Quotes About Loneliness

Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties - all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion - these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.

Many people are afraid of Emptiness, however, because it reminds them of Loneliness. Everything has to be filled in, it seems-appointment books, hillsides, vacant lots-but when all the spaces are filled, the Loneliness really begins. Then the Groups are joined, the Classes are signed up for, and the Gift-to-Yourself items are bought. When the Loneliness starts creeping in the door, the Television Set is turned on to make it go away. But it doesn't go away. So some of us do instead, and after discarding the emptiness of the Big Congested Mess, we discover the fullness of Nothing.

People cannot win against their loneliness because loneliness is this world’s worst kind of pain.

As an artist, the most important feeling is loneliness. So when I say artists need to isolate themselves from society this is what I mean: You have to look for that feeling of loneliness again. Only this way can you have something that is purely your own.

Oh, loneliness and cheeseburgers are a dangerous mix.

The people at the very top could fall by and grace you with their presence and give you a little largesse, and you'd be "Oh, I'm so beloved." In a way, it was kind of like flattery. The middle managers didn't quite have that cachet, but at the same time, they had to seem like they were of that caliber. So there's a little bit of loneliness at the heart of those with a little bit of power.

We need to bridge our sense of loneliness and disconnection with a sense of community and continuity even if we must manufacture it from our time on the Web and our use of calling cards to connect long distance. We must “log on” somewhere, and if it is only in cyberspace, that is still far better than nowhere at all. (264)

Love is an actual need, an urgent requirement of the heart, he read aloud from an old essay on marriage that he found in his files.Every properly constituted human being who entertains an appreciation of loneliness...and looks forward to happiness and content feels the necessity of loving. Without it, life is unfinished.

Remember that hate is not the opposite of love as people think. Hate is love standing upside down; it is not the opposite of love. The real opposite of love is fear. In love one expands, in fear one shrinks. In fear one becomes closed, in love one opens. In fear one doubts, in love one trusts. In fear one is left lonely. In love one disappears; hence there is no question of loneliness at all. Love is when you have known your inner sky. There is no higher religion than love

My art takes birth when my loneliness becomes my companion... when I take lives and deaths much personally and work when others play. When I meet myself and find that the truth of life is not the dream of tender age ... but the fire within me that creates the work of art.

The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world.

There have been times in my life when I have felt I was lonely, but I don't think you want to live your life in order to mitigate against loneliness.

Lisa: 'Do we have any food that wasn't brutally slaughtered?' Homer: 'Well, I think the veal died of loneliness.'

Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you.

There is no final solution to loneliness until you recognize that you need the resources which are in yourself to enpy, within limits, being alone being the kind of person that you like to be with, and reaching out to others, not in a grasping way, but in an attempt to be meaningful and loving and of service in their lives.

At this time of crisis we cannot be concerned solely with ourselves, withdrawing into loneliness, discouragement and a sense of powerlessness in the face of problems. Please do not withdraw into yourselves! This is a danger: we shut ourselves up in the parish, with our friends, within the movement, with the like-minded... but do you know what happens? When the Church becomes closed, she becomes an ailing Church, she falls ill! That is a danger. . . .A Church closed in on herself is the same, a sick Church.

Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.

I am stronger than depression and I am braver than loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.

Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness except greed.

The American appetite for loneliness impressed me, and there was something about this solitude that freed conversation. One night at a bar, I met a man, and within five minutes he explained that he had just been released from prison. Another drinker told me that his wife had passed away, and he had recently suffered a heart attack, and now he hoped that he would die within the year. I learned that there's no reliable small talk in America; at any moment a conversation can become personal.

These are some of the characteristics of the state of mind which the creation and appreciation of haiku demand: Selflessness, Loneliness, Grateful Acceptance, Wordlessness, Non-intellectuality, Contradictoriness, Humor, Freedom, Non-morality, Simplicity, Materiality, Love, and Courage.

At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others -- poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner -- young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.

Everything is freedom and everything is loneliness. Make your choice and let the rest fall away.

.. then when the hurt goes, anger takes its place; when the anger runs out of system, loneliness steps in to take over. it's a never ending circle of emotions; every lost emotion being replaced by another.

For all the advances in technology, science and communications, there are signs that we are failing in areas where it matters most: our personal relationships and society in general. The atomisation of society evidenced by the startling increase in recent decades of single person households and the identification of loneliness and isolation as one of our most pressing new social problems, should give us cause for concern.

Gail Godwin has written a book about the heaviest matters of loss, grief, and loneliness with a touch so light that I was as often deeply amused by it as I was deeply moved.

I really love baseball. The guys and the game, and I love the challenge of describing things. The only thing I hate - and I know you have to be realistic and pay the bills in this life - is the loneliness on the road.

There's a weird loneliness that comes with being a comedian, especially standup. Even with improvisers, I think there are certain moments of truth where you feel really, really connected to audiences, and that's when you're on stage. I think there's definitely something inside the personality of a person who wants to be a comedian that's looking to connect at all times. That's where the adrenaline rushes in their lives come from.

The confusing lesson whipped Frankie's anger into something she had never felt before. It was like an emotional meringue - the airy feeling of loneliness topped with the hard crisp of injustice. Yet its taste was far from sweet.

Loneliness is the universal problem of rich people.

There is nothing more painful than the untimely death of someone young and dear to the heart. The harrowing grief surges from a bottomless well of sorrow, drowning the mourner in a torrent of agonizing pain; an exquisite pain that continues to afflict the mourner with heartache and loneliness long after the deceased is buried and gone.

Sorrow has a name, and its name is loneliness. Sorrow has a shape, and its shape is absence. Sorrow is a sickness like any other.

To be lonely is to feel unwanted and unloved, and therefor unloveable. Loneliness is a taste of death. No wonder some people who are desperately lonely lose themselves in mental illness or violence to forget the inner pain.

Life is a journey one that much better traveled with a companion by our side. Sometimes, we lose our companions along the way and then the journey becomes unbearable. You see, human beings are designed for many things, but loneliness isn't one of them.

Aloneness is a state of being, whereas loneliness is a state of feeling. It's like the difference between being broke and being poor.

We have to live with our loneliness and the destiny that drives each person to the order of things.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Loneliness is necessary for pure poetry. When someone intrudes into the poet's life (and any sudden personal contact, whether in the bed or in the heart, is an intrusion) the poet loses his or her balance for a moment, slips into being what he or she is, uses his or her poetry as one would use money or sympathy. The person who writes the poetry emerges, tentatively, like a hermit crab from a conch shell. The poet, for that instant, ceases to be a dead person.

Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.

Corrigan told me once that Christ was quite easy to understand. He went where He was supposed to go. He stayed where He was needed. He took little or nothing along, a pair of sandals, a bit of a shirt, a few odds and ends to stave off the loneliness. He never rejected the world. If He had rejected it, He would have been rejecting mystery. And if He rejected mystery, He would have been rejecting faith.

Why do I write? It's not that I want people to think I am smart, or even that I am a good writer. I write because I want to end my loneliness.

Curiosity makes loneliness.

If someone were plucked from the group and given those responsibilities, they might find themselves growing more aloof, just by virtue of that promotion. Suddenly the group culture excludes you. I saw this in my own working life, and I don't think it's a coincidence - I sensed a kind of loneliness in middle managers especially.

We’re always alone. You can be in a crowded room and still feel the bite of loneliness. Personally, I find that it bites deepest whenever others are around.

When asked "What do we need to learn this for?" any high-school teacher can confidently answer that, regardless of the subject, the knowledge will come in handy once the student hits middle age and starts working crossword puzzles in order to stave off the terrible loneliness.

Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.

I began to paint again, even though I could barely hold the brush, but knowing exactly what I wanted to paint, I began three more large canvases... of large wheat fields under cloudy skies, and it did not take a great deal to express sadness and loneliness... I believe these paintings say what words cannot.