Quotes About Loneliness

Loneliness is the inability to share your story, your Unique Self story. For most people, the move beyond loneliness requires us to share our story with a significant other. For the spiritual elite, the receiving of our own story - and the knowing that it is an integral part of the larger story of All-That-Is - is enough. But for most human beings, loneliness is transcended through contact with another person.

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.

The loneliness you get by the sea is personal and alive. It doesn't subdue you and make you feel abject. It's stimulating loneliness.

In our hearts... there must abide some pity for those people who have always felt themselves to be separate from even their most familiar surroundings, those people who either are foreigners or who suffer a singular point of view that makes them feel as if they’re foreigners - even in their native lands. In our hearts... there also abides a certain suspicion that such people need to feel set apart from their society. But people who initiate loneliness are no less lonely than those who are suddenly surprised by loneliness, nor are they undeserving of our pity.

That many-faceted thing called love succeeds in building bridges from the loneliness on this shore to the loneliness on the other one. These bridges can be of great beauty, but they are rarely built for eternity, and frequently they cannot tolerate too heavy a burden without collapsing.

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.

People claim that love is the deepest feeling, but don't you believe it. Loneliness is the most affecting of human emotions. Nothing makes life more vivid. If you wish to live in the moment, I recommend intense loneliness.

Loneliness is an integral part of travelling. I used to think it was the downside to travelling, but now I realise it is a necessary educative part of it to be embraced.

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.

I understood that in this small space of time we had mutually surrendered our loneliness and replaced it with trust.

From the clayey soil of northern Wyoming is mined bentonite, which is used as filler in candy, gum, and lipstick. We Americans are great on fillers, as if what we have, what we are, is not enough. We have a cultural tendency toward denial, but being affluent, we strangle ourselves with what we can buy. We gave only to look at the houses we build to see how we build *against* space, the way we drink against pain and loneliness. We fill up space as if it were a pie shell, with things whose opacity further obstructs our ability to see what is already there.

Loneliness is not being alone, It's loving others to no avail.

Use loneliness. Its ache creates urgency to reconnect with the world. Take that aching and use it to propel you deeper into your need for expression - to speak, to say who you are.

[A cat] will make itself the companion of your hours of work, of loneliness, or of sadness.

Before getting to my mother's house, I would always think of her on the porch or even on the street, sweeping. She had a light way of sweeping, as if removing the dirt were not as important as moving the broom over the ground. Her way of sweeping was symbolic; so airy, so fragile, with a broom she tried to sweep away all the horrors, all the loneliness, all the misery that had accompanied her all her life.

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

The best antidote for loneliness, hopelessness, and fear is vulnerability: sharing your secrets and talking about what shames you, what you fear.

Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you.

However contradictory the coroner's report — whether he pronounces Consumption or Loneliness or Suicide to be the cause of death — isn't it plain how the true artist-seer actually dies? I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience.

There are people who cannot risk loneliness with the experience. They always have to be in a flock and have human contact.

People were buying milk, or filling their cars with petrol, or even posting letters. And what no one else knew was the appalling weight of the thing they were carrying inside. The superhuman effort it took sometimes to be normal, and a part of things that appeared both easy and everyday. The loneliness of that.

When I decided to be a singer, my mother warned me I'd be alone a lot. Basically we all are. Loneliness comes with life.

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.

loneliness is a twilight moment by feelings, longing after something or someone you can not reach

How on earth can religious people believe in so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash?....The acceptance of a creed, any creed, entitles the acceptor to membership in the sort of artificial extended family we call a congregation. It is a way to fight loneliness. Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamned lonely anymore.

Once he entered my life, I promptly forgot all my years of putting on a brave face while browsing at bookstores until closing time, and of having one, two, three beers while watching crime shows and CNN. I completely forgot the hateful sensation of loneliness, like thirst and hunger together pressing on my stomach.

The simplest spiritual discipline is some degree of solitude and silence. But it's the hardest, because none of us want to be with someone we don't love. Besides that, we invariably feel bored with ourselves, and all of our loneliness comes to the surface.We won't have the courage to go into that terrifying place without Love to protect us and lead us, without the light and love of God overriding our own self-doubt. Such silence is the most spacious and empowering technique in the world, yet it's not a technique at all. It's precisely the refusal of all technique.

The older generation had greater respect for land than science. But we live in an age when science, more than soil, has become the provider of growth and abundance. Living just on the land creates loneliness in an age of globality.

When does the loneliness of old age begin?

She felt a stealing sense of fatigue as she walked; the sparkle had died out of her, and the taste of life was stale on her lips. She hardly knew what she had been seeking, or why the failure to find it had so blotted the light from her sky: she was only aware of a vague sense of failure, of an inner isolation deeper than the loneliness about her.

Respect for sovereignity, for privacy, for total independence. Gentle alliances against loneliness, they were, cool rational love-affairs without the love.

Manliness consists not in bluff, bravado or loneliness. It consists in daring to do the right thing and facing consequences whether it is in matters social, political or other. It consists in deeds not words.

But when I thought I hit bottom, it started hitting back. There is no bruise like the bruise loneliness kicks into your spine.

The loneliness caused by not hearing Ren's voice... I felt it deep in the night. I felt it deeper than anyone else. Even now at times I look back. In this ordinary life without Ren, I think my life with him was like a dream. Especially on a snowy night like this. On a night as cold as this. Someone keep this guy warm for me, please.

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.

Pack the one bag. Unpack it, pack it, unpack it, pack it: passeport, ticket, book, taxi, airport, check-in, beer, announcement, stairs, airplane, fasten seat-belt, air born, flight, rocking, sun, stars, space, hips of strolling stewardesses, read, sleep, clouds, falling engine speed, descent, circling, touch down, earth, unfasten seat-belt, stairs, airport, immunization book, visa, customs, questions, taxi, streets, houses, people, hotel, key, room, stuffiness, thirst, otherness, foreignness, loneliness, fatigue, life.

I always wished I could go to confession. I was so full of things I couldn't name and had an instinct to hide. I felt burdened by the loneliness of my interior life. I wanted some container that I could empty myself into, some ear that would never be shocked, even if it offered me some kind of penance.

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.

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.

Friends, companions, lovers, are those who treat us in terms of our unlimited worth to ourselves. They are closest to us who best understand what life means to us, who feel for us as we feel for ourselves, who are bound to us in triumph and disaster, who break the spell of our loneliness.

If your beliefs are stressful and you question them, you come to see that they aren't true - whereas prior to questioning, you absolutely believe them. How can you live in joy when you're believing thoughts that bring on sadness, frustration, anger, alienation, and loneliness?

Good manners - the longer I live the more convinced I am of it - are a priceless insurance against failure and loneliness. And anyone can have them.

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.

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

So, now I shall talk every night. To myself. To the moon. I shall walk, as I did tonight, jealous of my loneliness, in the blue-silver of the cold moon, shining brilliantly on the drifts of fresh-fallen snow, with the myriad sparkles. I talk to myself and look at the dark trees, blessedly neutral. So much easier than facing people, than having to look happy, invulnerable, clever.

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

She was overstrained with grief and loneliness: almost any shoulder would have done as well.