c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Indeed, he could not be long in discovering that people beyond a suspicion of unbalance, or not obviously coveting the moment's arrest of attention gained them by their statements, never had experience with or knowledge of the restless dead. Slowly accepting this as evidence that no such things existed, Mr. Lecky found terrors deeper, and to him more plausible, to fill that unoccupied place - the simple sense of himself alone, and, not unassociated with it, the conception of a homicidal maniac quietly pursuing him.The first was exemplified by chance solitude in what he had considered deep woods. No part in it was played by natural dismay which he might have felt at finding himself lost, and none by any tangible suggestion of danger. Mr. Lecky could not even remember where or when it was. Long ago, under a seamless gray sky which would probably end with snow; in an autumnal silence free from birds, unmoved by the least breath of wind, he had come to be walking at random impulse.Leaves, yellow, tan, drifted deep and loose over the difficulties of an uneven hillside. His feet crashed and crackled in them. He was not going anywhere. He had nothing in mind. It might have been this receptive vacancy of thought which let him, little by little, grow aware of a menace. The unnatural light leaf-buried ground, the low dark sky, the solitary noise of his unskilled progress - none of them was good. He began to notice that though the fall of leaves left an apparent bright openness, in reality it merely pushed to a distance the point at which the woods became as impenetrable as a wall.He walked more and more slowly, listening, hearing nothing; looking, seeing nothing. Soon he stopped, for he was not going any farther. Standing in the deep leaves beneath trees bare and practically dead in the catalepsy of impending winter, he knew that he did not want to be here. A great evil - no more to be named than, met, to be escaped - waited fairly close. So he left. He got out of those woods onto an open road where he need not watch for anything he could not see.
— James Gould Cozzens, Castaway
When he had eaten, Mr. Lecky lay down on his cot, though he did not expect to sleep. The four lanterns continued to shed their thin floods of light. Against the dark, this illumination set the varied, ill-matched shapes of his assembled defenses. Studying the odd wall, in spirit unquiet, Mr. Lecky was reminded of his childhood - not in any detail of actual reminiscence, but more deeply, less coherently. He seemed to recall himself, unreally small and young, in concealment under a table. A table had been fort enough, for his enemies were imaginary. He never imagined them winning.Even at that early period, furniture would only be useful against foes which he had invented to play with. Tables could not have protected him from bears or wolves. Perhaps he had been taught, by his amused elders, a conventional fear of bears. Unassisted, he had picked up a private fear of wolves. Bears were no more than vague monsters coming at night, never distinct or well defined. But of wolves his unruly imagination could produce whole lifelike packs such as those which he had somehow been led to believe pursued any sleigh venturing out, three frantic horses abreast, in perpetually snow-sunk Russia.At a brief later stage he had entertained, fruit of the new-found ability to read, some concern about ghosts. His spectres were, however, practically people, if hideous, gaunt and pale ones. It was doubtful if he ever actually believed in them, in the sense of fearing that he might meet one. His eyesight had always been good, so it played him none of the terrifying tricks necessary to confirm a belief in the supernatural. Indeed, he could not be long in discovering that people beyond a suspicion of unbalance, or not obviously coveting the moment's arrest of attention gained them by their statements, never had experience with or knowledge of the restless dead. Slowly accepting this as evidence that no such things existed, Mr. Lecky found terrors deeper, and to him more plausible, to fill that unoccupied place - the simple sense of himself alone, and, not unassociated with it, the conception of a homicidal maniac quietly pursuing him.
— James Gould Cozzens, Castaway
I'm not like themBut I can pretend
— Kurt Cobain
Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
— John Irving, In One Person
It’s not that I mind being alone, not really. I can distract myself with silly fantasies and daydreams for hours, but in the end it always comes back to me. That’s what I’m left with: just me. And that’s what scares me more than anything. Me.
— Cat Clarke, Entangled
I had a strong sudden instinct that I must be alone. I didn’t want to see any people at all. I had seen so many people all my life -- I was an average mixer, but more than average in a tendency to identify myself, my ideas, my destiny, with those of all classes that came in contact with. I was always saving or being saved -- in a single morning I would go through the emotions ascribable to Wellington at Waterloo. I lived in a world of inscrutable hostiles and inalienable friends and supporters.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up
I called no one, and no one called me. I was suffocating with loneliness. The pain was almost physical. I felt like tearing myself apart. I wanted to escape from my own skin.
— Cat Clarke, Entangled
So that you will hear memy wordssometimes grow thinas the tracks of the gulls on the beaches.Necklace, drunken bellfor your hands smooth as grapes.And I watch my words from a long way off.They are more yours than mine.They climb on my old suffering like ivy.It climbs the same way on damp walls.You are to blame for this cruel sport.They are fleeing from my dark lair.You fill everything, you fill everything.Before you they peopled the solitude that you occupy,and they are more used to my sadness than you are.Now I want them to say what I want to say to youto make you hear as I want you to hear me.The wind of anguish still hauls on them as usual.Sometimes hurricanes of dreams still knock them over.You listen to other voices in my painful voice.Lament of old mouths, blood of old supplications.Love me, companion. Don't forsake me. Follow me.Follow me, companion, on this wave of anguish.But my words become stained with your love.You occupy everything, you occupy everything.I am making them into an endless necklacefor your white hands, smooth as grapes.
— Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
Walking by yourself in the rain is for college kids who think loneliness makes poets.
— Peter S. Beagle, A Fine and Private Place
And it was in that moment of distress and confusion that the whip of terror laid its most nicely calculated lash about his heart. It dropped with deadly effect upon the sorest spot of all, completely unnerving him. He had been secretly dreading all the time that it would come - and come it did.Far overhead, muted by great height and distance, strangely thinned and wailing, he heard the crying voice of Defago, the guide.The sound dropped upon him out of that still, wintry sky with an effect of dismay and terror unsurpassed. The rifle fell to his feet. He stood motionless an instant, listening as it were with his whole body, then staggered back against the nearest tree for support, disorganized hopelessly in mind and spirit. To him, in that moment, it seemed the most shattering and dislocating experience he had ever known, so that his heart emptied itself of all feeling whatsoever as by a sudden draught.'Oh! oh! This fiery height! Oh, my feet of fire! My burning feet of fire...' ran in far, beseeching accents of indescribable appeal this voice of anguish down the sky. Once it called - then silence through all the listening wilderness of trees.And Simpson, scarcely knowing what he did, presently found himself running wildly to and fro, searching, calling, tripping over roots and boulders, and flinging himself in a frenzy of undirected pursuit after the Caller. Behind the screen of memory and emotion with which experience veils events, he plunged, distracted and half-deranged, picking up false lights like a ship at sea, terror in his eyes and heart and soul. For the Panic of the Wilderness had called to him in that far voice - the Power of untamed Distance - the Enticement of the Desolation that destroys. He knew in that moment all the pains of someone hopelessly and irretrievably lost, suffering the lust and travail of a soul in the final Loneliness. A vision of Defago, eternally hunted, driven and pursued across the skyey vastness of those ancient forests fled like a flame across the dark ruin of his thoughts...It seemed ages before he could find anything in the chaos of his disorganized sensations to which he could anchor himself steady for a moment, and think...The cry was not repeated; his own hoarse calling brought no response; the inscrutable forces of the Wild had summoned their victim beyond recall - and held him fast.("The Wendigo")
— Algernon Blackwood, Monster Mix
But there it is: Everyone is alone, for life, and maybe that's not such a bad thing.
— Julianna Baggott, Fuse
It would be so great to have someone my own age to talk to, even if it was just about books.
— Alex Flinn, Beastly
I shall not be lonely. No one who reads is ever that.
— Mildred Aldrich, A Hilltop on the Marne
Stories are our gifts to a world that doesn't see us.
— Sarah Black
From long experience she knew that she wore her loneliness like armor. Very few people ever recognized it for what it was. To the casual observer it looked very much like arrogance. Sometimes it was.
— Nevada Barr, Track of the Cat
I guess I've been waiting so long I'm looking for perfection. That makes it tough.
— Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
You think you're alone until you realize you're in it.Now fear is here to stay, love is here for a visit.
— Elvis Costello
There was a marvelous, dark lyricism in his voice, the kind of defiance that is rooted in deep loneliness.
— Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
It's a funny thing in my job: you remain perpetually lonely in a world where loneliness is the rarest commodity.
— Brian W. Aldiss, Earthworks
I could say it was the nights when I was lonelyand you were the only one who'd talk.I could tell you that I like your sensitivity,when you know it's the way that you walk.
— Elvis Costello
All I know is that I shall be alone again. There is nothing more terrible than to be alone among human beings.
— Stefan Zweig, Letter from an Unknown Woman: The Fowler Snared
You don’t know what it means to be betrayed! Should I explain it to you? It means to be treated like trash and your feelings get stepped on…you get hurt over and over again and in the end you are left alone!Can’t you see how much I care for you? How hard I’m trying to connect with you?When did I ever betray you? When did I ever leave you alone?
— Yuuki Obata, We Were There, Vol. 1
Her world fragmented into dozens of sharp, cutting shards, shedding the salty blood and saltier tears that ringed the bitter cocktail of her despair. She was caterpillar and butterfly, both, caught in a cocoon of raw nerves and open sores; she was insanity, wrapped up in the thin, transient wrappings of a temporary lucidity; and she was afraid, because an innate desire lay in the bottom reaches of her psyche for the very poison that was killing her.
— Nenia Campbell, Terrorscape
Even if you are alive somewhere, the absence of the other person who used to be there beside you obliterates your presence. Everything in the room, even the stars in the sky, can disappear in a second, changing one scene for another, just like in a dream.
— Hwang Sok-yong, The Old Garden
I ignore people who need me and latch on to people who don't. I dive into every other world except my own just because I want something more glamorous than my real life. I do destructive shit so a stupid hypocritical fish will like me.I fall for fish instead of girls.
— Hannah Moskowitz, Teeth
The story of the young woman whose death I witnessed in a concentration camp. It is a simple story. There is little to tell and it may sound as if I had invented it; but to me it seems like a poem. This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. "I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard," she told me. "In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously." Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, "This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness." Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. "I often talk to this tree," she said to me. I was startled and didn't quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. "Yes." What did it say to her? She answered, "It said to me, 'I am here-I am here-I am life, eternal life.
— Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
...alone in this city, alone on this sea. The days were strewn about him, he was a drunkard of days. He had achieved nothing. He had his life--it was not worth much--not like a life that, though ended, had truly been something. If I had had courage,he thought, if I had had faith. We preserve ourselves as if that were important, and always at the expense of others. We hoard ourselves. We succeed if they fail, we are wise if they are foolish, and we go onward, clutching, until there is no one--we are left with no companion save God. In whom we do not believe. Who we know does not exist.
— James Salter, Light Years
Death has become so predictable that I have neither the youthful reverence of it nor the middle-age fear.
— Meghna Pant, Happy Birthday!
But I have one want which I have never yet been able to satisfy; and the absence of the object of which I now feel as a most severe evil. I have no friend, Margaret: when I am glowing with the enthusiasm of success, there will be none to participate my joy; if I am assailed by disappointment, no one will endeavour to sustain me in dejection. I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. I desire the company of a man who could sympathise with me; whose eyes would reply to mine. You may deem me romantic, my dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of a friend. I have no one near me, gentle yet courageous, possessed of a cultivated as well as of a capacious mind, whose tastes are like my own, to approve or amend my plans. How would such a friend repair the faults of your poor brother!
— Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein
That’s why I was calm. When you woke me in the middle of the night with your hand around my throat, and I thought I was going to die for bringing you home—that I had given my life to lie down next to a murderer—that’s why I was calm.Because all I was thinking in that moment was that it was worth it.
— Julio Alexi Genao, When You Were Pixels
And if the world refused to square with his version of reality then it was necessarily an uncaring world, a sour and sickening world, a penal colony, and he was doomed to be violently lonely in it. He bowed his head at the thought of how much strength a man would need to survive an entire life so lonely.
— Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections
Loneliness means when you have no one to celebrate your success with and share your pains.
— M.F. Moonzajer
...companionship refused is worse than loneliness.
— Mark Haddon, The Red House
My skin hungered for you. You were warm, and alive, and in my bed, and I wanted you so bad I could feel the ripple of need on the pads of my fingertips, on the palms of my hands, on the skin of my back, at the base of my cock, inside my ass—I wanted the taste of you in my mouth.
— Julio Alexi Genao, When You Were Pixels
It's not that people are mean to each other
—  it's just that they haven't forgotten the times when being selfless brought them loneliness & pain.
Things go backward.And then, one day, whatever it is we had, it’s gone. It won’t come back. We both know it.Whatever it is she let me have, she has taken it away. Whatever it is when two people agree to briefly occupy the same space, agree to allow their lives to overlap in some small area, some temporary region of the world, a region they create through love or convenience, or for us, something even more meager, whatever that was, it has collapsed, it has closed. She has closed herself to me.
— Charles Yu, Sorry Please Thank You: Stories
I fall in love with Paraíso. It’s like a giant playground where I’m never scolded for running around recklessly, where I’m almost overwhelmed with the amount of attention and love I receive from Mami’s family. In New York, I’m invisible.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
Did he understand, as those interminable minutes ticked by, that being alone is not the same as being lonely? That being alone is a neutral state; it is like a blind fish at the bottom of the ocean without eyes, and therefore without judgement. Is it possible? That which is around me does not affect my mood; my mood affects that which is around me. Is it true? Could Denny have possibly appreciated the subjective nature of loneliness, which is something that exists 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
Home. the word always had air quotes around it in her mind. She'd done what she could to make her flat cozy, filling it with art, books, ornate lanterns, and a Persian carpet as soft as lynx fur. And of course there were her angel wings taking up one whole wall. But there was no help for the real emptiness; its close air was stirred by no breath but her own. When she was alone, the empty place within her, the missingness, as she thought of it, seemed to swell. Even being with Kaz had done something to keep it at bay, though not enough. Never enough.
— Laini Taylor
How Gloomy it is, to pause, to cease and to rust unburn, to get used and be indistinct. Like to live is to breathe.
— Abhijit Tripathi
Durum semolina, golden wheat wafting in Italian fields. Can you imagine how astonished the Italians would be if they knew that what they were exporting in 1971 was really loneliness
— Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
I just...I've fantasized about peace and quiet for so long, dreamt about being left alone...but when the TV was off, and the sun was down...I'm in a full sob right now. I've just never felt so alone, and I couldn't take it.
— Andrea Randall, In the Stillness
In my recollection, there have been many places and people I have been both blessed and cursed to know. Much joy and heartache can come from immortality, for loneliness can be lethal. I have unfortunately witnessed many I cared for, both mortal and not, perish. I have never been able to own anything that was truly mine. Once, I possessed everything, but many moons have come since that time. -- Sacha Borishauski
— Wynter Wilkins, Strigoi
Na, it's not about the human desires; it's about the desires being used to get rid of loneliness, insecurity and lack of love we often feel.
— Saurabh Sharma
She deserved at least one person who saw her and knew how good she was.
— Rick Riordan, The Mark of Athena
Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness
— Kate Atkinson, Life After Life
The more we wait, the more everything and everyone looks like a grain of sand escaping between our fingers before vanishing into the wind.
— Fábio Moon, Daytripper
Everybody has something that chews them up and, for me, that thing was always loneliness. The cinema has the power to make you not feel lonely, even when you are.
— Tom Hanks
The Loneliness of the Military HistorianConfess: it's my professionthat alarms you.This is why few people ask me to dinner,though Lord knows I don't go out of my way to be scary.I wear dresses of sensible cutand unalarming shades of beige,I smell of lavender and go to the hairdresser's:no prophetess mane of mine,complete with snakes, will frighten the youngsters.If I roll my eyes and mutter,if I clutch at my heart and scream in horrorlike a third-rate actress chewing up a mad scene,I do it in private and nobody seesbut the bathroom mirror.In general I might agree with you:women should not contemplate war,should not weigh tactics impart
— Margaret Atwood, Morning in the Burned House
Sometimes I felt lonely because I pushed people away for so long that I honestly didn’t have many close connections left. I was physically isolated and disconnected from the world. Sometimes I felt lonely in a crowded room. This kind of loneliness pierced my soul and ached to the core. I not only felt disconnected from the world, but I also felt like no one ever loved me. Intellectually, I knew that people did, but I still felt that way.
— Jenni Schaefer, Goodbye Ed, Hello Me: Recover from Your Eating Disorder and Fall in Love with Life
And the world suddenly appeared to me as such an awfully large place, with I so totally alone in it that I could have cried from the bottom of my heart.
— Joseph von Eichendorff, Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts
No one is calling me. I can’t check the answering machine because I have been here all this time. If I go out, someone may call while I’m out. Then I can check the answering machine when I come back in.
— Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance
As long as you write, you'll never be lonely.
— Donna Lynn Hope
We are strangers to our own lives, setting out in the dark to look for the adobe of Love which we were meant to know, guided by the Music that wants us to see.
— David Paul Kirkpatrick, The Address Of Happiness
There pass the careless peopleThat call their souls their own:Here by the road I loiter,How idle and alone.Ah, past the plunge of plummet,In seas I cannot sound,My heart and soul and senses,World without end, are drowned.His folly has not fellowBeneath the blue of dayThat gives to man or womanHis heart and soul away.There flowers no balm to sain himFrom east of earth to westThat's lost for everlastingThe heart out of his breast.Here by the labouring highwayWith empty hands I stroll:Sea-deep, till doomsday morning,Lie lost my heart and soul.
— A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad
You are alone, I am alone; we don’t get together why we complain so much.
— M.F. Moonzajer, A moment with God ; Poetry
After listening to a lot of these stories, I began to think that American loneliness is a completely different creature from anything we experience in this country, and it made me glad I was born Japanese. The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different from the sort you know you'll get through if you just hang in there.
— Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup
But he also knew that, as much as he wanted to aid and console the soldier, he wanted to be alone in his room with the night coming down and a book close by and pen and paper and the knowledge that the door would remain shut until the morning came and he would ne be disturbed. The gap between these two desires filled him with sadness and awe at the mystery of the self, the mystery of having a single consciousness, knowing merely its own bare feelings and experiencing singly and alone it own pain or fear or pleasure or complacency.
— Colm Tóibín, The Master
As soon as whatever provisional well of confidence dries up, I will feel like a frightened motherless child. And I will—what? Lessee, I'll beg friends to assure me I'm fascinating, that my soul is complex so I can once more conduce to irony. An abyss opens up.
— Maryse Holder, Give Sorrow Words: Maryse Holder's Letters From Mexico
In this passionately social world, loneliness dogged the spirit. People were constantly “getting together,” but they never really got there…For everyone searched his neighbor’s eyes for the image of himself, and never saw anything else. Or if he did, he was outraged and terrified.
— Olaf Stapledon
Every time, Love pushed down the door where her loneliness lived. The Music came and sealed the chamber of her heart. She was filled with clear sweetness that was there from the start.
— David Paul Kirkpatrick, The Address Of Happiness
Through science, she could reach anyone at anytime around the world, but no one seemed to know what to say.
— David Paul Kirkpatrick, The Address Of Happiness
He raised himself above her pallid face and kissed her on both closed eyes and thought: she thinks she is taking and does not know that she is giving
—  in her loneliness she has fled to me and does not suspect my loneliness.
There’s little back roads and little towns sometimes I never heard of them. I start to expect the gas station attendants to know me when I arrive. I get excited that I’ve been there before. I want them to welcome me. I’m disappointed when they don’t. Something that I don’t want to be true starts lookin’ like it’s al that’s true only I don’t know what it is. No. No. I need my marriage. I come here to tell you. I got to stay married. I’m lost without her.
— David Rabe, Hurlyburly
Music eliminates my gravity. When I'm singing, I'm a ravenous pterodactyl. I'm alive and free and hungry, and I know who I am. But the flood is coming; it's weighing me down, making me prisoner to my loneliness and pain.-character Joanna (Broken)
— J. Matthew Nespoli
It is an awful thing to be betrayed by your body. And it's lonely, because you feel you can't talk about it. You feel it's something between you and the body. You feel it's a battle you will never win . . . and yet you fight it day after day, and it wears you down. Even if you try to ignore it, the energy it takes to ignore it will exhaust you.
— David Levithan, Every Day
I am jealous of anyone who can make other people care so much.
— David Levithan, Every Day
The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends, and guarded him.
— Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
I was feeling lonely without her, but the fact that I could feel lonely at all was consolation. Loneliness wasn't such a bad feeling. It was like the stillness of the pin oak after the little birds had flown off.
— Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase
I think she's afraid to even hug me now. It's my fault, but I miss it, Andrew. I miss it so much it aches sometimes, you 
— J.H. Trumble, Where You Are
How was I able to live alone before, my little everything? Without you I lack self-confidence, passion for work, and enjoyment of life--in short, without you, my life is no life.[Written to his wife, Mileva]
— Albert Einstein
I was lonelier than I should be, for a woman in love, or half in love.
— Edna O'Brien, Country Girl
To the extent that one is responsible for one's life, one is alone.
— Irvin D. Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy
If you are lonely when you are alone, you are in poor company.
— Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason
You know the parlor trick.wrap your arms around your own bodyand from the back it looks likesomeone is embracing youher hands grasping your shirther fingernails teasing your neckfrom the front it is another storyyou never looked so aloneyour crossed elbows and screwy grinyou could be waiting for a tailorto fit you with a straight jacketone that would hold you really tight.
— Billy Collins
There is nothing more lonely than a true artist.
— Tom Spanbauer, In the City of Shy Hunters
I've seen the way you've been looking at me. Don't bullshit me, Pat. I live in the addition around back, which is completely separate from the house, so there's no chance of my parents walking in on us. I hate the fact that you wore a football jersey to dinner, but you can fuck me as long as we turn the lights out first. Okay?
— Matthew Quick, The Silver Linings Playbook
When a man has learned how to remain alone with his suffering, how to overcome his longing to flee, then he has little left to learn.
— Albert Camus
There's not one good thought in that place. There's nothing but waste and want. I can feel his selfish cravings and an abyss of secrets I hope to never know.
— Steve V. Cypert
To deprive a gregarious creature of companionship is to maim it, to outrage its nature. The prisoner and the cenobite are aware that the herd exists beyond their exile; they are an aspect of it. But when the herd no longer exists, there is, for the herd creature, no longer entity, a part of no whole; a freak without a place. If he cannot hold on to his reason, then he is lost indeed; most utterly, most fearfully lost, so that he becomes no more than the twitch in the limb of a corpse.
— John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids
alone doesn't mean lonely. It just means alone. It just means that for now, you're on your own, and that's not a terrible thing.
— Hemal Jhaveri
To be a human being means to be lonely.To go on becoming a person means exploring new modes of resting in our loneliness.
— Robert Hobson
My reputation is largely the creature of the kindly imaginings of my flock, whom I chose not to disillusion, in part because the truth had the kind of pathos in it that would bring on sympathy in its least bearable forms.
— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
I've shepherded a good many people through their lives, I've baptized babies by the hundred, and all that time I have felt as though a great part of life was closed to me. Your mother says I was like Abraham. But I had no old wife and no promise of a child. I was just getting by on books and baseball and fried-egg sandwiches.
— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
Loneliness is a good education. You learn the things no crowds can teach and you discover the things no crowds can give.
— Mehmet Murat ildan
It seems perverse that we can be more social than anyone would have thought possible when we are at our most anti-social, locked away from the world and silently staring at a computer screen, but that, as psychologists will tell you is the way we operate. When we are at the maximum of our disconnect we also are ready to connect and feel the need for interaction.
— David Amerland, The Social Media Mind: How social media how social media is changing business, politics and science and helps create a new world order.
And if I'm alone in bed, I will go to the window, look up at the sky, and feel certain that loneliness is a lie, because the Universe is there to keep me company.
— Paulo Coelho, Manuscript Found in Accra
Yes, I guess you could say I am a loner, but i feel more lonely in a crowded room with boring people then i feel on my owm.
— Henry Rollins
She didn't want to go far, just out of the trees so she could see the stars. They always eased her loneliness. She thought of them as beautiful creatures, burning and cold; each solitary, and bleak, and silent like her.
— Kristin Cashore, Fire
I’ll be honest with you. I’m a little bit of a loner. It’s been a big part of my maturing process to learn to allow people to support me. I tend to be very self-reliant and private. And I have this history of wanting to work things out on my own and protect people from what’s going on with me.
— Kerry Washington
I'm thinking that it will be autumn soon," she said, lifting her gaze to his. "Autumn is my absolute favorite season. Spring is overrated. It's soggy and the trees are still bare from winter. Winter drags on and on, and summer is nice, but it's all the same. Autumn is different. I mean, is there any perfume in the world that can compare with the smell of burning leaves?" she asked with an engaging smile. Matt thought she smelled a hell of a lot better than burning leaves, but he let her continue. "Autumn —is thexincgitsinagrechanging. It's like dusk." "Dusk?""Dusk is my favorite time of day, for the same reason. When I was young, I used to walk down our driveway at dusk in the summer and stand at the fence, watching all the cars going by with their headlights on. Everyone had a place to go, something to do. The night was just beginning ..." She trailed off in embarrassment. "That must sound incredibly silly.""It sounds incredibly lonely.
— Judith McNaught, Paradise
Sometimes we don't need to eat or drink as much as we do, but it has become a kind of addiction. We feel so lonely. Loneliness is one of the afflictions of modern life. It is similar to the Third and Fourth Precpets--we feel lonely, so we engage in conversation, or even in a sexual relationship, hoping that the feeling of loneliness will go away. Drinking and eating can also be the result of loneliness. You want to drink or overeat in order to forget your loneliness, but what you eat may bring toxins into your body. When you are lonely, you open the refrigerator, watch TV, read magazines or novels, or pick up the telephone to talk. But unmindful consumption always makes things worse (68).
— Thich Nhat Hanh, For a Future to Be Possible: Buddhist Ethics for Everyday Life
Orpheus never liked words. He had his music. He would get a funny look on his face and I would say what are you thinking about and he would always be thinking about music.If we were in a restaurant sometimes Orpheus would look sullen and wouldn't talk to me and I thought people felt sorry for me. I should have realized that women envied me. Their husbands talked too much.But I wanted to talk to him about my notions. I was working on a new philosophical system. It involved hats.This is what it is to love an artist: The moon is always rising above your house. The houses of your neighbors look dull and lacking in moonlight. But he is always going away from you. Inside his head there is always something more beautiful.Orpheus said the mind is a slide ruler. It can fit around anything. Show me your body, he said. It only means one thing.
— Sarah Ruhl, Eurydice
There was a real sense of comfort but at the same time it felt oddly tense. The feeling that every little things we said, these conversations, at any moment, they could stop being possible, and so they were precious, it was that feeling, and the sense of the miracle of this shared moment, here and now. Why were we so far apart, even when we are together? It was anice loneliness, like th sensation of washing your face with cold water.
— Banana Yoshimoto, The Lake
In this passionately social world, loneliness dogged the spirit. People were constantly “getting together,” but they never really got there. Everyone was terrified of being alone with himself; yet in company, in spite of the universal assumption of comradeship, these strange beings remained as remote from one another as the stars. For everyone searched his neighbour’s eyes for the image of himself, and never saw anything else. Or if he did, he was outraged and terrified.
— Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker
When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as an escape.
— bell hooks
Everyone is a lonely victim of life's complexity.
— Ted Dekker
No one ever said aloud any of the kinds of things he was so constantly thinking, because no one in the parish, not Alice, not Lady Higgs, not anybody, ever seemed to see the things he saw. If they thought as he did, if they saw what he did, they never mentioned it; and to have things which are precious to one eternally unmentioned makes one, he had long discovered, lonely. These August nights, for instance--quite remarkably and unusually beautiful, warm and velvety as he had never known them, ushered in each evening by the most astonishing variety of splendid sunsets--nobody had said a single word about them. They might have been February ones, for all the notice they got. Sometimes he climbed up to the top of Burdon Down towards evening, and stood staring in amazement at what looked like heaven let loose in flames over England; but always he stood alone, always there was no one but himself up there, and no one afterwards, when he descended from his heights, seemed to be aware that anything unusual had been going on.
— Elizabeth von Arnim, Father
It is one of life's great ironies that most people's only connection to success is their attachment to the pain of not having achieved it.
— Stephen Smoke
My aloneness had never bothered me
—  I hadn't even been aware of it. But now it overwhelmed me. The awareness washed over me with painful sharpness and deep grief. Now that I had company.
It felt as if I’d been teleported to the dark side of the moon, forced to gaze out at the stars and wonder which one I’d come from.
— Heather Heffner, Year of the Wolf
Among all the wisdom and facts I learned from Giannon, I also learned the loneliness of incarnation, in which there is inevitably a separation of souls because of the uniqueness of our faces and our experiences. And I learned also the moments when the current of my life joins the current of another life, and I can glimpse for a moment the one flowing body of water we all compose.
— Kate Horsley, Confessions of a Pagan Nun
He stopped, feeling lonely in his long speech.
— John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Looking at her, thinking of her transported him, which struck him as vile because now it was hard for him not to despise the icy serenity of their earlier relations. And he knew that he should not love her, for she had been someone else whom he was supposed to love differently. -What is loneliness? Does the lonely space between two rocks vanish when spanned by a spider web?
— William T. Vollmann, The Ice-Shirt
You are the architect of your own loneliness.
— Adam Shankman
When the chips are down, you are alone, and loneliness can be terrifying. Fortunately, I've always had a chum I could call. And I love to be alone. It doesn't bother me one bit. I’m my own company.
— Audrey Hepburn
You know that saying about how you don’t know what you have until it’s gone? I already did know what I had, and now that she’s gone, I know even more.
— A.S. King, Ask the Passengers
Sometimes I think the loneliness inside of me is going to explode through my skin and sometimes im not sure if crying or screaming or laughing through the hysteria will solve anything at all
— Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me
I am a lonely man,' Sensei said. 'And so I am glad that you come to see me. But I am also a melancholy man, and so I asked you why you should wish to visit me so often.
— Sōseki Natsume, Kokoro
The loneliest days are the ones where you keep company with someone you love who can’t hear you.
— Holly Robinson, Sleeping Tigers
Lonely’s a different kind of pain, it doesn’t hurt as bad as heartbreak. I preferred it and embraced it ‘cause I reckoned it was one or the other.
— Kristen Ashley, For You
I've never had any summer lovin'. And I've never had any school year lovin', either. I've never had a boyfriend. I've never hooked up with a guy. And this morning, on my Internet browser, an article popped up about women marrying themselves. Even my wireless connection knows I'm alone.
— Flynn Meaney, The Boy Recession
The emptiness made her insides ache.
— Anna McPartlin, Apart From The Crowd
What a difference having a friend makes.
— Richard Paul Evans, Lost December
Loneliness is a failure to appreciate others.
— Marty Rubin
I am not alone, in my aloneness.
— T. Scott McLeod, All That Is Unspoken
Madoka: Won't anyone notice that Mami-san is dead?Homura: Mami Tomoe's only relatives are distant relations. It will be quite some time before anyone files a missing persons report. When one dies on that side of the wards, not even a body is left behind. She'll wind up forever a "missing person"... That is what happens to magical girls in the end.Madoka: ...That's too cruel! Mami-san has been fighting all alone for a long time for everyone's sake! For no one to even notice that she's gone... That's just too lonely a fate...Homura: It is just that kind of contract that gives us the power in the first place. It isn't for anyone else's sake. We fight on for the sake of our own prayer. So for no one to notice... for the world to forget us... That is just something we have to accept.
— Magica Quartet, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Vol. 01
Brianna peered through the large window into the sea of plexiglass cradles. Each infant, so small and precious, belonged to someone. Someone who cared for them. Someone who loved them. Brianna sniffled and turned away, unable to bear the thought that she had no one.
— J.E.B. Spredemann, Amish by Accident
I’m alone, stumbling through the city in the dark, trying not to let the night freeze my blood.
— Isaac Marion, Boarded Window
I suppose I'd had, by the standards of that pre-permissive time, a good deal of sex for my age. Girls, or a certain kind of girl, liked me; I had a car-not so common among undergraduates in those days-and I had some money. I wasn't ugly; and even more important, I had my loneliness, which, as every cad knows, is a deadly weapon with women. My 'technique' was to make a show of unpredictability, cynicism, and indifference. Then, like a conjurer with his white rabbit, I produced the solitary heart.
— John Fowles, The Magus
I've chosen a life that's so different from everybody else's that it cuts me off from them. Practically everybody I know treats me like a guest celebrity. Of course it's my own fault. I feel so damn alone sometimes, I feel like I could just float away into the stratosphere and everybody would stand there looking up at me and not one would haul me back down to earth. No ropes.
— Jordan Mechner, The Making of Prince of Persia
The truth is "#9dream" is a descendant of "Norwegian Wood". Both are ghost stories. "She" in "Norwegian Wood" curses you with loneliness. The "Two spirits dancing so strange" in "#9dream" bless you with harmony. But people prefer loneliness to harmony.
— David Mitchell, number9dream
There are lots of different ways grown-ups disappear. It's lonely being the one left behind.
— Julia Green, Breathing Underwater
Barbaric is letting the woman suffer to be alone for the rest of her life.
— Missy Lyons, Alien Promise
Stillness was most natural. To go on scrabbling and running and grasping after some kind of life was aberration
—  stillness was lasting.
...he went into the sitting room, put on a Duke Ellington record he had bought after seeing Gene Hackman sitting on the overnight bus in The Conversation to the sound of some fragile piano notes that were the loneliest Harry had ever heard.
— Jo Nesbø, The Devil's Star
Je fais mon lit et mon ménage; I seek my dinner in a restaurant; my supper takes care, of itself; I pass days laborious and loveless; nights long and lonely; I am ferocious, and bearded and monkish; and nothing now living in this world loves me, except some old hearts worn like my own, and some few beings, impoverished, suffering, poor in purse and in spirit, whom the kingdoms of this world own not, but to whom a will and testament not to be disputed has bequeathed the kingdom of heaven.
— Charlotte Brontë
I've noticed that loneliness gets stronger when we try to face it down, but gets weaker when we simply ignore it.
— Paulo Coelho, The Witch Of Portobello
I felt very lonely when they were all there.
— Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
Over the wintry forest, winds howl in rage with no leaves to blow.
— Sōseki Natsume
I understand everything,” he said.“You understand nothing, but it really doesn’t matter, since what you mean is, you’re glad to see me, just as I’m glad to see you because no more loneliness.”“That’s what I mean,” said Fezzik.
— William Goldman, The Princess Bride
Loneliness is not a result of physical isolation
—  you're only lonely the day you realize that nobody shares your opinions.
Can I be honest with you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird? I mean, really, really, really honest? Sometimes I get sooo scared! I’ll wake up in the middle of the night all alone, hundreds of miles away from anybody, and it’s pitch dark, and I have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen to me in the future, and I get so scared I want to scream. Does that happen to you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird? When it happens, I try to remind myself that I am connected to others—other things and other people. I work as hard as I can to list their names in my head. On that list, of course, is you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. And the alley, and the well, and the persimmon tree, and that kind of thing. And the wigs that I’ve made here with my own hands. And the little bits and pieces I remember about the boy. All these little things (though you’re not just another one of those little things, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, but anyhow…) help me to come back “here” little by little.
— Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Sometimes the silence is the loudest thing in the room.
— Cory Basil, Skinny Dipping in Daylight
Didn't people call New Year's the loneliest night on the calender? She took comfort in knowing somewhere on the planet, someone might be as miserable as she was.
— Mitch Albom, The Time Keeper
...this idea I had of an oversoul of loneliness. A connectedness among the world's lonely that I could turn to when I was very low. There was a delicious romance in being utterly alone, & I told myself I was nobler for it, & that there was a purpose to my solitude, O there must be.
— Liz    Moore, Heft
She almost never said his name. Because it made the dreams too real. Because it made the loneliness too tangible when she woke up.
— Dianna Hardy, Releasing The Wolf
And tonight I'm feelin like an astronaut, sending sos from this tiny box,and i lost the signal when i lifted off, now i'm stuck up here and the world forgot, can i please come down? Cuz i'm tired of drifting round and round....can i please come down? Now I lie awake and scream in my zero gravity...and its starting to weigh down on me....lets abort this mission now....CAN I PLEASE COME DOWN? So tonight I'm calling all the astronauts, all the lonely people that the world forgot, if you hear my voice, come pick me up, cuz ur all i've got...
— Simple Plan
they have seen the likes of you before, they may be intrigued by the looks of you, but they know that you-like everyone else-will leave them in the end.
— Terra Elan McVoy, After the Kiss
Along the way I stopped into a coffee shop. All around me normal, everyday city types were going about their normal, everyday affairs. Lovers were whispering to each other, businessmen were poring over spread sheets, college kids were planning their next ski trip and discussing the new Police album. We could have been in any city in Japan. Transplant this coffee shop scene to Yokohama or Fukuoka and nothing would seem out of place. In spite of which -- or, rather, all the more because -- here I was, sitting in this coffee shop, drinking my coffee, feeling a desperate loneliness. I alone was the outsider. I had no place here. Of course, by the same token, I couldn't really say I belonged to Tokyo and its coffee shops. But I had never felt this loneliness there. I could drink my coffee, read my book, pass the time of day without any special thought, all because I was part of the regular scenery. Here I had no ties to anyone. Fact is, I'd come to reclaim myself.
— Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance
My characters are quite as real to me as so-called real people
—  which is one reason why I'm not subject to what is known as loneliness. I have plenty of company.
For I'm afraid of loneliness; shiveringly, terribly afraid. I don't mean the ordinary physical loneliness, for here I am, deliberately travelled away from London to get to it, to its spaciousness and healing. I mean that awful loneliness of spirit that is the ultimate tragedy of life. When you've got to that, really reached it, without hope, without escape, you die. You just can't bear it, and you die.
— Elizabeth von Arnim, In the Mountains
Loneliness, dejection, the contempt or pity of people around you--these are unpleasant feelings. But they are precisely the things that produce genuine Dark Ones.
— Sergei Lukyanenko, Day Watch
He’s like a hero come back from thewar, a poor maimed bastard living out the reality of his dreams.Wherever he sits himself the chair collapses; whatever door heenters the room is empty: whatever he puts in his mouth leaves abad taste. Everything is just the same as it was before; theelements are unchanged, the dream is no different than the reality.Only, between the time he went to sleep and the time he woke up,his body was stolen.
— Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
I want to be alone... with someone else who wants to be alone.
— Dimitri Zaik