secrets. Nobody acknowledges its content unless he attempts to inspect it.Happiness is not always dominated by heavenly chances, blue and green seashores of euphoria and pink clouds of serenity. Happiness does not dwell in luxurious mansions and expensive cars neither in glamorous appearances.Many times Unhappiness and loneliness lurk behind the ledges of luxury and surface brightness.There are so many examples around us, in newspapers, magazines, television and radio of people who are plunged in uncertainty, grief and insecurity.I wonder why this is.
— Katerina Kostaki, Cosmic Light
People want to be loved
—  failing that admired
Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate. Many a housewife staring at the back of her husband's newspaper, or listening to his breathing in bed is lonelier than any spinster in a rented room.
— Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch
A man with a good wife is the luckiest of God's creatures, and one without must be among the most miserable, I think, the only true blessing of their lives that they don't know how poorly off they are.
— Stephen King, The Green Mile
I'd spent my life searching for something I couldn't name.And as I drowned in the torrential flow of conflicting desires, caught in the relentless roar of water, earth, blood, and war, I reached out - wildly, desperately - and found it with him.
— Emma Raveling, Crest
No one loves us here, let’s go to Mars.
— M.F. Moonzajer, A moment with God ; Poetry
Oh yes, it hurts at times to be alone among the stars. But it hurts a lot more to be alone at a party. A lot more.
— George R.R. Martin, Dreamsongs, Volume I
Loneliness is like sitting in an empty room and being aware of the space around you. It is a condition of separateness. Solitude is becoming one with the space around you. It is a condition of union. Loneliness is small, solitude is large. Loneliness closes in around you; solitude expands toward the infinite. Loneliness has its roots in words, in an internal conversation that nobody answers; solitude has its roots in the great silence of eternity.
— Kent Nerburn
Being alone is better than sitting next to a lover and feeling lonely.
— Richard Linklater
I would like to be with you, but I do love my loneliness too.
— M.F. Moonzajer
A half-dead thing in a stark dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold.
— Robert W. Service
This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.
— Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
I want you to know that you will not be alone in your loneliness,” he said.Her tear-filled eyes welled over. “You will be surrounded by your court…and all the beautiful ladies there.”Rodrigo shook his head. “I’ve never cared about any of them. I shall be lonely for you. Lonely in the midst of a crowd…surrounded by a hundred faces, none of them yours.” He held Rapunzel’s tearful gaze, and tried to swallow the lump in his throat. But he couldn’t. “And as everything and everyone is spinning around me, I shall be thinking of you and longing to be here…” he brushed the backs of his fingers against her wet cheek, “…here in the tower, with my Rapunzel.
— Lisa Valdez, Rapunzel
The only way to escape the feeling of loneliness is to just be silent
— Sonya Withrow
You are everything that I don’t have.
— M.F. Moonzajer, A moment with God ; Poetry
I've never been afraid of being alone. For the sake of my work, I must be!
— Ochiai Naoyuki
Don’t be afraid of loneliness, because everything is a door; even loneliness is a door, it opens to somewhere!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Cause sometimes what makes you two is shadow and you.
— Jayson lobo
You can do beautiful things with your friends; you can do beautiful things when you are all alone! In togetherness, listen to the music of the crowds; in solitude, listen to the music of the silence! Be neither afraid of the crowds, nor of the loneliness, because both are blessings!
— Mehmet Murat ildan