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.

Usually, we think that "good" loneliness is what we call "solitude," the choice of some alone-time. But I want to press on with the negative dimension, to look at ways in which a fundamental sense of being separated from others shapes who we are and why.

I don't know if I will ever get sick of performing a song called 'Feels Like Loneliness' from Evolution. It's inspired by one of my favorite songs, 'Fever' by Peggy Lee. It's got a jazzy feel to it and I'm always able to put on a bit of character when I sing it, which is fun.

So, how can we live in joy - and how can we know that we're supposed to live in joy the way people tell us to - when we're believing thoughts that bring on sadness and frustration and anger and alienation and loneliness? When we're believing those thoughts, we think that's the world, rather than what we're believing about the world. We're like lost little children.

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.

People are longing to rediscover true community. We have had enough of loneliness, independence and competition.

If you write fiction, you're by yourself. There are certain advantages to that in that you don't have to explain anything to anybody. But when you get in with others who share the loneliness of the whole enterprise, you're not lonely anymore.

A warrior accepts defeat. He does not treat it as a matter of indifference, nor does he attempt to transform it into a victory. The pain of defeat is bitter to him; he suffers at indifference and becomes desperate with loneliness. After all this has passed, he licks his wounds and begins everything anew. A warrior knows that war is made of many battles: he goes on

One leaf left on a branch and not a sound of sadness or despair. One leaf left on a branch and no unhappiness. One leaf left all by itself in the air and it does not speak of loneliness or death. One leaf and it spends itself in swaying mildly in the breeze.

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

Isolation and loneliness create the conditions for rapid aging. The key is to stay connected and open to new relationships throughout your life.

These are frightening times...when she feels herself annointed by loneliness.

Among all the wisdom and facts I learned from Giannon, I also learned the loneliness of incarnation, in which there is inevitably a separation of souls because of the uniqueness of our faces and our experiences. And I learned also the moments when the current of my life joins the current of another life, and I can glimpse for a moment the one flowing body of water we all compose.

Though we are all human beings, we have built walls between ourselves and our neighbors through nationalism, through race, caste, and class - which again breeds isolation, loneliness.

The loneliness of a visionary is that you might be the only one in the universe at that time who recognizes magic. I'm a magical person, and so I recognize other magical people. It takes ones to know one.

Loneliness is an aspect of the land.

The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.

If you feel a great loneliness and a deep longing for human contact, you have to be extremely discerning...and ask yourself whether this situation is truly God given. Because where God wants you to be, God holds you safe and gives you peace, even when there is pain. To live a disciplined life is to live in such a way that you want only to be where God is with you. The more deeply you live your spiritual life, the easier it will be to discern the difference between living with God and living without God, and the easier it will be to move away from the places where God is no longer with you.

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 get an audience personally involved in a song - because I'm involved myself. It's not something I do deliberately: I can't help myself. If the song is a lament at the loss of love, I get an ache in my gut. I feel the loss myself and I cry out the loneliness, the hurt and the pain that I feel.

I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.

When does the loneliness of old age begin?

Where a people prays, there is the church; and where the church is; there is never loneliness.

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

Over time, loneliness gets inside you and doesn't go away.

No one ever discovers the depths of his own loneliness.

We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist. So, for a time, if such a passion come to fruition, the man will get what he wants. He will get the moral support, the encouragement, the relief from the sense of loneliness, the assurance of his own worth. But these things pass away; inevitably they pass away as the shadows pass across sundials. It is sad, but it is so. The pages of the book will become familiar; the beautiful corner of the road will have been turned too many times. Well, this is the saddest story.

Loneliness is the penalty of leadership, but the man who has to make the decisions is assisted greatly if he feels that there is no uncertainty in the minds of those who follow him, and that his orders will be carried out confidently and in the expectation of success.

Most of the world's great souls have been lonely. Loneliness seems to be one price the saint must pay for his saintliness... Always remember: you cannot carry a cross in company. Though a man were surrounded by a vast crowd, his cross is his alone and his carrying of it marks him as a man apart. Society has turned against him; otherwise he would have no cross. No one is a friend to the man with a cross.

She felt as if she bled her regret and loneliness from her very pores, and yet she could not shape those feelings into any sentiment she could imagine her parents could bear reading.

You've been so long in the rain, you feel like a dirty dish rag. But despite the misery of your water soaked body, you look around to see verdant leaves dripping with water. The air entering your lungs smells vibrantly clean. To experience adventure, you must be willing to be uncomfortable at times and enjoy the loneliness by being happy with your own singing. A song pops out of your mouth... "It rained all night the day I left, the weather it was fine..."

Plato calls complacency the companion of loneliness.

Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

...the pain of the constant, bone-chilling loneliness she'd accustomed herself to. And learned to live with it.

You're neither unnatural, nor abominable, nor mad; you're as much a part of what people call nature as anyone else; only you're unexplained as yet -- you've not got your niche in creation. ~ The Well of Loneliness, 1928

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.

I didn't really get the chance to talk to girls. I was a straight boy with hormones kicking in, and I wanted to talk to girls, but they weren't interested in talking back to me, so there was a real sense of 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?

How many human beings anywhere, hold on to a relationship merely because it exists? This fear of loneliness, abandonment, or failure can, if we let it, hold any of us back from doing exactly what each of us needs to do to feel fulfilled.

You were my hope during my days of loneliness, my anxiety during moments of doubt, my certainty during moments of faith.

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.

The soul hardly ever realizes it, but whether he is a believer or not, his loneliness is really a homesickness for God.

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

if you are afraid of loneliness, don't get married

I write because I want to end my loneliness. Books make people less alone. That, before and after everything else, is what books do. They show us that conversations are possible across distances.

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.