c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.
— Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
I've never been lonely. I've been in a room -- I've felt suicidal. I've been depressed. I've felt awful -- awful beyond all -- but I never felt that one other person could enter that room and cure what was bothering me...or that any number of people could enter that room. In other words, loneliness is something I've never been bothered with because I've always had this terrible itch for solitude. It's being at a party, or at a stadium full of people cheering for something, that I might feel loneliness. I'll quote Ibsen, "The strongest men are the most alone." I've never thought, "Well, some beautiful blonde will come in here and give me a fuck-job, rub my balls, and I'll feel good." No, that won't help. You know the typical crowd, "Wow, it's Friday night, what are you going to do? Just sit there?" Well, yeah. Because there's nothing out there. It's stupidity. Stupid people mingling with stupid people. Let them stupidify themselves. I've never been bothered with the need to rush out into the night. I hid in bars, because I didn't want to hide in factories. That's all. Sorry for all the millions, but I've never been lonely. I like myself. I'm the best form of entertainment I have. Let's drink more wine!
— Charles Bukowski
The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
I’m here. I love you. I don’t care if you need to stay up crying all night long, I will stay with you. If you need the medication again, go ahead and take it—I will love you through that, as well. If you don’t need the medication, I will love you, too. There’s nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than Depression and I am braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
being alone never felt right. sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.
— Charles Bukowski, Women
All great and precious things are lonely.
— John Steinbeck, East of Eden
When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.
— Janet Fitch, White Oleander
The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved.
— Mother Teresa
But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning.
— Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
How we need another soul to cling to.
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Will’s voice dropped. “Everyone makes mistakes, Jem.”“Yes,” said Jem. “You just make more of them than most people.”“I —”“You hurt everyone,” said Jem. “Everyone whose life you touch.”“Not you,” Will whispered. “I hurt everyone but you. I never meant tohurt you.”Jem put his hands up, pressing his palms against his eyes. “Will —”“You can’t never forgive me,” Will said in disbelief, hearing thepanic tinging his own voice. “I’d be —”“Alone?” Jem lowered his hand, but he was smiling now, crookedly. “Andwhose fault is that?
— Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince
If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.
— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
there is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock
— Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell
I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
When you have nobody you can make a cup of tea for, when nobody needs you, that's when I think life is over.
— Audrey Hepburn
So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in 
— Sylvia Plath, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose and Diary Excerpts
Where are the people?” resumed the little prince at last. “It’s a little lonely in the desert…” “It is lonely when you’re among people, too,” said the snake.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
It would be too easy to say that I feel invisible. Instead, I feel painfully visible, and entirely ignored.
— David Levithan, Every Day
They cannot scare me with their empty spacesBetween stars—on stars where no human race is.I have it in me so much nearer homeTo scare myself with my own desert places.
— Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost
We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being.
— Hermann Hesse
I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.
— Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven - Meniti Bianglala
Sometimes I feel so- I don’t know - lonely. The kind of helpless feeling when everything you’re used to has been ripped away. Like there’s no more gravity, and I’m left to drift in outer space with no idea where I’m going’Like a little lost Sputnik?’I guess so.
— Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
I realize, for the first time, how very lonely I've been in the arena. How comforting the presence of another human being can be.
— Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
I wish I could tell you how lonely I am. How cold and harsh it is here. Everywhere there is conflict and unkindness. I think God has forsaken this place. I believe I have seen hell and it's white, it's snow-white.
— Sandy  Welch
Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe. The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass.
— D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover
i felt her absence. it was like waking up one day with no teeth in your mouth. you wouldn't need to run to the mirror to know they were gone
— James Dashner, The Scorch Trials
It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know.
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better.
— Henry Rollins
What is hell? Hell is oneself. Hell is alone, the other figures in it Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.
— T.S. Eliot
People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.
— Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
Some nights are made for torture, or reflection, or the savoring of loneliness.
— Poppy Z. Brite
Loneliness is the poverty of self
—  solitude is richness of self.
There is the solitude of suffering, when you go through darkness that is lonely, intense, and terrible. Words become powerless to express your pain; what others hear from your words is so distant and different from what you are actually suffering.
— John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
A joker is a little fool who is different from everyone else. He's not a club, diamond, heart, or spade. He's not an eight or a nine, a king or a jack. He is an outsider. He is placed in the same pack as the other cards, but he doesn't belong there. Therefore, he can be removed without anybody missing him.
— Jostein Gaarder, The Solitaire Mystery
Karou wished she could be the kind of girl who was complete unto herself, comfortable in solitude, serene. But she wasn't. She was lonely, and she feared the missingness within her as if it might expand and... cancel her. She craved a presence beside her, solid. Fingertips light at the nape of her neck and a voice meeting hers in the dark. Someone who would wait with an umbrella to walk her home in the rain, and smile like sunshine when he saw her coming. Who would dance with her on her balcony, keep his promises and know her secrets, and make a tiny world wherever he was, with just her and his arms and his whisper and her trust.
— Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone
But nothing makes a room feel emptier than wanting someone in it.
— Calla Quinn, All the Time
I am alone, I thought, and they are everybody.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead
If you smile when you are alone, then you really mean it.
— Andy Rooney
The pain of being alone is completely out of this world, isn't it? I don't know why, but I understand your feelings so much, it actually hurts. 
— Masashi Kishimoto
That initial anger she had felt turned to sadness, and now it had become something else, almost a dullness of sorts. Even though she was constantly in motion, it seemed as if nothing special ever happened to her anymore. Each day seemed exactly like the last, and she had trouble differentiating among them.
— Nicholas Sparks, Message in a Bottle
DeWitt: Loneliness leads to nothing good, only detachment. And sometimes the people who most need to reach out are the people least capable of it.
— Jane Espenson
...I also believe that introversion is my greatest strength. I have such a strong inner life that I’m never bored and only occasionally lonely. No matter what mayhem is happening around me, I know I can always turn inward.
— Susan Cain
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.
— T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Be good and you will be lonesome.
— Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World
My loneliness was born when men praised my talkative faults and blamed my silent virtues.
— Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam
Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone. It has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone.
— Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now
Like crying wolf, if you keep looking for sympathy as a justification for your actions, you will someday be left standing alone when you really need help.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
It's so stupid because all I wanted was space and now that I have it, there's this part of me that's achingly lonely I could die.
— Hannah Harrington, Saving June
Solitude is indeed dangerous for a working intelligence. We need to have around us people who think and speak. When we are alone for a long time we people the void with phantoms
— Guy de Maupassant, Le Horla et autres contes fantastiques
Then stirs the feeling infinite, s
— George Gordon Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present.
— Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams
Are you angry? Punch a pillow. Was it satisfying? Not hardly. These days people are too angry for punching. What you might try is stabbing. Take an old pillow and lay it on the front lawn. Stab it with a big pointy knife. Again and again and again. Stab hard enough for the point of the knife to go into the ground. Stab until the pillow is gone and you are just stabbing the earth again and again, as if you want to kill it for continuing to spin, as if you are getting revenge for having to live on this planet day after day, alone.
— Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You
...sometimes I get tired. Sometimes I get bored. And sometimes all I want, more than anything else in the world, is to go on a freaking date.
— Kiersten White, Paranormalcy
Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you.
— Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
l(aleaffalls)oneliness
— E.E. Cummings
Occasionally, very occasionally, say at four o’clock in the afternoon on a wet Sunday, she feels panic-stricken and almost breathless with loneliness. Once or twice she has been known to pick up the phone to check that it isn’t broken. Sometimes she thinks how nice it would be to be woken by a call in the night: ‘get in a taxi now’ or ‘I need to see you, we need to talk’. But at the best of times she feels like a character in a Muriel Spark novel – independent, bookish, sharp-minded, secretly romantic.
— David Nicholls, One Day
Deep down, the young are lonelier than the old.
— Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
What was wrong with me? I had a decent life. I was healthy. I wasn't starving or maimed by a land mine or orphaned. Yet somehow, it wasn't enough. I had a hole in me, and everything I took for granted slipped through it like sand.I felt like I had swallowed yeast, like whatever evil was festering inside me had doubled in size.
— Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care
Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.
— Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
Lonely people have enthusiasms which cannot always be explained. When something strikes them as funny, the intensity and length of their laughter mirrors the depth of their loneliness, and they are capable of laughing like hyenas. When something touches their emotions, it runs through them like Paul Revere, awakening feelings that gather into great armies.
— Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale
In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.
— Aldous Huxley
Half of the time I don't know what they're talking about
—  their jokes seem to relate to a past that everyone but me has shared. I'm a foreigner in the world and I don't understand the language.
What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
Lonely was much better than alone.
— Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
Over time, loneliness gets inside you and doesn't go away.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game
When I was a kid--10, 11, 12, 13--the thing I wanted most in the world was a best friend. I wanted to be important to people; to have people that understood me. I wanted to just be close to somebody. And back then, a thought would go through my head almost constantly: "There's never gonna be a room someplace where there's a group of people sitting around, having fun, hanging out, where one of them goes, 'You know what would be great? We should call Fiona. Yeah, that would be good.' That'll never happen. There's nothing interesting about me." I just felt like I was a sad little boring thing.
— Fiona Apple
When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.
— Tennessee Williams, Camino Real
To forget a friend is sad. Not everyone has had a friend.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
Loneliness in a crowd of people was the worst kind of loneliness, but she couldn't help it.
— Lauren Kate, Torment
[A]t bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise or even help another, a lot must happen, a lot must go well, a whole constellation of things must come right in order once to succeed.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
An ad that pretends to be art is -- at absolute best -- like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.
— David Foster Wallace
I knew this feeling, the 2 a.m. loneliness that I'd practically invented.
— Sarah Dessen, This Lullaby
Oh, the places you'll go! There is fun to be done!There are points to be scored. There are games to be won.And the magical things you can do with that ballwill make you the winning-est winner of all.Fame! You'll be as famous as famous can be,with the whole wide world watching you win on TV.Except when they don'tBecause, sometimes they won't.I'm afraid that some timesyou'll play lonely games too.Games you can't win'cause you'll play against you.
— Dr. Seuss, Oh, The Places You'll Go!
There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematician that four is twice two. But two is not twice one
—  two is two thousand times one.
There’s a loneliness that only exists in one’s mind. The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is blink.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
When I'm in turmoil, when I can't think, when I'm exhausted and afraid and feeling very, very alone, I go for walks. It's just one of those things I do. I walk and I walk and sooner or later something comes to me, something to make me feel less like jumping off a building.
— Jim Butcher, Storm Front
To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude. The movement from loneliness to solitude, however, is the beginning of any spiritual life because it it is the movement from the restless senses to the restful spirit,l from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward-reaching search, from the fearful clinging to the fearless play.
— Henri J.M. Nouwen, Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life
Loneliness is about the scariest thing out there.
— Joss Whedon
It was as if the empty nights were made for thinking of him. And sometimes I found myself so vividly aware of him it was as if he had only just left the room and the ring of his voice were still there. And somehow, there was a disturbing comfort in that, and, despite myself, I’d envision his face.
— Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire
Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness , dear, my happiness will remain,in the moist reflection of a street lamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal's black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Selected Letters, 1940-1977
Lingering is so very lonely when one lingers all alone.
— Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan
I decided that maybe we left each other alone too much. Leaving each other alone was killing us.
— Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
Like you're riding a train at night across some vast plain, and youcatch a glimpse of a tiny light in a window of a farmhouse. In aninstant it's sucked back into the darkness behind and vanishes. Butif you close your eyes, that point of light stays with you, justbarely for a few moments.
— Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away — yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit ——————————— and wanted to shoot myself.
— Søren Kierkegaard
Shrinking in a corner,pressed into the wall;do they know I'm present,am I here at all?Is there a written rule book,that tells you how to be—all the right things to talk about—that everyone has but me?Slowly I am withering—a flowered deprived of sun;longing to belong to—somewhere or someone.
— Lang Leav, Love & Misadventure
I left the library. Crossing the street, I was hit head-on by a brutal loneliness. I felt dark and hollow. Abandoned, unnoticed, forgotten, I stood on the sidewalk, a nothing, a gatherer of dust. People hurried past me. and everyone who walked by was happier than I. I felt the old envy. I would have given anything to be one of them.
— Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
But there are other words for privacy and independence. They are isolation and loneliness.
— Megan Whalen Turner, The King of Attolia
What is the difference in being alone with another and being alone by one's self?
— Henrik Ibsen
I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.
— Franz Kafka
The price of being a sheep is boredom. The price of being a wolf is loneliness. Choose one or the other with great care.
— Hugh MacLeod
When a man is one of a kind, he will be lonely wherever he is.
— Louis L'Amour, The Lonesome Gods
She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the menace of familiar objects lying still.
— Toni Morrison, A Mercy
My sleep wasn't peaceful, though. I have the sense of emerging from a world of dark, haunted places where I traveled alone.
— Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay
I had been alone more than I could have been had I gone by myself.
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Shrinking in a corner,pressed into the wall;do they know I'm present,am I here at all?
— Lang Leav, Love & Misadventure
Jamie enjoyed solitude, but loneliness was a constant ache.
— Sidney Sheldon, Master of the Game
You fall in love, it's intoxicating, an for a little while you feel like you've actually become one with the other person. Merged souls, and so on. You think 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 than ever, because the illusion-the hope you'd held on to all those years-has been shattered.
— Nicole Krauss, Man Walks Into a Room
The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down to pretty few in most personal experience. There's lots of good fish in the sea... maybe... but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you're not mackerel or herring yourself, you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea.
— D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover
The worst thing about loneliness is that it brings one face to face with oneself.
— Mary Balogh, No Man's Mistress
There's so much I should say, so many things I should tell him, but in the end I tell him nothing.I cut a line and my losses, and I light a cigarette.
— Clint Catalyst, Cottonmouth Kisses
I barely noticed loneliness anymore; it was my normal condition, by necessity if not by nature.
— Rachel Hartman, Seraphina
Today the individual has become the highest form, and the greatest bane, of artistic creation. The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other and without realizing that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other's eyes and yet deny each other's existence. We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster's whim and the purest ideal.
— Ingmar Bergman
I am not meant to be alone and without you who understands.
— Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
You'll end up living a lonely life if you're waiting around for perfect.
— Samantha Young, Before Jamaica Lane
I don't know why I still feel this pit in my stomach whenever I get a moment to think. I know what the pit is, too; I feel lonely. But I'm not alone, I keep telling myself.
— Pittacus Lore, The Rise of Nine
In the midst of friends, home, and kind parents, she was alone.
— William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
I'm all alone, but I'm not lonely.
— Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
A lonely, quiet person has observations and experiences that are at once both more indistinct and more penetrating than those of one more gregarious; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. . . . Loneliness fosters that which is original, daringly and bewilderingly beautiful, poetic. But loneliness also fosters that which is perverse, incongruous, absurd, forbidden.
— Thomas Mann, Death in Venice
Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation.(pg.99, "The Body and the Earth")
— Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
You do not have to be alone. The world never inflicts loneliness upon us. That is something we choose or reject by ourselves.
— Darren Shan, Birth of a Killer
Even the company of the mad was better than the company of the dead.
— Stephen King, The Stand
She talked about wanting to be a part of something, wanting to be desired, to be 'special', craving to be loved. She talked about experiencing the kind of loneliness so immense it could swallow you up. She called it 'loneliness that crowds couldn't cure'.
— Cupcake Brown, A Piece of Cake
Just like you mistook lust for love, you have mistaken with being alone for loneliness. So I'm fine. Thanks for asking.
— pleasefindthis, I Wrote This For You
That’s why; he’s worried about how his life is turning out, and he’s lonely, and lonely people are the bitterest of them all
— Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
I am lonely, sometimes, but I dare say it's good for me…
— Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Road
...But the heart is not a computer that can be upgraded so quickly and easily with the latest version of love. Love cannot be sealed hermetically inside a tight box like any other on the store shelf; even though the word itself is in public domain, its quality is not. Love cannot promise a full customer satisfaction garanteed or a whole lifetime of dreams shared refunded, with no questions asked. Love cannot be agreed to in terms and conditions as quickly as the "Next" button being clicked. These unspoken terms and conditions grow and develop over time until it gets very messy, and no one remembers how such a mess of accusation and anger was able to overshadow their pure ecstasy of love, the spark between two people turning on a new operation system of togetherness for the first time. Love is always beta; never a golden master.If love were a computer, constant bug reports and subsequent fixes are the name of the game, and there are many unexplained breakdowns. The heart is too stubborn for explanations and too impatient for forgiveness, and there is usually no one at the tech support line. Forgive me stan, if I've crashed so often. It's just to hard to boot up to a whole new future without you. I am an empty monitor in search of a "hello.
— Raymond Luczak
And loneliness. I should say something of loneliness. The panic, the sweeping hysteria that comes not when you are without others, but when you are without yourself, adrift. I should describe the filthy province of mind, the blighted district inside, the place so crowded you cannot raise the lids of your eyes. Your shoulders are drawn and your head has fallen and your chest is bruised by the constant assault of your heart. (p. 37)
— Hilary Thayer Hamann, Anthropology of an American Girl
You're too far for my hands to hold you, but too near for my heart to love you.
— Heraline
They are so caught up in their happiness that they don't realize I'm not really a part of it. I am wandering along the periphery. I am like the people in the Winslow Homer paintings, sharing the same room with them but not really there. I am like the fish in the aquarium, thinking in a different language, adapting to a life that's not my natural habitat. I am the people in the other cars, each with his or her own story, but passing too quickly to be noticed or understood. . . . There are moments I just sit in my frame, float in my tank, ride in my car and say nothing, think nothing that connects me to anything at all.
— David Levithan, Every Day
. . . clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude.
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando
In the weeks that followed, we amazed ourselves. Our habits slid apart easily...And our very few intimacies were simply discontinued. Where did they go, those things we did? Were they recycled? Did some new couple in China do them? Were a Swedish man and woman foot to foot at this very moment? 
— Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You
Lucian was beginning to get used to hearing her small observations at night. More than anything, he realized he liked her voice in the dark. It made him feel less lonely.
— Melina Marchetta, Froi of the Exiles
The two of them on top of the freezing slide, wordlessly holding hands. Once again they were a ten-year-old boy and girl. A lonely boy, and a lonely girl. A classroom, just after school let out, at the beginning of winter. They had neither the power nor the knowledge to know what they should offer to each other, what they should be seeking. They had never, ever, been truly loved, or truly loved someone else. They had never held anyone, never been held. They had not idea, either, where this action would take them. What they entered then was a doorless room. They couldn't get out, nor could anyone else come in. The two of them didn't know it at the time, but this was the only truly complete place in the entire world. Totally isolated, yet the one place not tainted with loneliness.
— Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
If we are alone, we become more alone. Life is strange
— Paulo Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept
And she was well-enough acquainted with loneliness to understand that the worst part wasn't having nobody caring for you - it was having nobody to care for.
— Tessa Dare, Romancing the Duke
My main goal is to stay alive. To keep fooling myself into hanging around. To keep getting up every day. Right now I live without inspiration. I go day to day and do the work because it's all I know. I know that if I keep moving I stand a chance. I must keep myself going until I find a reason to live. I need one so bad. On the other hand maybe I don't. Maybe it's all bullshit. Nothing I knew from my old life can help me here. Most of the things that I believed turned out to be useless. Appendages from someone else's life.Everything I have I would give to not know what I know. To not feel emptiness as my constant companion. To not look into this room and be reminded why I'm in it. I'm not getting enough air. The room feels so small all of a sudden. It's pathetic to be this lonely and know it. To keep breathing. To be silent and alone. And to know.
— Henry Rollins, Roomanitarian
What have I become?My sweetest friend
—  everyone I know goes away in the end.And you could have it all:my empire of dirt.I will let you down.I will make you hurt.
I know what it feels like, and it sucks, it really does, when you are up in the middle of the night thinking about the things that you've suddenly became aware of. The things you're missing out on right now, and all the people who are not close to you anymore, and all of the good times that will never happen again, and all the people who have meant the world to you who have forgotten about you forever, and you get this awful feeling that's kind of like a mix between loneliness and nostalgia.
— Abraham M. Alghanem, Summer and Autumn
It no longer makes me cry and die and tear myself to see her go because everything goes away from me like that now — girls, visions, anything, just in the same way and forever and I accept lostness forever.
— Jack Kerouac
Only on the Internet can a person be lonely and popular at the same time.
— Allison Burnett, Undiscovered Gyrl
Sometimes being surronded by everyone is the loneliest, because you'll realise you have no one to turn to.
— Soraya
I think it takes an amazing amount of energy to convince oneself that the Forever Person isn't just around the corner. In the end I believe we never do convince ourselves. I know that I found it increasingly hard to maintain the pose of emotional self-sufficiency lying on my bed and sitting at my desk, watching the gulls cartwheeling in the clouds over the bridges, cradling myself in my own arms, breathing warm chocolate-and-vodka breath on a rose I had found on a street corner, trying to force it to bloom.
— Douglas Coupland, Life After God
I was trained to turn loneliness into laziness.
— Bill Callahan, Letters to Emma Bowlcut
I have been a stranger here in my own land: All my life
— Sophocles, Antigone
I hope somebody cares because I sure don't. I sure don't. Not anymore. I'm ashamed to go around my family. I'm too embarrassed to confide in my friends. Outside of work I don't have a life.
— Mary B. Morrison
What makes loneliness an anguish is not that I have no one to share my burden, but this: I have only my own burden to bear.
— Dag Hammarskjöld
And I'm hoping there's some larger truth about suffering here, or at least my understanding of it - although I've come to realize that the only truths that matter to me are the ones I don't, and can't, understand. What's mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable. What doesn't fit into a story, what doesn't have a story. Glint of brightness on a barely-there chain. Patch of sunlight on a yellow wall. The loneliness that separates every living creature from every other living creature. Sorrow inseparable from joy.
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
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
Loneliness watches and sights, then climbs into my bed and pulls the covers over... himself, fully dressed, shoes and all. He’s going to make me sleep with him again tonight, i just know it.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone. It has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone. Although, in daily life, we do not always distinguish these words, we should do so consistently and thus deepen our understanding of our human predicament.
— Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now
Not belonging is a terrible feeling. It feels awkward and it hurts, as if you were wearing someone else's shoes.
— Phoebe Stone, The Romeo And Juliet Code
Some people say dying alone is a fate worse than death itself. Well, they should try being alone during the living part sometimes. There's no quicker way to make you wonder why the hell you ever thought you'd want to return.
— John Corey Whaley, Noggin
I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano!
— William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
The opposite of Loneliness is not Togetherness , It's Intimacy
— Richard Bach
It'll be no use their putting their heads down and saying "Come up again, dear!"I shall only look up and say "Who am I then? Tell me that first, and then,if I like being that person, I'll come up: if not, I'll stay down heretill I'm somebody else"--but, oh dear!' cried Alice, with a sudden burstof tears, 'I do wish they WOULD put their heads down! I am so VERY tiredof being all alone here!
— Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
I didn't let her go. She went. It's not my fault.She did it.She could undo it. This is feeling so fucking famliar.Why do we even bother? Why do we make ourselves so open to such easy damage? Is it all loneliness? Is it all fear? Of is it just to experience those narcotic moments of belonging with someone else?
— David Levithan, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist
I think that if we look for love courageously, it reveals itself, and we wind up attracting even more love. If one person really wants us, everyone does. But if we’re alone, we become even more alone. Life is strange.
— Paulo Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept
There's a lot to be said for being alone. But you and I know, don't we, Flavia, that being alone and being lonely are not at all the same thing?
— Alan Bradley, The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag
It made me start to wonder if there were other people so lonely so close. I thought about “Eleanor Rigby.” It’s true, where do they all come from? And where do they all belong?
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Thirsty for attention is a cry of loneliness.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
She'd been in love with the man, and love is a scary thing. If not reciprocated, it can turn a person into a monster.
— Michele Young-Stone, The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors
I learned the strange art of loneliness, the weathered yearning that swells and passes, and swells and passes, when you walk a trail alone.
— Anna Carey, Eve
My despair is less despair than boredom and loneliness.
— Anthony Swofford, Jarhead
Lying in the bed that had once held two, Lisey thought alone never felt more lonely than when you woke up and discovered you still had the house to yourself. That you and the mice in the walls were the only ones still breathing.
— Stephen King, Lisey's Story
Human beings, in point of fact, are lonely by nature, and one should feel sorry for them and love them and mourn with them. It is certain that people would understand one another better and love one another more if they would admit to one another how lonely they were, how sad they were in their tormented, anxious longings and feeble hopes.
— Halldór Laxness
She had never before minded being alone. Now she dreaded it. When she was alone now she felt so dreadfully alone.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne's House of Dreams
Consider A MoveThe steady time of being unknown,in solitude, without friends,is not a steadiness that sustains.I hear your voice waver on the 
— Michael     Ryan, New and Selected Poems
Solitude is where one discovers one is not alone.
— Marty Rubin
She understood how a world jammed with phones, email, and faxes could still leave you feeling utterly alone.
— Jodi Picoult, Salem Falls
I need the pain of loneliness to make my imagination work.
— Orhan Pamuk
Unpopular, lonely and loving, Elinor need not trouble, For if she were not so loving, She would not be so miserable.
— Stevie Smith, Selected Poems
Until then I had always thought of loneliness as something negative—an absence of company, and, of course, something temporary... That day I had learned that it was much more. It was something which could press and oppress, could distort the ordinary and play tricks with the mind. Something which lurked inimically all around, stretching the nerves and twanging them with alarms, never letting one forget that there was no one to help, no one to care. It showed one as an atom adrift in vastness, and it waited all the time its chance to frighten and frighten horribly—that was what loneliness was really trying to do; and that was what one must never let it do...
— John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids
She imagined herself as some sort of vessel to be filled up with love. But it wasn't like that. The love was within her all the time, and its only renewal came from giving it away.
— Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper's Daughter
Twilight whippoorwill...Whistle on, sweet deepenerOf dark loneliness
— Bashō Matsuo, Japanese Haiku
But most days,I wander around feeling invisible.Like I'm a speck of dustfloating in the airthat can only be seenwhen a shaft of light hits it.
— Sonya Sones, One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies
The thing is, being lonely is like walking in the cold without a coat. It’s uncomfortable, but eventually you go numb. Once you get used to not being lonely, though, the shock of going back is like having your down comforter yanked off at six o’clock on a Minnesota December morning.
— Maggie  Hall, The Conspiracy of Us
To be alone with yourself is to be alone. To be in the company of others is to be alone tog
— Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
It’s just that you go so crazy being alone like that. Sometimes he’d forget my water or food and I’d cry and cry and cry.” She stops talking and looks out the window. “I would try to tell myself stories to pass the time. Fairy tales. Parts of books. But they got used up.
— Holly Black, White Cat
Are the dead as lonesome as the living?
— Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms
...Maybe instead of fire and brimstone, hell is just a feeling of loneliness
— Amy Huntley, The Everafter
Sometimes I wake up and lie still enough to hear a petal drop from the vase of flowers. Sometimes I lie awake and wish there was someone to hear my falling.
— Simon Van Booy, The Illusion of Separateness
In a world filled with people, some happy, others like me, I feel so all alone.
— Mary B. Morrison
Language has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone.
— Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now
Loneliness is a state of feeling that can be changed.People may still feel lonely even among the crowd.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Loneliness is the prison of the human spirit. When we are lonely, we pace back and forth in small, shut-in worlds.
— John Powell, Will the Real Me Please Stand Up?: 25 Guidelines for Good Communication
Where are the men?” the little prince at last took up the conversationagain. “It is a little lonely in the desert. . . ”“It is also lonely among men,” the snake said.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
He would say her name over and over until it devolved into meaningless sounds - mah REI kuh, mah REI kuh - it became an entry in a dictionary of loneliness.
— Audrey Niffenegger, Her Fearful Symmetry
Loneliness is a funny disease. You don’t realize how badly you’re infected until someone gives you a shot of contentment—and then it wears off
— Brigid Kemmerer, Thicker Than Water
If only I had something to take the edge off the loneliness. If only lonely were a more accurate word. It should sound much less pretty.
— Nina LaCour, We Are Okay
Loneliness is like being the only person left alive in theuniverse, except that everyone else is still here.
— Simon Van Booy, Everything Beautiful Began After
From childhood's hour I have not beenAs others were - I have not seenAs others saw - I could not bringMy passions from a common spring -
— Edgar Allan Poe, Alone
Only boxers can understand the loneliness of tennis players - and yet boxers have their corner men and managers. Even a boxer's opponent provides a kind of companionship, someone he can grapple with and grunt at. In tennis you stand face-to-face with the enemy, trade blows with him, but never touch him or talk to him, or anyone else. The rules forbid a tennis player from even talking to his coach while on the court. People sometimes mention the track-and-field runner as a comparably lonely figure, but I have to laugh. At least the runner can feel and smell his opponents. They're inches away. In tennis you're on an island. Of all the games men and women play, tennis is the closest to solitary confinement....
— Andre Agassi, Open
There's a special quality to the loneliness of dusk, a melancholy more brooding even than the night's.
— Ed Gorman, Everybody's Somebody's Fool
When loneliness is a constant state of being, it harkens back to a childhood wherein neglect and abandonment were the landscape of life.
— Alexandra Katehakis, Mirror of Intimacy: Daily Reflections on Emotional and Erotic Intelligence
Rats! There goes the bell... oh, how I hate lunch hours! I always have to eat alone because nobody likes me... Peanut butter again... I wish that little red haired girl would come over, and sit with me. Wouldn’t it be great if she’d walk over here, and say, “May I eat lunch with you, Charlie Brown?” I’d give anything to talk with her... she’d never like me, though... I’m so blah and so stupid... she’d never like me... I wonder what would happen if I went over and tried to talk to her! Everyone would probably laugh... she’d probably be insulted someone as blah as I am tried to talk to her. I hate lunch hour... all it does is make me lonely... during class it doesn’t matter... I can’t even eat... Nothing tastes good... Rats! Nobody is ever going to like me... Lunch hour is the loneliest hour of the day!
— Charles M. Schulz
All we had was her room, her stories, and the quiet that settled in as we tried in vain to spread ourselves out and fill the space she'd left behind.
— Sarah Dessen, Dreamland
There were people everywhere but no one was mine, and I was no one's.
— Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz
I wanted to tell him then how loneliness can become a tangible thing, after a while. It’s something that you carry with you on your shoulder, hold up like a friend with a twisted ankle. It sits with you and walks the streets with you. It’s a selfish thing and it refuses to let go or even split its attention. Of course, like a particularly annoying itch, you can convince yourself for a while that it’s not there. You can go to libraries and sit with friends and drink more coffee than your body can handle and you can feel surrounded and happy. But eventually you have to scratch it. Loneliness steals you away from the world, as if you’ve been cut loose and you’re lost, untethered, somewhere far above everyone else. Just you and this feeling that you just need someone to put a hand on your shoulder and turn you around, to look at you and tell you the three words that matter most: You’re not alone. Don’t be scared. I am here. It’s not about love or lust or any other inadequate word; it’s about being touched and realising that you are no longer by yourself.
— Chloe Rattray, Sacré Noir
Why were we so far apart, even when we were together? It was a nice loneliness, like the sensation of washing your face in cold water.
— Banana Yoshimoto, The Lake
Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.
— John Fowles, The Magus