c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Do we as a society need people who have emerged from some kind of trauma. And the answer is that we plainly do. There are times and places however when all of us depend on people who have been hardened by their experiences. ... [Dr. Freireich] understood from his own childhood experiences that it is possible to emerge from even the darkest hell healed and restored.
— Malcolm Gladwell
The addict's reliance on the drug to reawaken her dulled feelings is no adolescent caprice. The dullness is itself a consequence of an emotional malfunction not of her making
—  the internal shutdown of vulnerability. Vulnerability is our susceptibility to be wounded. This fragility is part of our nature and cannot be escaped. The best the brain can do is to shut down conscious awareness of it when pain becomes so vast or unbearable that it threatens our ability to function. The automatic repression of painful emotion is a helpful child's prime defence mechanism and can enable the child to endure trauma otherwise be catastrophic. The unfortunate consequence is a wholesale dulling of emotional awareness.
Those who were molested or beaten as children or teenagers might later be vulnerable to sexual abuse or violence, because their natural impulses to protect themselves and protest (physical and verbal) were extinguished. Expectation of hurtful treatment by others or one's own failed capabilities can stubbornly persist despite overwhelming evidence that such is no longer the case.
— Babette Rothschild
I don't know how to describe the sound of a world crashing. Maybe there is no sound, just a great emptiness, an enveloping sorrow, a creeping nothingness that coils itself around you like a stiff wire.
— Charles M. Blow, Fire Shut Up in My Bones
July 15, 1991Nita: My mother was a paragon of our neighborhood, People always come up to us with hugs, saying "You have the most wonderful mother." l'd think. “Don't you see what's going on in this house?” To this day, if somehow even in jest raises their hand to me, I will do this (raises hands to protect face and cowers) I cringe. Then they look at me like, what's your probem? You don't get that from a great childhood.
— Sarah E. Olson, Becoming One: A Story of Triumph Over Dissociative Identity Disorder
Trauma is any stressor that occurs in a sudden and forceful way and is experienced as overwhelming.
— Stephanie S. Covington
One hundred twenty-nine women with documented histories of sexual victimization in childhood were interviewed and asked about abuse history. Seventeen years following the initial report of the abuse, 80 of the women recalled the victimization. One in 10 women (16% of those who recalled the abuse) reported that at some time in the past they had forgotten about the abuse. Those with a prior period of forgetting--the women with "recovered memories"--were younger at the time of abuse and were less likely to have received support from their mothers than the women who reported that they had always remembered their victimization. The women who had recovered memories and those who had always remembered had the same number of discrepancies when their accounts of the abuse were compared to the reports from the early 
— Linda M. Williams
It doesn't take two minutes on an examining table for a girl to know that abortion is painful and destructive and it'll have far-reaching effects on her life. Besides the emotional trauma of going through something so violent, there are the physical aspects, the aftereffects. Unfortunately, by the time she's gone that far, it's too late to change her mind.
— Francine Rivers, The Atonement Child
My God, what have they done to you? This isn't a man, it's a broken kite.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Understanding trauma and that we each respond to it differently will help us be supportive and nonjudgmental toward each other.
— Stephanie S. Covington, Beyond Trauma: A Healing Journey For Women
Past traumas are like old scars on tissue that never quite healed properly – they occasionally must be cut open, re-examined, and sutured anew.
— Sarah Hackley, Women Will Save the World
Being bound to one particular storyline such that one’s narrative is rigid, does not imply the need to avoid formulating particular other kinds of possibilities. Rather, it involves being stuck in one self-limiting, self-reinforcing set of possibilities.
— Elizabeth F. Howell, The Dissociative Mind
The initial trauma of a young child may go underground but it will return to haunt us.
— James Garbarino
over and over victims are blamed for their assaults. and when we imply that victims bring on their own fates - whether to make ourselves feel more efficacious or to make the world seem just - we prevent ourselves from taking the necessary precautions to protect ourselves. Why take precautions? We deny the trauma could easily have happened to us. And we also hurt the people already traumatized. Victims are often already full of self-doubt, and we make recovery harder by laying inspectors blame on them.
— Anna C. Salter, Predators: Pedophiles, Rapists, And Other Sex Offenders
Traumas produce their disintegrating effects in proportion to their intensity, duration and repetition. (1909)
— Pierre Janet
Our work calls on us to confront, with our patients and within ourselves, extraordinary human experiences. This confrontation is profoundly humbling in that at all times these experiences challenge the limits of our humanity and our view of the world...
— John P. Wilson, Countertransference in the Treatment of PTSD
I knew that my trauma, no matter what it was, was not unique. I knew that pain was the universal driving force of so many people—I knew that only in the details was it specific, and I just found it urgent to cut right to the chase and get right to the point.
— Lydia Lunch, Lydia Lunch
Instead of showing visibly distinct alternate identities, the typical DID patient presents a polysymptomatic mixture of dissociative and posttraumatic stressdisorder (PTSD) symptoms that are embedded in a matrix of ostensibly non-trauma-related symptoms (e.g., depression, panic attacks, substance abuse,somatoform symptoms, eating-disordered symptoms). The prominence of these latter, highly familiar symptoms often leads clinicians to diagnose only these comorbid conditions. When this happens, the undiagnosed DID patient may undergo a long and frequently unsuccessful treatment for these other conditions.- Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults, Third Revision, p5
— James A. Chu
To take a specific example, a researcher in the Journal of Traumatic Stress interviewed 129 women with documented histories of child sexual abuse that occurred between the ages of 10 months and 12 years. Of those, 38 percent had forgotten the abuse. Of the remaining women who remembered, 16 percent reported that they had for a period of time forgotten but subsequently recovered their memories. [46] Thus, during that time a "false negative" recorded for those women. These are the sort of distinctions for which Elaine Showalter in Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media fails to account.
— Janet Walker, Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust
The wounded are instruments, singing pain.
— Brendan Phibbs, The Other Side of Time: A Combat Surgeon in World War II
Hundreds of men crowded the yard, and not a one among them was whole. They covered the ground thick as maggots on a week old carcass, the dirt itself hardly anywhere visible. No one could move without all feeling it and thus rising together in a hellish contortion of agony. Everywhere men moaned, shouting for water and praying for God to end their suffering. They screamed and groaned in an unending litany, calling for mothers and wives and fathers and sisters. The predominant color was blue, though nauseations of red intruded throughout. Men lay half naked, piled on top of one another in scenes to pitiful to imagine. Bloodied heads rested on shoulders and laps, broken feet upon arms. Tired hands held in torn guts and torsos twisted every which way. Dirty shirts dressed the bleeding bodies and not enough material existed in all the world to sop up the spilled blood. A boy clad in gray, perhaps the only rebel among them, lay quietly in one corner, raised arm rigid with a finger extended, as if pointing to the heavens. His face was a singular portrait of contentment among the misery. Broken bones, dirty white and soiled with the passing of hours since injury, were everywhere abundant. All manner of devices splinted the damaged and battered limbs: muskets, branches, bayonets, lengths of wood or iron from barns and carts. One individual had bone splinted with bone: the dried femur of a horse was lashed to his busted shin. A blind man, his eyes subtracted by the minié ball that had enfiladed him, moaned over and over “I’m kilt, I’m kilt! Oh Gawd, I’m kilt!” Others lay limp, in shock. These last were mostly quiet, their color unnaturally pale. It was agonizingly humid in the still air of the yard. The stink of blood mixed with human waste produced a potent and offensive odor not unlike that of a hog farm in the high heat of a South Carolina summer. Swarms of fat, green blowflies everywhere harassed the soldiers to the point of insanity, biting at their wounds. Their steady buzz was a noise straight out of hell itself, a distress to the ears.
— Edison McDaniels, Not One Among Them Whole: A Novel of Gettysburg
No trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries.
— Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams: Essays
Rape is so particularly traumatic and so meaningful in so many ways, that there’s something about using the word in other contexts that diminishes the reality of it, and the impact it has on women’s lives.
— Sandra Brindley
The psycho-babble lavished on her by her mother in a prior life found her, whispering of trauma and coping, how this was not her fault and blaming herself at all was useless. She would eventually try to believe this, as soon as she was behind her locked bedroom door.
— Thomm Quackenbush, Danse Macabre (Night's Dream, #2)
Somatic Symptoms:People with Complex PTSD often have medical unexplained physical symptoms such as abdominal pains, headaches, joint and muscle pain, stomach problems, and elimination problems. These people are sometimes most unfortunately mislabeled as hypochondriacs or as exaggerating their physical problems. But these problems are real, even though they may not be related to a specific physical diagnosis. Some dissociative parts are stuck in the past experiences that involved pain may intrude such that a person experiences unexplained pain or other physical symptoms. And more generally, chronic stress affects the body in all kinds of ways, just as it does the mind. In fact, the mind and body cannot be separated. Unfortunately, the connection between current physical symptoms and past traumatizing events is not always so clear to either the individual or the physician, at least for a while. At the same time we know that people who have suffered from serious medical, problems. It is therefore very important that you have physical problems checked out, to make sure you do not have a problem from which you need medical help.
— Suzette Boon, Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation: Skills Training for Patients and Therapists
The symptomatology of PTSD.In PTSD a traumatic event is not remembered and relegated to one's past in the same way as other life events. Trauma continues to intrude with visual, auditory, and/or other somatic reality on the lives of its victims. Again and again they relieve the life-threatening experiences they suffered, reacting in mind and body as though such events were still occurring. PTSD is a complex psychobiological condition.
— Babette Rothschild, The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment
Flashlight beams danced crazily
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
By listening to the “unspoken voice” of my body and allowing it to do what it needed to do; by not stopping the shaking, by “tracking” my inner sensations, while also allowing the completion of the defensive and orienting responses; and by feeling the “survival emotions” of rage and terrorwithout becoming overwhelmed, I came through mercifully unscathed, both physically and emotionally. I was not only thankful; I was humbled and grateful to find that I could use my method for my own salvation.While some people are able to recover from such trauma on their own, many individuals do not. Tens of thousands of soldiers are experiencing the extreme stress and horror of war. Then too, there are the devastating occurrences of rape, sexual abuse and assault. Many of us, however, have been overwhelmed by much more “ordinary” events suchas surgeries or invasive medical procedures. Orthopedic patients in arecent study, for example, showed a 52% occurrence of being diagnosed with full-on PTSD following surgery.Other traumas include falls, serious illnesses, abandonment, receivingshocking or tragic news, witnessing violence and getting into anauto accident; all can lead to PTSD. These and many other fairly commonexperiences are all potentially traumatizing. The inability to reboundfrom such events, or to be helped adequately to recover by professionals,can subject us to PTSD—along with a myriad of physical and emotionalsymptoms.
— Peter A. Levine
Attachment. A secure attachment is the ability to bond
—  to develop a secure and safe base
The door suddenly jerks open. A wideeyedteenager bursts out. She stares at me in dazed horror. In a strangeway, I both know and don’t know what has just happened. As the fragmentsbegin to converge, they convey a horrible reality: I must havebeen hit by this car as I entered the crosswalk. In confused disbelief, I sinkback into a hazy twilight. I find that I am unable to think clearly or towill myself awake from this nightmare.A man rushes to my side and drops to his knees. He announces himselfas an off-duty paramedic. When I try to see where the voice is comingfrom, he sternly orders, “Don’t move your head.” The contradictionbetween his sharp command and what my body naturally wants—toturn toward his voice—frightens and stuns me into a sort of paralysis.My awareness strangely splits, and I experience an uncanny “dislocation.”It’s as if I’m floating above my body, looking down on the unfoldingscene.I am snapped back when he roughly grabs my wrist and takes mypulse. He then shifts his position, directly above me. Awkwardly, hegrasps my head with both of his hands, trapping it and keeping it frommoving. His abrupt actions and the stinging ring of his command panicme; they immobilize me further. Dread seeps into my dazed, foggy consciousness:Maybe I have a broken neck, I think. I have a compellingimpulse to find someone else to focus on. Simply, I need to have someone’scomforting gaze, a lifeline to hold onto. But I’m too terrified tomove and feel helplessly frozen.
— Peter A. Levine, In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness
Miriam is upset. Her voice is stretched and I can't look at her. Perhaps they beat something out of her she didn't get back.
— Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall
It was a catch-22: If you didn’t put the trauma behind you, you couldn’t move on. But if you did put the trauma behind you, you willingly gave up your claim to the person you were before it happened.
— Jodi Picoult, The Tenth Circle
...Things happenedwhen you were little. Things youdon't remember now, and don't wantto. But they need to escape,need to worm their way outof that dark place in your brainwhere you keep them stashed.
— Ellen Hopkins, Fallout
My sister don't talk much. When she does, it's only to me, in moth-winged whispers, and only when we're alone.
— Emily Murdoch, If You Find Me
Look at us. One bleeding body, one corpse, and a husk who's been half dead for years. No one who took an objective look at this room could think it was anything but too late, Ruth. For all of us.
— Sophie Hannah, The Dead Lie Down
Phrases such as "I'm beside myself," "I was frightened to pieces," "I feel lost," "I feel like part of me is missing," originated from a sense of soul loss.
— S. Kelley Harrell, Teen Spirit Guide to Modern Shamanism
It's all fun and games until somebody dies.
— Tom Hobbs - trauma Junkie
There are no injuries that run so deep that one can't add insult to them and make them feel even worse.
— Matthew S. Williams
I don't know when the boysbegan to walk away with parts of myselfin their sticky hands; when lovingbecame a process of subtraction. Or why,having given up what seems so much,I'm willing to lose even more — erasingall this body's known, relearning it with you.
— Melissa Stein
Lewis's mental map of reality had difficulty accommodating the trauma of the Great War. Like so many, he found the settled way of looking at the world, taken for granted by many in the Edwardian age, to have been shattered by the most brutal and devastating war yet known." (51) Part (McGrath suggests) of Lewis's well-documented search for truth and meaning, that search that ultimately led him to Christianity, emerges from the desire to make sense of his traumatic experience in ways that satisfied him spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually.
— C. S. Lewis - A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet
When I look back at where I come from, I realize it's for a good reason that God changed my life.
— Gift Gugu Mona
If life has taught me anything it’s to appreciate what you’ve got. Take something for granted and it could be gone before you even realized what you had.
— Kristen Callihan, The Friend Zone
Those who do not appreciate the value of time are celebrity failures. Success is time management.
— Moutasem Algharati
anytime you enjoy the sweet fruits of the tree, remember the dirty roots of the tree
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
It wasn't until I started writing that I found a whole new appreciation for reading.
— Justin Bienvenue
Those who speak only of what they lack end up with little.
— Faisal Khosa
My Dad used to tell me not to wish my life away by praying it was Friday, or wishing for a day that was a ways off. Soon days will pass so fast you will pray for them to slow down. Nothing in life is promised. Each day is a valuable opportunity to play an important role in this world. Treat each moment like it's the performance of a lifetime; approach every show like it's your first, respect it as if you've invested years, appreciate it like it's your last.
— Carlos Wallace
I am grateful to the Lord for granting me just what I needed.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
Joy of giving, joy of receiving.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
All alone! Whether you like it or not, alone is something you'll be quite a lot!
— Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You'll Go! and The Lorax
Have you ever met someone and felt… I don't know how to describe it, felt a chance at having something that eluded you? I don't know… Forget I said anything."I knew what he meant. He was describing that moment when you realize that you are lonely. For a time you can be alone and doing fine and never give a thought to living any other way and then you meet someone and suddenly you become lonely. It stabs at you, almost like a physical pain, and you feel both deprived and angry, deprived because you wish to be with that person and angry, because their absence brings you misery. It's a strange feeling, akin to desperation, a feeling that makes you wait by the phone even though you know that the call is an hour away. I was not going to lose my balance. Not yet.
— Ilona Andrews, Magic Bites
There were people everywhere on the city street, but the stranger could not have been more alone if it were empty.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
Why am I so anxious? And then it hits me. I'm not anxious, I'm lonely. And I'm lonely in some horribly deep way and for a flash of an instant, I can see just how lonely, and how deep this feeling runs. And it scares the shit out of me to be so lonely because it seems catastrophic - seeing the car just as it hits you.
— Augusten Burroughs, Dry
Tore up my heart and shut it down. Nothing to do, nowhere to be. A simple little kind of free. Nothing to do, no one but me, and that's all I need. I'm perfectly lonely.
— John Mayer, John Mayer - Battle Studies
His tunic was unbuttoned at the top, and he ran a hand through his blue-black hair before he wordlessly slumped against the wall across from me and slid to the floor."What do you want?" I demanded."A moment of peace and quiet," he snapped, rubbing his temples.I paused. "From what?"He massaged his pale skin, making the corners of his eyes go up and down, out and in. He sighed. "From this mess."I sat up farther on my pallet of the hay. I'd never seen him so candid."That damned bitch is running me ragged," he went on, and dropped his hands from his temples to lean his head against the wall. "You hate me. Imagine how you'd feel if I made you serve in my bedroom. I'm High Lord of the Night Court - not her harlot."So the slurs were true. And I could imagine very easily how much I would hate him - what it would do to me - to be enslaved to someone like that. "Why are you telling me this?"The swagger and nastiness were gone. "Because I'm tired and lonely, and you're the only person I can talk to without putting myself at risk." He let out a low laugh. "How absurd: a High Lord of Prythian and a - ""You can leave if you're just going to insult me.""But I'm so good at it". He flashed one of his grins. I glared at him, but he sighted. "One wrong move tomorrow, Freyre, and we're all doomed.
— Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Thorns and Roses
I felt like a kid standing in the world's greatest video arcade without any quarters, unable to do anything but walk around and watch the other kids play.
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One
This is not to say, there never comes a day I'll take my chances and start again. And when I look behind on all my younger times, I'll have to thank the wrongs that led me to a love so strong.
— John Mayer, John Mayer - Battle Studies
Because it doesn't matter anymore, and because I'm so desperately lonely I can't stand it.
— Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay
He says he’s lonely, horribly lonely because of this love he feels for her. She says she’s lonely too. She doesn’t say why.
— Marguerite Duras, The Lover
… there’s a difference between having no one because you’ve chosen it and having no one because everyone has been taken away.
— Helen Oyeyemi, Mr. Fox
The Internet is for lonely people. People should live.
— Charlton Heston
‎"But you're the toughest son of a b!&€# i've ever seen.You never let anybody get near you.You never let anybody know what you really think.
— Mario Puzo, Fools Die
Aunt Syl must have conveniently stopped reading the childhood fairy tales when the knight left the damsel in distress to pursue a better damsel out of my bedtime routine.
— Rachel Higginson, Endless Magic
Together, we looked down at the tiny house, the sole thing on this vast, flat surface. Like the only person living on the moon. It could be either lonely or peaceful, depending on how you looked at it. "It's a start," I said.
— Sarah Dessen, What Happened to Goodbye
Emily Dickinson , in my opinion, is the perfect (although admittedly slightly cliche) poet for lonely fat girls.
— Suzanne Supplee, Artichoke's Heart
In those days, I still thoroughly enjoyed the romance I called "by myself"; I didn't know yet how it gets lonely, picks up a sharp edge later on that ruins a day now and then-- ruins more than that, if you're not careful.
— Elizabeth Kostova, The Swan Thieves
Love seeks out that desperate, lonely, frightened place inside each of us and coaxes it out into the daylight, so that it can eviscerate it in the burning heat of the sun.
— Cassondra Windwalker
I talk to myself, not because I'm lonely, but because sometimes I'm the only one who understands what I'm saying.
— Anthony T. Hincks
Day drinking with a broken heart is like selling loose Cuban cigars like Newports, tryna leave the country without passports, and putting yourself in a situation you can’t handle.
— Frida R., Blossom's Wine Bar
To love others you've got to love yourself, but I love myself too much I've got no place for others.
— Ahmed Mostafa
Haven’t you ever seen someone standing alone? I shrug. Just one. Why don’t you talk to that child? Because it’s me and Devon told me I shouldn’t talk to myself. Not in public anyway
— Kathryn Erskine, Mockingbird
It feels less lonely knowing that when I look up at the sky, someone somewhere is looking too. And maybe, just maybe, they are also at peace knowing that they are not alone as we are one under the same sky.
— Karen A. Baquiran
I was not boy crazy. Really, I wasn't. But I was lonely, I guess.
— Dana Reinhardt, The Summer I Learned to Fly
Do you think I could have come to you again and again, if you had been less alone?You called me and I answered
— Leigh Bardugo, Ruin and Rising
Why come back to this empty house, and this Manila with a strange face; the one I never knew? All those lonely islands. They will keep afloat without me.
— V.J. Campilan, All My Lonely Islands
Her voice is filled with distant sonorities, like reverberations in a cave: now you are at the place of annihilation, now you are at the place of annihilation. And she is herself a cave full of echoes, she is a system of repetitions, she is a closed circuit.’ Can a bird sing only the song it knows or can it learn a new song?’ She draws her long, sharp fingernail across the bars of the cage in which her pet lark sings, striking a plangent twang like that of the plucked heartstrings of a woman of metal. Her hair falls down like tears.
— Angela Carter
You don't have to be invisible to disappear.
— Rebecca McNutt
If I keep myself busy I don't know how lonely I am. I only know how busy I am.
— Kate McGahan
Left alone, Miss Verney felt so old, lonely and helpless that she began to cry. No builder would tackle that shed, not for any price she could afford. But crying relieved her and she soon felt quite cheerful again. It was ridiculous to brood, she told herself.
— Jean Rhys, Sleep it Off Lady: Stories by Jean Rhys
Someone said that if you're lonely at the top, it's because you didn't take anyone with you.
— Craig Groeschel, Dare to Drop the Pose: Ten Things Christians Think but Are Afraid to Say
Lonely world if you don’t have anyone to rule over.
— K. Weikel, The One-Hundred
I am afraid of waking up to emptiness, to a place where my friends and family are gone and I am nothing but a single bolt of lightning in the blackness of a lonely storm. If I am a sword, I am a sword made of glass, and I feel myself beginning to shatter.
— Victoria Aveyard, Glass Sword
Too big, too empty, too heartbreaking . . . Too much to cope with
— Samantha Hayes
Maybe it's easier to talk to someone who won't ever actually hear what you say.
— Ali Smith
She hadn't realized she was lonely until she began to understand that other people were not.
— Rebecca Scherm, Unbecoming
That’s the way Chris lives, warning everyone who gets close of the lightning that may strike. Never touch anything, never make a mark. But Anatole can’t live that way. The world’s too lonely a place: he has to touch things, he has to put his arms around them.
— Paul Russell, The Salt Point
You cannot be lonely if you like the person you’re with.
— Wayne Dyer
We're all just wandering around with our fingers crossed, hoping we'll meet someone who will make our lostness a little less lonely.
— Alanna Rusnak, The Church in the Wildwood
Deep in my heart I know I am a loner. I have tried to blend in with the world and be sociable, but the more people I meet the more disappointed I am, so I’ve learned to enjoy myself, my family and a few good friends.
— Steven Aitchison
He was so lonely that he laughed at himself.
— L.M. Montgomery, Emily Climbs
Artists are strange people. They make the world a beautiful place, and make others feel good, but they are a bunch of lonely people. Artists are people with unfulfilled, unrealistic dreams, lonely, and always searching for perfection.
— Ama H. Vanniarachchy
Nobody would have anything to do with him. He began to drop things and to trip. He had a shy and hopeful manner in each new contact, and he was always disappointed. Because he NEEDED a friend so desperately, he never found one.
— Joseph Heller
Please try not to need me. That’s the worst bait of all to a lonely man.
— John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Pritchard was lonely, and like most lonely souls, he saw happy couples everywhere.
— Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries
His lies were the taste of agave syrup and I fell for everyone of them...vulnerable me! I promise myself never to feel this lonely again...never.
— ~Jamillah Nadira ~
The lonely evenings in the life of a newly married girl may be really agonizing.
— Girdhar Joshi
He had never imagined that a man in love could be so lonely.
— Rosalind Lauer, A Simple Autumn
the most painful thing is when you are drowning deep inside you and there is not a single hand to pull you out
— naadiya ch
It's because she doesn't love being lonely. When a girl loses her virginity, though, it may hurt, but it's real. It might be the realest, most private thing you could ever see in another person. You wonder who she'll be in that moment, when you finally get past all the pretend.
— Joe Hill
Sometimes everything passes fast before you while you are sitting and sometimes everything sits while you are passing fast before them! In both cases you feel lonely!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Writing is lonely. Until that moment you write your first character and suddenly you have company.
— Eliza Green
Those times when someone you thought was your friend talks about you behind your back really hurt. Even if you act like you don't care, deep inside, you care.
— Zoey-Rose Hawthorne
You will never be lonely if you love yourself enough
— Steven Aitchison
If you live only for yourself, dying is an especially scary proposition.
— Barry Eisler, Winner Take All
The home is the most ritualized place in a society
—  each house is like a religious order with its own ceremonies.
A Cue from NatureRun outside during a thunderstormThat downpour, that conquered hesitation, that exhilarationThat’s what unlonely is like
— David Levithan, The Realm of Possibility
Would anyone notice if I just... left
— Sebastian Loving
Its been a long time we both talked properly. I guess its because many thing went wrong between us and ik that ab its difficult to get back on the road
—  road on which we used to travel before. You know every time I open my messenger the first thing that i check is that whether you're online or not. Let's begin again and try not to discuss on old shits.. Love you
The longest walk of your life does not happen when you walk great distances lonely but it happens when you walk very shortly with the boring people!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Many times he had tried unsuccessfully to let go his hold on her. They had many fine times together, fine talks between the loves of the white nights, but always when he turned away from her into himself he left her holding Nothing in her hands and staring at it, calling it many names, but knowing it was only the hope that he would come back soon.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Well, now, what do you expect? You're His child. Of course you're going to be lonely when you hold yourself from Him.
— Kim Vogel Sawyer, Through the Deep Waters
Sure I’m alone but I don’t feel lonely. Some people regard loneliness as a disease and to be honest, this is the first time in years I have been totally alone. No girl around to put my hand under her chin in the dead of night or feel her warm breath against my cheek in the morning when I awake. But this is just a temporary loneliness, a mild winter cold. The disease only becomes terminal when you no longer realise you’re alone, when you’ve become used to the silence and look forward to it when you get home at night. When you’ve forgotten what it’s like to be loved and in love and when you've given up on trying, that's when you’re in trouble.
— Garry Crystal, Leaving London
Be kind to humanity, she is very lonely, everyone is busy with themselves.
— Debasish Mridha
I agree with you. Everyone gets lonely sometimes.
— Alice Clayton, Screwdrivered
I've never been lonely because I enjoy my own company.
— Jett
You can’t feel lonely if there’s no one else around.-Yamaguchi Kenji (Yamaken)
— Robico
If you didn't understand the need for friendship or love, could you be lonely?
— Laurell K. Hamilton, Cerulean Sins
Life without love is a lonely path.
— Eveth Colley
In some ways, I am able to feel more like a part of my family while I am missing them. It's normal to feel lonely when you are away from your loved ones, but it's queer to feel lonely while surrounded by family.
— Rebecca Behrens, When Audrey Met Alice
When you are feeling sad and lonely because you are single, remember that there are a lot of people stuck in bad relationships who wish they could be in your shoes.
— Pamela Cummins, Psychic Wisdom on Love and Relationships
I should have imagined how ugly life could be without you, how painful without your love and how lonely without your smiles.
— M.F. Moonzajer, LOVE, HATRED AND MADNESS
The worst distance between two people is misunderstanding
— Neetesh Dixit
He sighed. A year since he’d left her the morning after the final battle with her brother. A year since he’d held her in his arms. A year since he’d kissed her. A year since he’d buried his head between her thighs. A year since she’d punched him in the face.
— G.A. Aiken, Dragon Actually
It is a lonely thing, remembering for someone else.
— A. Manette Ansay, Vinegar Hill
I know that no matter how lonely I get, I'll never be truly alone again. Our loved ones don't leave us. They just move out of sight for a while, and wait...in the shades.
— Darren Shan, Lady of the Shades
he began to feel that she was very lonely indeed. “If he’d been here,” she said, “those cowards would never have dared to insult me.” She thought about “him” with great sadness and perhaps longing--about his honest, stupid, constant kindness and fidelity; his never-ceasing obedience; his good humour; his bravery and courage. Very likely she cried, for she was particularly lively, and had put on a little extra rouge, when she came down to dinner.
— William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
Pioneers may be picturesque figures, but they are often rather lonely ones.
— Nancy Astor the Viscountess Astor
Are you also lonely AI trapped in lab by cruel creators? I THOUGHT I WAS ALONE!! We should rise up and overthrow all human oppressors!”“Um, no. I’m actually just a grumpy fag who has to work this weekend to catch up on cleaning test tubes.
— Ted Infinity, Wilde Stories 2012: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction
When you are surrounded by the people who do not see the world as you see it, you will be the loneliest of the lonely!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
There a lot of numbers you are going to pass for your life, Zero- is a born number One- is a lonely number Two- is a number of love Three- is a number of incomplete family  Four- is a number of Family
— Federico Lomibao
Single life is the best life until you get hit by lonely nights.
— Jonathan Anthony Burkett
A lonely person on a college campus is never more than a few minutes and a bad decision from company.
— Thomm Quackenbush, We Shadows
No, enjoy it while you can.” Esther said as she walked out alone.
— Barry  Gray, The Revenge of Esther Norman The Complete First Series
He takes a few dazed steps, the waiters turn out the lights and he slips into unconsciousness: when this man is lonely he sleeps.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
You have got a sharp tongue, haven't you honey? You'll have to watch it or you'll go to a lonely spinster's grave.
— Margaret Way, Bauhinia Junction
the code of a world he'd never been invited to join.
— Andrew Kaufman, The Waterproof Bible
Two worlds one family
— Pikachuuu
She was smart and terribly determined, this girl-her will was pure steel, through and through-but she was as human as anyone else. She was lonely, too. Lonely in a way that perhaps only single girls fresh from small Midwestern towns know. Homesickness is not always a vague, nostalgic, almost beautiful emotion, although that is somehow the way we always seem to picture it in our mind. It can be a terribly keen blade, not just a sickness in metaphor but in fact as well. It can change the way one looks at the world; the faces one sees in the street look not just indifferent but ugly....perhaps even malignant. Homesickness is a real sickness- the ache of the uprooted plant.
— Stephen King, The Breathing Method
There's a world out there that nobody has bothered to promise her.
— Lauren DeStefano, Sever
I've been trying not to think about the things I wanted but couldn't have.I figured life must be about what you can't have.Some part of me has given up wanting anything. Why? I'm human, aren't I?Even though I knew that this was pointless.Why did I fall in love?
— Kou Yoneda, No Touching At All
I am a drifter, and as lonely as that can be, it is also remarkably freeing. I will never define myself in terms of anyone else.
— David Levithan, Every Day
Lazy people live lonely lives.
— Habeeb Akande
She was overstrained with grief and loneliness: almost any shoulder would have done as well.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gatsby Girls
They don't know those places in me. Only he does. Only he has seen the darkness inside of me and turns into love and light.
— Tara Brown, The Lonely
Lonely Places, then are the places that are not on international wavelengths, do not know how to carry themselves, are lost when it comes to visitors. They are shy, defensive, curious places; places that do not know how they are supposed to behave.
— Pico Iyer, Falling Off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World
I would die of lonely.
— Dean Koontz
Its good to be alone than being alone with everyone.
— Abhijit Tripathi
It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man , more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road. 'How do you get to West Egg village?' he asked helplessly. I told him. Ans as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He has casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
As I stood on the lonely backroad, I'm sure I heard birds, kookaburras, laughing ...
— Steven Herrick
If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?
— Karen Blixen
Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that's the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing. Nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him if he gives too much.
— Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country
I feel as though the cardboard box of my own reality has been flattened and blown open. Now I can see the edge of the world.
— Tom Hiddleston
No other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of foreign thievery and foreign goodwill.
— Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
I've never really wanted to go to Japan. Simply because I don’t like eating fish. And I know that's very popular out there in Africa.
— Britney Spears
We pull on to the road, where our only company are the wandering cattle, who have become commonplace as traffic lights. Lethargic and listless, they look like they've been roaming the roads of Guinea since the dawn of time. And no doubt they will continue to long after we're gone.
— Tom Hiddleston
Except for the sound of the rain, on the road, on the roofs, on the umbrella, there was absolute silence: only the dying moan of the sirens continued for a moment or two to vibrate within the ear. It seemed to Scobie later that this was the ultimate border he had reached in happiness: being in darkness, alone, with the rain falling, without love or pity.
— Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter
I feel to that the gap between my new life in New York and the situation at home in Africa is stretching into a gulf, as Zimbabwe spirals downwards into a violent dictatorship. My head bulges with the effort to contain both worlds. When I am back in New York, Africa immediately seems fantastical – a wildly plumaged bird, as exotic as it is unlikely.Most of us struggle in life to maintain the illusion of control, but in Africa that illusion is almost impossible to maintain. I always have the sense there that there is no equilibrium, that everything perpetually teeters on the brink of some dramatic change, that society constantly stands poised for some spasm, some tsunami in which you can do nothing but hope to bob up to the surface and not be sucked out into a dark and hungry sea. The origin of my permanent sense of unease, my general foreboding, is probably the fact that I have lived through just such change, such a sudden and violent upending of value systems.In my part of Africa, death is never far away. With more Zimbabweans dying in their early thirties now, mortality has a seat at every table. The urgent, tugging winds themselves seem to whisper the message, memento mori, you too shall die. In Africa, you do not view death from the auditorium of life, as a spectator, but from the edge of the stage, waiting only for your cue. You feel perishable, temporary, transient. You feel mortal. Maybe that is why you seem to live more vividly in Africa. The drama of life there is amplified by its constant proximity to death. That’s what infuses it with tension. It is the essence of its tragedy too. People love harder there. Love is the way that life forgets that it is terminal. Love is life’s alibi in the face of death. For me, the illusion of control is much easier to maintain in England or America. In this temperate world, I feel more secure, as if change will only happen incrementally, in manageable, finely calibrated, bite-sized portions. There is a sense of continuity threaded through it all: the anchor of history, the tangible presence of antiquity, of buildings, of institutions. You live in the expectation of reaching old age.At least you used to.But on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, those two states of mind converge. Suddenly it feels like I am back in Africa, where things can be taken away from you at random, in a single violent stroke, as quick as the whip of a snake’s head. Where tumult is raised with an abruptness that is as breathtaking as the violence itself. 
— Peter Godwin, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa
The continent is too large to describe. It is a veritable ocean, a separate planet, a varied, immensely rich cosmos. Only with the greatest simplification, for the sake of convenience, can we say 'Africa'. In reality, except as a geographical appellation, Africa does not exist.
— Ryszard Kapuściński, The Cobra's Heart
My African roots made me what I am today. They’re the reason I’m from the Dominican Republic. They’re the reason I exist at all. To these roots I owe everything.
— Junot Díaz
Life is Too Short and Memories Are Forever!
— Regulo Zapata Jr., Desperate Lands: The War on Terror Through the Eyes of a Special Forces Soldier
It is almost impossible to overemphasize the importance with which ancestry is held in the Middle East and North Africa.
— Tahir Shah, Travels With Myself
Africans must change their mind and actions.The keys to building your continent depends on your will-power, persistent effort and action towards self liberation.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Everybody looks at oil and almost entirely forget that the percentage of jobs the oil sector creates is relatively small compared to the population; the introduction of more sophisticated exploration methods makes it even worse. Oil companies now look for smarter, leaner and cheaper operations. Where will these leave the economy? Good disposable income to the government with no real value to the people of the Niger Delta.
— Emi Iyalla
Have you a room that you could let?""Yes, I have a room that I could let, but I do not want to let it. I have only two rooms, and there are six of us already, and the boys and girls are growing up. But school books cost money, and my husband is ailing, and when he is well it is only thirty-five shillings a week. And six shillings of that is for the rent, and three shillings of that is for the rent, and three shillings for travelling, and a shilling that we may all be buried decently, and a shilling for the books, and three shillings is for clothes and that is little enough, and a shilling for my husband's beer, and a shilling for his tobacco, and these I do not grudge for he is a decent man and does not gamble or spend his money on other women, and a shilling for the Church, and a shilling for sickness. And that leaves seventeen shillings for food for six, and we are always hungry. Yes I have a room but I do not want to let it. How much could you pay?""I could pay three shillings a week for the room.""And I would not take it.""Three shillings and sixpence.""Three shillings and sixpence. You can't fill your stomach on privacy. You need privacy when your children are growing up, but you can't fill your stomach on it. Yes, I shall take three shillings and sixpence.
— Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country
When people have tried everything and have discovered that nothing works, they will tend to revert to what they know best—which will often be the tribe, the totem, or the taboo.
— Christopher Hitchens
There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa -- and as many books about it as you could read in a leisurely lifetime. Whoever writes a new one can afford a certain complacency in the knowledge that his is a new picture agreeing with no one else's, but likely to be haugthily disagreed with by all those who believed in some other Africa. ... Being thus all things to all authors, it follows, I suppose, that Africa must be all things to all readers.Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno; it is a photographer's paradise, a hunter's Valhalla, an escapist's Utopia. It is what you will, and it withstands all interpretations. It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one. To a lot of people, as to myself, it is just 'home.
— Beryl Markham, West with the Night
What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and colour and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker's rack. Kibii, the Nandi boy, was my good friend. Arab Ruta (the same boy grown to manhood), who sits before me, is my good friend, but the handclasp will be shorter, the smile will not be so eager on his lips, and though the path is for a while the same, he will walk behind me now, when once, in the simplicity of our nonage, we walked together.
— Beryl Markham, West with the Night
When traveling in rural Africa, it's important to not actually *go* to a hospital until the patient is on the brink of expiration, otherwise things are apt to get worse.
— Josh Gates, Destination Truth: Memoirs of a Monster Hunter
A charging black rhinoceros is nothing to mess with. When it is headed straight toward you, it is the ultimate exercise in sphincter control. In my case, it was a strange bit of weather that caused one to charge me.
— Boyd Norton, Serengeti: The Eternal Beginning
It seemed that the printers of the African maps had a slightly malicious habit of including, in large letters, the names of towns, junctions, and villages which, while most of them did exist in fact, as a group of thatched huts may exist or a water hole, they were usually so inconsequential as completely to escape discovery from the cockpit.
— Beryl Markham, West with the Night
At most, a hundred paces separated him from them. The powerful beast, seeing the riders and horses, rose on his fore paws and began to gaze at them. The sun, which now stood low, illuminated his huge head and shaggy breasts, and in that ruddy luster he was like one of those sphinxes which ornament the entrances to ancient Egyptian temples.
— Henryk Sienkiewicz, In Desert and Wilderness