c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The American appetite for loneliness impressed me, and there was something about this solitude that freed conversation. One night at a bar, I met a man, and within five minutes he explained that he had just been released from prison. Another drinker told me that his wife had passed away, and he had recently suffered a heart attack, and now he hoped that he would die within the year. I learned that there's no reliable small talk in America; at any moment a conversation can become personal.
— Peter Hessler
The more books you read, the less topics you have in common with most of the people, that´s the price you pay for reading.
— Martina Tutková
Anyone who knows how scary it is to be alone, can't help loving others." ~Rin Sohma
— Natsuki Takaya, Fruits Basket, Vol. 14
Eventually, I’ll grow sick and perish. Die on the floor, a young girl—who even when in the presence of company, still feels the loneliness that looms over her heart.
— R.J. Gonzales, Mundahlia
It was bad enough not having a boyfriend for New Year's Eve. Now I had to cope with Valentine datelessness, feeling consummate social pressure from every retailer in America who stuck hearts and cupids on their windows by January second to rub it in. (Thwonk)
— Joan Bauer
you’re ignoring me so loud that it’s deafening. This silence is so deep that it’s echoing.
— Anna Jae
Loneliness is painful. But suffering is not wrong in and of itself. It's part of the human experience, and in a way brings us closer to all people.
— Juliette Fay, Shelter Me
Hoyt was by himself right under one of the portable lights rigged up for the occasion. He had his hands thrust in his pockets, and he looked more serious than I’d ever seen him. There was something strange about the sight, and after a second I figured out why.It was one of the few times I’d ever seen Hoyt alone.
— Charlaine Harris, All Together Dead
A gem, like you, is made beautiful by being polished. It's not an easy undertaking, but a stone that exists undisturbed among others just is...but the most beautiful stand out because they face being alone, endure hardships and learn from what challenges them. Suffering purifies and makes beautiful, but only if the gem can shine.
— Donna Lynn Hope
Pale winter sun Is beatin' the ground Why'm I throwin' away The best thing that I've found My young heart's in tatters and I'm sureThat it will be a long time healing It's so hard to see what I'm doing this forWhen loneliness is all that I'm feeling
— David Gray
I can go years thinking that it seems impossible that I will ever satisfy that appetite again and then it is easy to satisfy and no one notices or cares, nor does it make me happy, when loneliness surrounds me like water I've already drowned in without dying.
— Francisco Goldman, The Divine Husband
She's never really wanted to be the only person, she's never been such a fan of being alone.
— Alison Pace, Through Thick and Thin
There is no living being on earth at this moment except myself. I could walk down the halls, and empty rooms would yawn mockingly at me from every side. God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of 'parties' with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter — they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship — but the loneliness of the soul in it's appalling self-consciousness, is horrible and overpowering.
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Was it really some other person I was so anxious to discover...or was it only my own solitude that I could not abide?
— David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress
You and I share the same DNA.Is there anything more lonely than that?
— Charlie Kaufman, Adaptation.: The Shooting Script
It bothered me that whatever was waiting wasn't waiting for me
— Jean Anouilh, Antigone
On those nights, the words were for me alone. They came up unbidden from my heart. They spilled over my tongue and spilled out my mouth. And because of them, I, who was nothing and nobody, was a prince of Denmark, a maid of Verona, a queen of Egypt. I was a sour misanthrope, a beetling hypocrite, a conjurer's daughter, a mad and murderous king.
— Jennifer Donnelly, Revolution
Lucy seemed to be imprisoned by a legion of people in her life who always wanted what was right for her. And as a result, in the eyes of everyone, she had everything... and yet she always, always felt she had nothing. No one.
— C. JoyBell C., Saint Paul Trois Chateaux: 1948
I brought the birdcages to the windows.I opened the windows, and opened the birdcages.I poured the fish down the drain.I took the dogs and cats downstairs and removed their collars.I released the insects onto the street.And the reptiles.And the mice.I told them, Go.All of you.Go.And they went.And they didn’t come back
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Loneliness Ends With Love
— Al Lerner
To break the silence the old man said the first thing that came to his mind: "Loneliness is a type of violence.
— Jonathan Messinger, Hiding Out
You think of outside your room, of the streets of the town, the lonely little squares over by the station, of those winter Saturdays all alike.
— Marguerite Duras, The Malady of Death
Though she’d begun to get a bit fat that winter, it was in February, around when her father found a toy poodle (sitting there, in the side yard, watchful and waiting as a person), and adopted it, that a weightlessness entered into Chelsea’s blood—an inside ventilation, like a bacteria of ghosts—and it was sometime in the fall, before her 23rd birthday, that her heart, her small and weary core, neglected now for years, vanished a little, from the center out, took on the strange and hollowed heaviness of a weakly inflated balloon.
— Tao Lin, Bed
Yes, after all, this by now was his customary loneliness: there was little else he desired for the present than the hospitality of the dark.
— Walter de la Mare, The Return
When you are young, you think it's going to be solved by love. But it never is. Being close -- as close as you can get -- to another person only makes clear that impassable distance between you."[…]"I don't know. If being in love only made people more lonely, why would everyone want it so much?""Because of the illusion. You fall in love, it's intoxicating, and for a little while you feel like you've actually become one with the other person. Merged souls, and so on. You thing you'll never be lonely again. Only it doesn't last and soon you realize you can only get so close, and you end up brutally disappointed, more alone that ever, because the illusion - the hope you'd held on to all those years - has been shattered." […] "But see, the incredible thing about people is that we forget." Ray continued. "Time passes and somehow the hope creeps back and sooner or later someone else comes along and we think this is the one. And the whole thing starts all over again. We go through our lives like that, and either we just accept the lesser relationship - it may not be total understanding, but it's pretty good - or we keep trying for that perfect union, trying and failing, leaving behind us a trail of broken hearts, our own included. In the end, we die as alone as we were born, having struggled to understand others, to make ourselves understood, but having failed in what we once imagined was possible.
— Nicole Krauss, Man Walks Into a Room
People claim that love is the deepest feeling, but don't you believe it. Loneliness is the most affecting of human emotions. Nothing makes life more vivid. If you wish to live in the moment, I recommend intense loneliness.
— Seth, George Sprott, 1894-1975
I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss
— Sigmund Freud
It's just as easy to be lonely in a city as out in the wilderness. Easier, really. It's harder to get to know someone when you meet in a crowded place. People can freely ignore you in the city; they can assume they don't have any responsibility for you. When there are fewer people, (...) they begin assuming some kind of responsibility, simply because you naturally do the same.
— Mercedes Lackey, Winds of Change
It was the shadow of Some one who had gone by long before: of Some one who had gone on far away quite out of reach, never, never to come back. It was bright to look at; and when the tiny woman showed it to the Princess, she was proud of it with all her heart, as a great, great, treasure. When the Princess had considered it a little while, she said to the tiny woman, And you keep watch over this, every day? And she cast down her eyes, and whispered, Yes. Then the Princess said, Remind me why. To which the other replied, that no one so good and so kind had ever passed that way, and that was why in the beginning. She said, too, that nobody missed it, that nobody was the worse for it, that Some one had gone on to those who were expecting him-- 'Some one was a man then?' interposed Maggy. Little Dorrit timidly said yes, she believed so; and resumed:'-- Had gone on to those who were expecting him, and that this remembrance was stolen or kept back from nobody. The Princess made answer, Ah! But when the cottager died it would be discovered there. The tiny woman told her No; when that time came, it would sink quietly into her own grave, and would never be found.
— Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit
To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?…There is nobody—here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone.
— Virginia Woolf
Those who live alone slide into the habit of vertical eating: why bother with the niceties when there's no one to share or censure? But laxity in one area may lead to derangement in all.
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
For my part, I think that the mystery is always greatest where there is the most - emptiness.
— Judith Krantz, Scruples
I was a lonely boy. I spent all my time reading books and watching the world. [some] tried to draw me out at first, but their hearts weren't in it. And after all, they had enough troubles of their own.
— Rabih Alameddine, The Hakawati
Oh, this coming back to an empty house,' Rupert thought, when he had seen her safely up to her door. People - though perhaps it was only women - seemed to make so much of it. As if life itself were not as empty as the house one was coming back to.
— Barbara Pym, An Unsuitable Attachment
It was somehow clear, even then, that the monster had been lonely. The folds above its eye made the old face look wistful, and it emanated such a strong sense of solitude that each human standing in the park that day felt miles from the others, though we were shoulder-to-shoulder, touching.
— Lauren Groff, The Monsters of Templeton
You are letting this feeling get cold, I cant blame you, you must know you are free to go... Don't you ever look back... If you wonder why it is because I wont be there.
— Andres Oliver
I’m good when I’m alone. I’m comfortable when I’m alone. I can sit and do lots of things all by myself. Sex included.
— Johnny Weir
Ivanov: No, my clever young thing, it's not a question of romance. I say as before God that I will endure everything - depression and mental illness and ruin and the loss of my wife and premature old age and loneliness - but I cannot tolerate, cannot endure being ridiculous in my own eyes. I'm dying of shame at the thought that I, a healthy, strong man, have turned into some sort of Hamlet or Manfred, some sort of 'superfluous man'... devil knows precisely what! There are pitiful people who are flattered by being called Hamlet or superfluous men, but for me it's a disgrace! It stirs up my pride, I'm overcome by shame and I suffer...
— Anton Chekhov, Ivanov
Sometimes isolation can be shared.
— Ken Grimwood, Replay
I am taking this in, slowly,Taking it into my body.This grief. How slowThe body is to realizeYou are never coming back.
— Donna Masini
I'm the one who steps from the shadows, all trenchcoat and cigarette and arrogance, ready to deal with the madness. Oh, I've got it all sewn up. I can save you. If it takes the last drop of your blood, I'll drive your demons away. I'll kick them in the bollocks and spit on them when they're down and then I'll be gone back into darkness, leaving only a nod and a wink and a wisecrack. I walk my path alone... who would walk with me?
— Garth Ennis, Hellblazer: Dangerous Habits
He began to cry, not hysterically or screaming as people cry when concealed rage with tears, but with continuous sobs who has just discovered that he's alone and will be for long. He cried because safety and reason seemed to have left the world. Loneliness was a reality, but in this situation madness was also remotely a possibility.
— Stephen King, The Talisman
No I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be  Am an attendant lord one that will do To swell a progress start a scene or two  Advise the prince no doubt an easy tool  Deferential glad to be of use  Politic cautious and meticulous  Full of high sentence but a bit obtuse  At times indeed almost ridiculous— Almost at times the Fool. I grow old … I grow old … I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind Do I dare to eat a peach  I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me. I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black. We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us and we drown.
— T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
I'm solitary as a pulled tooth,Lonely as an unwelcome truth, Lost as a minnow out of school, A genius in a crop of fools.
— Gail Carson Levine, Fairest
Well, I know about loneliness. I won't talk about it, but I was very lonely after the war. I know what it feels like to spend a whole weekend all by yourself and no one wants you at all.
— Charles M. Schulz, Charles M. Schulz: Conversations
From the photo albums, every single print of her had been peeled away. Shots of the both of us together had been cut, the parts with her neatly trimmed away, leaving my image behind. Photos of me alone or of mountains and rivers and deer and cats were left intact. Three albums rendered into a revised past. It was as if I'd been alone at birth, alone all my days, and would continue alone.
— Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase
I wanted to wear her as you would a piece of clothing, to fold into her ribs, be a stone in her mouth.
— Hisham Matar, Anatomy of a Disappearance
It all comes down to this: when you recognise your loneliness in another person, when you see desperation so familiar to yours written across someone else, you can’t just let them leave.
— Chloe Rattray, Sacré Noir
On the plane leaving Tokyo I’m sitting alone in back twisting the knobs on Etch-A-Sketch and Roger is next to me singing “Over the Rainbow” straight into my ear, things changing, falling apart, fading, another year, a few more moves, a hard person who doesn’t give a fuck, a boredom so monumental it humbles, arrangements so fleeting made by people you don’t even know that it requires you to lose any sense of reality you might have once acquired, expectations so unreasonable you become superstitious about ever matching them. Roger offers me a joint and I take a drag and stare out the window and I relax for a moment when the lights of Tokyo, which I never realized is an island, vanish from view but this feeling only lasts a moment because Roger is telling me that other lights in other cities, in other countries, on other planets, are coming into view soon.
— Bret Easton Ellis, The Informers
The personal desolation Christ is experiencing on the cross is what you and I should be experiencing--but instead, Jesus is bearing it, and bearing it all alone.Why alone?He's alone so that we might never be alone.
— C.J. Mahaney, Living the Cross Centered Life: Keeping the Gospel the Main Thing
There was something odd for him about not feeling lonely. The very fact that he had ceased to be lonely caused him to fear the possibility of becoming lonely again.
— Haruki Murakami, Tony Takitani
See, that’s the thing about L.A.— When you’ve mastered the art of feeling lonely in a room full of people, that’s when you know.
— Kris Kidd, I Can't Feel My Face
I am," I saidTo no one thereAn no one heard at allNot even the chair"I am," I cried"I am," said IAnd I am lost, and I can't even say whyLeavin' me lonely still
— Neil Diamond, Neil Diamond - 12 Greatest Hits Volume 2
I have always known there is a difference between loneliness and aloneness. I am alone, but my father is lonely. And if I had to choose one, I would rather be alone.
— Ted Michael, Crash Test Love
In the parking lot, she drove and parked in a dark area with no other cars around. She reclined her seat, and listened to music. Outside there were trees, a ditch, a bridge; another parking lot. It was very dark. Maybe the Sasquatch would run out from the woods. Chelsea wouldn’t be afraid. She would calmly watch the Sasquatch jog into the ditch then out, hairy and strong and mysterious—to be so large yet so unknown; how could one cope except by running?—smash through some bushes, and sprint, perhaps, behind Wal-Mart, leaping over a shopping cart and barking. Did the Sasquatch bark? It used to alarm Chelsea that this might be all there was to her life, these hours alone each day and night—thinking things and not sharing them and then forgetting—the possibility of that would shock her a bit, trickily, like a three-part realization: that there was a bad idea out there; that that bad idea wasn’t out there, but here; and that she herself was that bad idea. But recently, and now, in her car, she just felt calm and perceiving, and a little consoled, even, by the sad idea of her own life, as if it were someone else’s, already happened, in some other world, placed now in the core of her, like a pillow that was an entire life, of which when she felt exhausted by aloneness she could crumple and fall towards, like a little bed, something she could pretend, and believe, even (truly and unironically believe; why not?), was a real thing that had come from far away, through a place of no people, a place of people, and another place of no people, as a gift, for no occasion, but just because she needed—or perhaps deserved; did the world try in that way? to make things fair?—it.
— Tao Lin
I felt like I was in danger of vanishing, though at the same time the feelings I had were so raw and overwhelming that I often wished I could find a way of losing myself altogether, perhaps for a few months, until the intensity diminished.
— Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
A terrible feeling of loneliness besieged her, so strong it was almost like physical pain...
— Jennifer Wilde, The Slipper
I won,” said Chelsea’s dad, and went to give Chelsea a high-five, but missed, as they were standing too close.“My fault,” he said. “That was my fault.”“Oh,” Chelsea said.And he stepped back a little and tried again, but Chelsea, distracted now by something—maybe the plant in the far corner, standing and waiting like a person in a dream; or maybe the green shoe or some other thing that was out there and longing, to be looked at, and taken—wasn’t ready, and their hands, his then hers, passed through the air in a kind of wave, a little goodbye.
— Tao Lin, Bed
The problem with living so long is that we get used to it. We watch the mortals age and wither and die around us, watch the world change and decay...but no matter the hardship or the pain or the sorrow we suffer, we choose to continue living. Out of sheer habit, I think.
— Derek Landy, Mortal Coil
There are times when you don't belong and you think you're going to kill yourself. Once I went to a hotel. Later that night I made a plan. The plan was I would leave my family when my second child was born. And that's what I did. I got up one morning, made breakfast, went to the bus stop, got on a bus. I'd left a note. I got a job in a library in Canada. It would be wonderful to say you regretted it. It would be easy. But what does it mean? What does it mean to regret when you have no choice? It's what you can bear. There it is. No-one's going to forgive me. It was death. I chose life." -Laura Brown-
— Michael Cunningham, The Hours
It's sad to fall asleep. It separates people. Even when you're sleeping together, you're all alone.
— J.L. Merrow, Pricks and Pragmatism
She felt just like that girl in that book with the letter A on her chest. Only her A signified Alone. She was an outcast, cast out by her own choices, an outsider with a pretty face. Like a rose, she may have been beautiful to look at, but almost everyone only knew the thorny side.
— Victoria Kahler, Their Friend Scarlet
I HIDE myself within my flowerThat wearing on your breast,You, unsuspecting, wear me too—And angels know the rest.I hide myself within my flower,That, fading from your vase,You, unsuspecting, feel for meAlmost a loneliness...
— Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
When we finished the kiss she said laughing, I can taste your loneliness - it tastes like vinegar. That annoyed me. Everyone knows loneliness tastes like cold potato soup.
— Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole
It wasn't always like this. There was a time when I imagined my life could happen in another way. It's true that early on I became used to the long hours I spent alone. I discovered that I did not need people as others did. After writing all day it took an effort to make conversation, like wading through cement, and often I simply chose not to make it, eating at a restaurant with a book or going for long walks alone instead, unwinding the solitude of the day through the city. But loneliness, true loneliness, is impossible to accustom oneself to, and while I was still young I thought of my situation as somehow temporary, and did not stop hoping and imagining that I would meet someone and fall in love... Yes, there was a time before I closed myself off to others.
— Nicole Krauss, Great House
Being alone is best. I mean, it's true, isn't it? In the end you'll be absolutely alone; therefore, being alone is natural. If you accept that, nothing bad can happen. That's why I shut myself away in my six-mat one-room apartment.
— Tatsuhiko Takimoto, Welcome to the N.H.K.
There were the endless birthday nights and New Year's Eves of just you in your bed and no one else. There was the welling up at weddings, the glittery eye-prick, when all the couples would get up to dance. Sometimes it felt like your heart was crazed with cracks like your grandmother's old saucers. Sometimes the sight of a Saturday afternoon couple laughing in a park would splinter it completely.
— Nikki Gemmell, The Bride Stripped Bare
Don't you understand? Listen carefully to what I'm saying. If you do, you'll get it. you can grasp this easily. In short...in short, I shut myself in because I'm lonely. Because I don't want to face any more loneliness, I shut myself away.
— Tatsuhiko Takimoto, Welcome to the N.H.K.
The half-moon westers low, my love,And the wind brings up the rain;And wide apart lie we, my love,And seas between the twain.I know not if it rains, my love, In the land where you do lie;And oh, so sound you sleep, my love,You know no more than I.
— A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad
I am vehemently grateful that, by whatever means, I learned to assume that loneliness should be in part pleasure, sensitizing and clarifying, and that it is even a truer bond among people than any kind of proximity.
— Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books
Because it hardly ends with falling in love. Just the opposite. I don't need to tell you, Your Honor, I sense that you understand true loneliness. How you fall in love and it's there that the work begins: day after day, year after year, you must dig yourself up, exhume the contents of your mind and sould for the other to sift through so that you might be known to him, and you, too, must spend days and years wading through all that he excavates for you alone, the archaeology of his being, how exhausting it became, the digging up and the wading through, while my own work, my true work, lay waiting for me. Yes, I always thought there would be more time left for me, more time left for us, and for the child we might one day have, but I never felt that my work could be put aside as they could, my husband and the idea of our child, a little boy or girl that I sometimes even tried to imagine, but always only vaguely enough that he or she remained a ghostly emissary of our future, just her back while she sat playing with her blocks on the floor, or just his feet sticking out of the blanket on our bed, a tiny pair of feet. What of it, there would be time for them, for the life they stood for, the one I was not yet prepared to live because I had not yet done what I had meant to do in this one.
— Nicole Krauss, Great House
She was completely alone, only the distant call of a bird telling her a world existed outside of her circle of pain.
— Roseanna M. White, A Stray Drop of Blood
One evening he was in his room, his brow pressing hard against the pane, looking, without seeing them, at the chestnut trees in the park, which had lost much of their russet-coloured foliage. A heavy mist obscured the distance, and the night was falling grey rather than black, stepping cautiously with its velvet feet upon the tops of the trees. A great swan plunged and replunged amorously its neck and shoulders into the smoking water of the river, and its whiteness made it show in the darkness like a great star of snow. It was the single living being that somewhat enlivened the lonely landscape.
— Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin
When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don’t have an audience; I have a set of standards. But when I think of my work out in the world, written and published, I like to imagine it’s being read by some stranger somewhere who doesn’t have anyone around him to talk to about books and writing—maybe a would-be writer, maybe a little lonely, who depends on a certain kind of writing to make him feel more comfortable in the world.
— Don DeLillo
For better or worse, she was the lady Soraya. And the lady Soraya would never dream of missing the warm bulk of Casia's body between her and the hearth, or the comforting drone of Ludo's snores. Or the wry laughter of a slave... a slave, for Azura's sake! The lady Soraya needed no one. The lady Soraya cried herself to sleep.
— Hilari Bell, Rise of a Hero
I didn’t have the vaguest idea of what to do – I couldn’t keep staring at the wall forever, I told myself. But even that admonition didn’t work. A faculty advisor reviewing a graduation thesis would have had the perfect comment: you write well, you argue clearly, but you don’t have anything to say.
— Haruki Murakami, Pinball, 1973
Talking to strangers sounded like talking to no one, which Henry had some firsthand experience in- in real life. It was lonely. Almost as lonely as Lake View Cemetery, where he'd buried Ethel.
— Jamie Ford, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
I looked briefly up from my notes. I was surrounded by hearts, sectioned and preserved. Hearts with holes. Hearts with leaking valves or thickened walls. Hearts with narrow or transposed aortas. I closed my eyes.
— Claire Holden Rothman, The Heart Specialist
Loneliness is remedied at times with the company of a friend and at other times with the company of oneself.
— Patricia Selbert
I tell you loneliness is the thing to master. Courage and fear, love, death are only parts of it and can easily be ruled afterwards. If I make myself master my own loneliness there will be peace or safety: and perhaps these are the same.
— Martha Gellhorn
I am a lonely man," he said again that evening. "And is it not possible that you are also a lonely person? But I am an older man, and I can live with my loneliness, quietly. You are young, and it must be difficult to accept your loneliness. You must sometimes want to fight it.""But I am not at all lonely.""Youth is the loneliest time of all. Otherwise, why should you come so often to my house?"Sensei continued: "But surely, when you are with me, you cannot rid yourself of your loneliness. I have not it in me to help you forget it. You will have to look elsewhere for the consolation you seek. And soon, you will find that you no longer want to visit me."As he said this, Sensei smiled sadly.
— Sōseki Natsume, Kokoro
Mostly she just missed Vaughn. Missed all those quiet, unspectacular moments that, when added up, showed how entwined their lives had become. And right now, she missed being able to phone him, because it would be so easy to tap in the eleven digits that would put his voice on the line. ‘Grace, about bloody time,’ he’d say, and make it sound like an endearment.But she couldn’t call Vaughn, because she’d left him. Which was a novelty, until Grace remembered that he’d have left her eventually if she hadn’t done it first. She was never the one. She was never even the one before the one. She was the girl who seemed like a good idea at the time, but ultimately was just a phase that people went through.That was the way it had always been. Friends and lovers came and went because there was something about her which repelled them, and she didn’t have a clue what it was. It was a mystery that she couldn’t solve on her own, and there wasn’t a single person in the world who could help . . .
— Sarra Manning, Unsticky
I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God knows what on this side.
— Michael  Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey
I was so alone that every day was like eating my own heart.
— Junot Díaz
My friends, tonight we bring you something entirely different. Something special. The poets will rest, the sonnets will be silent, and what words of love there are will not be spoken. Tonight, my friends, and I can hear you out there, sitting alone, like me, in your chairs, your beds, driving down an empty street with no one but me to listen to your weeping; tonight, I'm going to bring you Armageddon.
— Charles Grant
In one sense, (Duchamp's) “The Large Glass” is a glimpse into Hell; a peculiarly modernist Hell of repetition and loneliness.
— Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New
Dim loneliness came imperceivably into the fields and he turned back. The birds piped oddly; some wind was caressing the higher foliage, turning it all one way, the way home. Telegraph poles ahead looked like half-used pencils; the small cross on the steeple glittered with a sharp and shapely permanence.
— A.E. Coppard, Dusky Ruth: And Other Stories
I could be the lone Eskimo, friend of whales and seals."The Panopticon
— Jenn Fagan
The warmth of your heart is tauntingly near, but you reserve it as you shut me out in the lizard of your doubt. Is it because you don't understand the freakish assembly of my soul, a soul that was once broken? In some ways I guess I don't blame you. if I had the opportunity to avoid the vague horizon of my future, I would. But these are the cards I've been dealt and I still don't know all the rules of the game. My burden is heavy and becomes harder to bear each day. I know I have the ability to endure it alone if I really persevere, but I prefer a steady hand to help guide me along the way and maybe even hold me in times of uncertainty.
— Shykia Bell, CAMILEON: Beyond The Veil
Estragon: I remember the maps of the Holy Land. Coloured they were. Very pretty. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty. That's where we'll go, I used to say, that's where we'll go for our honeymoon. We'll swim. We'll be happy.
— Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
How is it that some celebrities, whom the average person would believe to have all the popularity a human being could want, still admit to feeling lonely? It is quite naive to assume that popularity is the remedy for loneliness. Loneliness does not necessarily equal physical solitude, it is the inability to be oneself and rightfully represented as oneself.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
I and me are always too deeply in conversation: how could I endure it,if there were not a friend?The friend of the hermit is always the third one: the third one is the float which prevents the conversation of the two from sinking into the depth.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
I love when I reach Marcus on the phone and as he says hello, I can hear the music he's listening to in the background. That music is the sound of him without me. How he surrounds himself when I'm not there, which is almost all the time.
— Megan McCafferty, Charmed Thirds
Just think about it," he said softly. "You can do practically anything. You can have practically everything. And none of it will keep you from being alone.""Shut up shut up...Everybody's alone."He nodded. "But some people learn how to live with it.
— Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human
That's the strangest thing about this life, about being in the ministry. People change the subject when they see you coming. And then sometimes those very same people come into your study and tell you the most remarkable things. There's a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn't really expect to find it, either.
— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
A vast and abandoned world laid out in anonymous grids and quadrants, a view that confirmed you were much more alone than you thought you were, a view that inspired the flickering thoughts of suicide.
— Bret Easton Ellis, Imperial Bedrooms
I have a mouth for kisses / No one to give or to take / I have a heart in my bosom / Beating for nobody's sake.
— Lana Citron, A Compendium Of Kisses
Before that experience, I had often felt the kind of alone that comes from the suspicion that you are not only genetically different from those around you, but different in your very soul...[then] I was a different kind of alone. I was alone and ashamed of myself...it was no one's fault but mine.
— Jillian Lauren, Some Girls: My Life in a Harem
Alone you're refinding a glittering, a clarity, you're finding your distilled self. ...You think of the two types of aloneness you've known recently: this wonderful, sparkly, soul-refreshing type, and the despairing loneliness that sucks the breath from your life.
— Nikki Gemmell, The Bride Stripped Bare
Red's world, you see, is a closed circle. Not that it matters. I know that I'm a closed circle, too, and it's all I can do to find some starting point from myself, while at the same time trying to find my own terminus. There's no way I'm ever going to find my beginning or end in somebody else's circle. Two people together never add up to anything more than one person added to another. That we continue to add ourselves up in this way is the reason human beings will always be lonely.
— Xiaolu Guo, Village of Stone
As I saw myself moving ever farther toward the social margin, nothing healed me of a sore and angry heart like a walk through the city. To see in the street the fifty different ways people struggle to remain human - the variety and inventiveness of survival techniques - was to feel the pressure relieved, the overflow draining off. I felt in my nerve endings the common refusal to go under. That refusal became company. I was never less alone than alone in the crowded street. Here, I found, I could imagine myself. Here, I thought, I am buying time. What a notion: buying time.
— Vivian Gornick
But he saw Naomi as the wind traveling over the field, always searching, never stopping, and never knowing that true piece is when you curl around one little piece of something. One little fern. One little frond. One person to love.
— Rene Denfeld, The Child Finder
What's the point of wandering?to find a better place?a home?But the loneliness will always capture mein its clawsof no tomorrow
— Asper Blurry, Train to the Edge of the Moon
There’s nothing abnormal about loneliness.
— Paula Stokes, Hidden Pieces
Seasons happened and things got colder and harder and suddenly I found myself smoking circles in the airby myself in the snowand I was not okay.
— Charlotte Eriksson, You're Doing Just Fine
Loneliness can either kill you or teach you depending on you being either a fighter or a survivor
— Vignesh S
Turn your loneliness into singing and praying, and you shall realize that you are never alone at all
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
No matter whom I'm with I'll always be alone," she said. And she added with a roguish touch: "Excellency.
— Gabriel García Márquez, The General in His Labyrinth
I see nothing that can unite us under the auspices of innocence and honor," he wrote to her. "In the future you will be alone, although at your husband's side, and I will ab alone in the midst of the world. The glory of having conquered ourselves will be our only consolation.
— Gabriel García Márquez
I'll never fall in love again," he once confessed to José Palacios, the only human being with whom he ever permitted himself that sort of confidence. "It's like having two souls at the same time.
— Gabriel García Márquez, The General in His Labyrinth
I do not know that Lady Glencora's heart was made of that stern stuff which refuses to change its impressions; but it was a heart, and it required food. To love and fondle someone, - to be loved and fondled, were absolutely necessary to her happiness. She wanted the little daily assurance of her supremacy in the man's feelings, the constant touch of love, half accidental half contrived, the passing glance of the eye telling perhaps of some little joke understood only between them two rather than of love, the softness of an occasional kiss given here and there when chance might bring them together, some half-pretended interest in her little doings, a nod, a wink, a shake of the head, or even a pout.
— Anthony Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?
Dimple didn’t want to admit how much what he was saying resonated with her. Loneliness. That’s what he was describing. And she’d felt it so much it had become like a constant presence in her life, curled up against her like a sleeping cat. “I know what you mean,” she said softly. “Unfortunately.
— Sandhya Menon, When Dimple Met Rishi
Loneliness is like a big, empty room inside you that echoes with the sounds of the life you're not living.
— Leisa Rayven, Mr. Romance
Solitude removes us from the mindless humdrum of everyday life into a higher consciousness which reconnects us with ourselves and our deepest humanity, and also with the natural world, which quickens into our muse and companion. By setting aside dependent emotions and constraining compromises, we free ourselves up for problem solving, creativity, and spirituality. If we can embrace it, this opportunity to adjust and refine our perspectives creates the strength and security for still greater solitude and, in time, the substance and meaning that guards against loneliness.
— Neel Burton, For Better For Worse: Should I Get Married?
For I, Sinuhe, am a human being. I have lived in everyone who existed before me and shall live in all who come after me. I shall live in human tears and laughter, in human sorrow and fear, in human goodness and wickedness, in justice and injustice, in weakness and strength. As a human being I shall live eternally in mankind. I desire no offerings at my tomb and no immortality for my name. This was written by Sinuhe, the Egyptian, who lived alone all the days of his life.
— Mika Waltari, The Egyptian
Nothing is worse than loneliness.
— Wayne    Smith, Thor
The hush of the night sky is the silence of a graveyard.
— Ted Chiang, The Great Silence
She was reasonable and rational, even through the tears. I hurt her. I know I hurt her. All I felt was anger. I wanted to yell and break stuff. Be demonstrative. Because she was being... she was so adult. And I just felt like a stupid kid. I didn't want to be in our empty place so I did what I do, I went to the movies. I wanted a big dark room to cry in.
— Matt Fraction, Sex Criminals, Vol. 2: Two Worlds, One Cop
There are people who haven't any gift for happiness at all and are painfully and ruthlessly aware of the fact. Such people don't seek happiness, only to get a little form and style into their unhappiness
— Hjalmar Söderberg, Doctor Glas
You know something, you never know what lonely is until you are really alone, alone all day, alone all night, with no one to talk to.
— Michael Morpurgo, Toto: The Dog-Gone Amazing Story of the Wizard of Oz
Had I been screaming, screaming, in some way? I with my life so separate and well-ordered in the company of my green things and my sky and the animals of the hillside? I shouted - it was a demand - I shouted and shook him: "Godbody!" And as usual he understood me perfectly: 'You was lonesome,' he said.
— Theodore Sturgeon, Godbody
I had chosen to play the detective—and if there is one thing that unites all the detectives I've ever read about, it's their inherent loneliness. The suspects know each other. They may well be family or friends. But the detective is always the outsider. He asks the necessary questions but he doesn't actually form a relationship with anyone. He doesn't trust them, and they in turn are afraid of him. It's a relationship based entirely on deception and it's one that, ultimately, goes nowhere. Once the killer has been identified, the detective leaves and is never seen again. In fact, everyone is glad to see the back of him.
— Anthony Horowitz, Magpie Murders
If I can teach myself the art of loneliness, then perhaps the art of writing will come more easily to me.
— Nell Stevens, Bleaker House: Chasing My Novel to the End of the World
If you think it ain’t dismal and lonesome out in a fog that way, by yourself, in the night, you try it once – you’ll see.
— Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
People talked about loneliness as if it were something alive and it could get you. But loneliness is something dead, it's deadness. Lonely people are slowly dying people.
— Sofia Samatar, Tender: Stories
The extravagant cost of staying is watching others leave.-Commitment Defined
— L.V. Jones
Dream big and dream of a beautiful world where the sun always shines; where everyone sports a smile; where sorrow doesn’t come knocking on any one’s door; where there is plenty of love and where time stands still to watch you enjoy life.Dream of a peaceful world, a world where children retain their innocence and are not violated even before they bloom; where love exists in its true form and breakups are never heard of; where families grow instead of shrinking; where loneliness doesn’t exist and old age is spent enjoying the fruits of love that you sowed.Dream of a world where unselfishness and selflessness rule the roost; where we are not divided on the basis of colour or creed, instead we treat each other with love and respect; where there is equality in everything and the line between the haves and have not's doesn’t exist. Such a world will bring Heaven on Earth.Fly out on the wings of imagination to build such a world and let not even the sky be your limit.
— Latika Teotia
I always come here when I can't sleep [. . .] every night.
— Faith Erin Hicks, The Stone Heart
He really is alone in whatever hell this is.Completely and utterly alone.'It isn't,' he thinks, as he trudges back toward his house, 'the most unfamiliar feeling in the world.
— Patrick Ness, More Than This
Loneliness is the endless disease that eats at our soul.
— Jacob Baylis
She spent the first half of her life alone. For the second half, she longed for a man of dignity to rescue her.
— Terry a O'Neal
She didn’t care if the world thought she was pretty. All she wanted was that special someone to reach beyond the surface and discover her heart.
— Terry a O'Neal
But it's funny how even after all these years you find yourself wondering just how well you know anyone. Hell, we've all been tight since we we're kids - been through a lot together - but we still have secrets, don't we? All of us. None of us are ever exactly, precisely what we claim to be, are we? We're one way with some people, another way with other people, maybe another way still when we're all alone. That's what it boils down to fellas. At night, when you're lying there in bed looking at the ceiling, remembering the day, thinking back through things you did and what lies ahead, when it's just you and whatever god you pray to in the dark ...that's when all the masks are peeled away and it's just you. Just you..., and whoever...or whatever you are.
— ― Greg F. Gifune, The Bleeding Season
When the silence and the aloneness press down and around me, crushing me, carving through me like ice, I need to speak aloud sometimes, if only for proof of life.
— Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine
It's a dark place, not knowing. It's difficult to surrender to. But I guess it's where we live most of the time. I guess it's where we all live, so maybe it doesn't have to be so lonely. Maybe I can settle into it, cozy up to it, make a home inside uncertainty.
— Nina LaCour, We Are Okay
He thought of night coming on. He thought of the loneliness of tonight, this first night in the ground. This, he thought, was the moment when the dead must first feel truly alone. This was the moment when the dead, in loneliness, feel the first stirrings of the long penance of decay. This was the moment when the dead realize the truth: This is it, it will never be different.To be dead, he thought, that was to know that nothing would ever be different.
— Robert Penn Warren, Wilderness: A Tale Of The Civil War
You will always remain lonely till the day you meet a person who can understand your mind deeply!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
But before that day it felt like at least I had an ally on this boat. Now I have nothing. Well, I have a fat baby sea monster. But Bao doesn't tell jokes, and somehow I need that.I hate how I need that.
— Emily Skrutskie, The Abyss Surrounds Us
Why?" I asked. He knew what I meant, and shrugged. "Because when the legends get written, I didn't want to be remembered for standing on the sidelines. I want my future offspring to know that I was there, and that I fought against her at the end, even if I couldn't do anything useful." I blinked, this time not at the brightness of the sun. "Because," he went on, his eyes locked with mine, "I didn't want you to fight alone. Or die alone.
— Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Thorns and Roses
Together we were something less, which felt like such a relief, to not be ourselves for a while.
— Ben Marcus, Notable American Women
Sometimes I felt so alone that I wish there were a bigger, longer word for alone. I tried to tell Grandma about this feeling, about my suspicion that life was nicking away pieces of me.
— J.R. Moehringer, The Tender Bar
How did men make themselves loved, I wondered. I had passed all my life with men who were loved but I seemed never to have learnt the lesson.
— Maria McCann, As Meat Loves Salt
Maybe the point of life is to teach us that we aren’t always going to be our past mistakes. Maybe the point of life is to open ourselves up to the things that we fear most—like love.Maybe the whole point of my life was to simply find you, even if it wasn’t meant to be forever.And that thought alone is enough to get me through each night of loneliness.
— Brittainy C. Cherry, The Fire Between High & Lo
The place was a truck stop town. Large 18 wheelers lined the sidewalks and cafes. Giant diesel motors roaring their exhaust into the cloudy night skies. Wearied looking truckers climbed into the cabs like captains of gigantic steel ships. She could not imagine anyone trying to maneuver such large metallic beasts all over the roads of the nation. While the idea of being behind the wheel with nothing but the comfort of the radio, and the isolation were appealing. The thought of fighting all the congested traffic in smog infested industrial waters of choking vapors killed any pleasant dreams of the occupation.
— Jaime Allison Parker, Justice of the Fox