Quotes About Loneliness

For I'm afraid of loneliness; shiveringly, terribly afraid. I don't mean the ordinary physical loneliness, for here I am, deliberately travelled away from London to get to it, to its spaciousness and healing. I mean that awful loneliness of spirit that is the ultimate tragedy of life. When you've got to that, really reached it, without hope, without escape, you die. You just can't bear it, and you die.

...and my loneliness, always my loneliness - that airless bubble of despair that is slowing stifling me.

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.

Birth is the start of loneliness and loneliness the start of poetry.

Loneliness is caused by an alienation from life. It is a loneliness from your real self.

In the country, I stopped being a person who, in the words of Sylvia Boorstein, startles easily. I grew calmer, but beneath that calm was a deep well of loneliness I hadn't known was there. ... Anxiety was my fuel. When I stopped, it was all waiting for me: fear, anger, grief, despair, and that terrible, terrible loneliness. What was it about? I was hardly alone. I loved my husband and son. I had great friends, colleagues, students. In the quiet, in the extra hours, I was forced to ask the question, and to listen carefully to the answer: I was lonely for myself. [p. 123]

But, visiting Sea, your love doth press / And reach in further than you know, / And fills all these; and, when you go, / There's loneliness in loneliness.

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 eyelids of your eyes. Your shoulders are drawn and your head has fallen and your chest is bruised by the constant assault of your heart.

Since I love you, my loneliness begins to throw you.

I like being alone and I think this movie, as much as it is an investigation of connection and people bonding, I also think it's just as much about loneliness.

I am, I must confess, suspicious of those who denounce others for having too much sex. At what point does a healthy amount become too much? There are, of course, those who suffer because their desire for sex has become compulsive; in their case the drive (loneliness, guilt) is at fault, not the activity as such. When morality is discussed I invariably discover, halfway into the conversation, that what is meant are not the great ethical questions but the rather dreary business of sexual habit, which to my mind is an aesthetic rather than an ethical issue.

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.

We eat pancakes to escape loneliness, yet within moments we want nothing more than our freedom from ever having so much as thought about pancakes. Nothing can prevent us, after eating pancakes, from feeling the most awful regret. After eating pancakes, our great mission in life becomes the repudiation of the pancakes and everything served along with them, the bacon and the syrup and the sausage and coffee and jellies and jams. But these things are beneath mention, compared with the pancakes themselves. It is the pancake--Pancakes! Pancakes!--that we never learn to respect.

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.

You left , and my heart is a ceaseless sermon of loneliness.

If you fear loneliness, then don't get married.

The principal contributor to loneliness in this country is television. What happens is that the family 'gets together' alone.

O yes, everyone gets lonely some time or other. After all, if we look closer into ourselves, shall we not admit that the warmth from other people comes so sweet to us when it comes, because, we always carry with us the knowledge of the cold loneliness of death?

The writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated loneliness, and a sense of local and global distress. The square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb and the cocktail party are variously identified as sources of the grudge. There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.

For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.

This world that I live in is empty and cold/the loneliness cuts me and tortures my soul.

Some degree of withdrawal serves to nurture man's creative powers. The artist and the scientist bring out of the dark void, like the mysterious universe itself, the unique, the strange, the unexpected. Numerous observers have testified upon the loneliness of the process.

The impulse to perfection cannot exist where the definition of perfection is the arbitrary decision of authority. That which is born in loneliness and from the heart cannot be defended against the judgment of a committee of sycophants. The volatile essences which make literature cannot survive the clichés of a long series of story conferences.

There was just one moon. That familiar, yellow, solitary moon. The same moon that silently floated over fields of pampas grass, the moon that rose--a gleaming, round saucer--over the calm surface of lakes, that tranquilly beamed down on the rooftops of fast-asleep houses. The same moon that brought the high tide to shore, that softly shone on the fur of animals and enveloped and protected travelers at night. The moon that, as a crescent, shaved slivers from the soul--or, as a new moon, silently bathed the earth in its own loneliness. THAT moon.

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

Once in a while, people enter our lives and lessen the loneliness of being away from Home.

There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you're high it's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars....But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against-you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable....It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.

I prayed for the city to be cleared of people, for the gift of being alone—a-l-o-n-e: which is the one New York prayer that rarely gets lost or delayed in channels, and in no time at all everything I touched turned to solid loneliness.

...to speak of them out loud, to speak of their hunger and pain and loneliness and humour, to make them visible so that can not be ravaged in the dark without great consequence.

Loneliness is about the scariest thing out there.

..and I thought how liking a boy was just the same as believing you wanted to know a secret - everything was better when you were denied and could feel tormented by curiousity or loneliness. But the moment of something happening was treacherous. It was just so tiring to have to worry about whether your face was peeling, or to have to laugh at stories that weren’t funny.

I know the dark delight of being strange, The penalty of difference in the crowd, The loneliness of wisdom among fools.

I'm just a believer in keeping all of the creative brain cells moving and working even when you're not working because the inevitable loneliness and boring drought in the actor's world, it can eat you alive.

She did not know the nature of her loneliness. The only words that named it were: This is not the world I expected.

Loneliness is the most compelling force in the universe.

The loneliness you feel with another person, the wrong person, is the loneliest of all.

The Lord is near! You're not alone. You may feel alone. You may think you're alone. But there's never a moment in which you face life without help. God is near. God repeatedly pledges his proverbial presence to his people. Don't assume God is watching from a distance. Avoid the quicksand that bears the marker "God has left you!" Don't indulge this lie. If you do, your problem will be amplified by a sense of loneliness. It's one thing to face a challenge, but to face it all alone? Isolation creates a downward cycle of fret.

There is something so sad about going online and seeing almost everyone shouting ‘Notice me, notice me!’ Which is such a human desire—to be acknowledged. But me responding to that with some sort of ‘You’re noticed, you’re seen’ only perpetuates the loneliness. Because I’m not seeing you; I’m not noticing you. And whoever you are, you so deserve to be noticed and valued. I feel lucky to have not grown up with the Internet because it forced me to get out, struggle and be so messy.

Look, it's a monster. He's walking alone. Look, he's pulling something out of his pocket. He threw it on the ground. Let's go see what it is. It's a black box. You open it... ok... Look, it's sorrow, misery and pain. It's loneliness and longing. Boy, he'll be sorry he lost these.

I think we often write because we feel a loneliness, and people read for the same reason, and then they come away feeling a little less lonely.

No shame in saying that I felt a loneliness drifting through me. Funny how it was, everyone perched in their own little world with the deep need to talk, each person with their own tale, beginning in some strange middle point, then trying so hard to tell it all, to have it all make sense, logical and final.

On a societal level, what happens to community when people don't have time to gather or connect, in person, not just over social media? Not having time off becomes a public-interest issue. It means the erosion of social bonds, less civic contribution and participation. Loneliness is on the rise in North America; we find ourselves too busy for true connection, prioritizing work over life.

My children's favorite, and it's funny because they've seen it but they have a difficult time watching it because it's their dad and they make that connection, but Edward Scissorhands is by far my kids' favorite. They just connect with the character, and they see their dad feeling that isolation, that loneliness. He's a tragic character, so I think it's hard for them. They bawl.

It was a time of great loneliness. He had a group of friends, and suddenly I had no one and did not understand why. I felt excluded. Some days, the majority was in high school and did not know who to talk to. And that is something really terrible when you're twelve years old.

Physician Albert Scheweitzer said. " We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness." Professor Leo Buscaglia notes, "There seems to be accumulating evidence that there is actually an inborn need for this togetherness, this human interaction, this love. It seems that without these close ties with other human beings, a new born infant, for example, can regress developmentally, lose consciousness, fall into idiocy and die.

Freedom' is the most expensive possession there is; it has to be paid for with loneliness.

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.

I am interested in the loneliness and isolation that we can feel when we hide feelings we are ashamed of, especially if they concern people that we love.