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.

It is precisely when you are loved a lot that you might realize a second loneliness which is not to be solved but lived. This second loneliness is an existential loneliness that belongs to the basis of our being. It's where we are unfulfilled because only God can fill us.

I thought I knew what loneliness was before he found me, but I had no clue. You don't know what real loneliness is until you've known the opposite.

I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do. It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one's solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem.

Don't be afraid of loneliness, because everything is a door; even loneliness is a door, it opens to somewhere!

Spells of acute loneliness are an essential part of travel. Loneliness makes things happen.

There is no loneliness like the loneliness of a dead marriage.

Writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy and freedom.

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]

Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness. A policy to reduce the loneliness of the elderly would certainly reduce suffering.

In short, [photography] is a matter of turning loneliness into thoughts.

The gay life is filled with as much cruelty and loneliness as the heterosexual life... I search into my dreams or desires and try to ask myself how these feelings can be made into concrete images... Are they really abnormal, or are they trying to tell us something we have repressed about ourselves, something we don't want to see, something about the darker side of the human condition itself?

Oh, loneliness and cheeseburgers are a dangerous mix.

I could tell you it's the heart, but what is really killing him is loneliness. Memories are worse than bullets.

I have a lot of friends, but my biggest fear is loneliness. I miss my family in Mumbai, and my biggest nightmare every day is to go back home alone.

Everyone says love hurts, but that is not true. Loneliness hurts. Rejection hurts. Losing someone hurts. Envy hurts. Everyone gets these things confused with love, but in reality love is the only thing in this world that covers up all pain and makes someone feel wonderful again. Love is the only thing in this world that does not hurt.

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.

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

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

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.

Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you.

I went through a period in my life when I had no friends, when the phone never rang, when I thought I would die from loneliness. I know that the real blessing here isn't that I have a book published, but that I have so many people to thank.

Loneliness is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings.

It is necessary now and then for a man to go away by himself and experience loneliness; to sit on a rock in the forest and to ask of himself, 'Who am I, and where have I been, and where am I going?'...If one is not careful, one allows diversions to take up one's time-the stuff of life

I felt his hot tears and the loneliness of man and the sweetness of all men and the aching haunting beauty of the living

So often loneliness comes from being out of touch with parts of oneself. We go searching for those parts in other people, but there's a difference between feeling separate from others and separate from oneself.

I would have to say loneliness is next to uncleanliness.

SO the richest are often the poorest as this saying goes, "Loneliness is the ultimate poverty"

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.

The eternal quest of the individual human being is to shatter his 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.

The lack of human voices really gets to me. I never realized that we need to talk with other people just to know that we exist. That we matter. Loneliness is a howling, empty cavern inside of me that just keeps growing.

You really come to life on stage but outside - this is a bit of a sad clown cliché - there is that element of loneliness you get from travelling and being on the road. Stand-ups can bring a lot of that to a dramatic role and make it work for them.

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?

Loneliness is emptiness, but happiness is you.

Maybe a first love exists to reaffirm the best parts of yourself, the choices you made when you didn't worry about the consequences. Maybe a first love exists to remind you to be brave in the moment, to stand up for your feelings, instead of shrinking back in the face of potential loneliness.

Loneliness is the most compelling force in the universe.

If all the beasts were gone, men would die from a great loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beasts also happens to the man. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the sons of the Earth.

I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don't know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. In reality those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my ''idea of them.

And yet, these insights of connectedness and oneness, which make us feel so at home in the world, are so difficult to hold onto. And so, inevitably, we wind up living lives of isolation and loneliness.

Like falling stars from the universe we are hurled Down through the long loneliness of the world Until we behold the pain, become the pearl

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.

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.

Loneliness doesn't have much to do with where you are.

I've never been in love, but I've always imagined it--weirdly--like some sort of OxiClean commercial. The TV host shows a scene from an ordinary day, and then takes a big old sponge soaked in love and swipes away the stains. Suddenly that same scene is missing all the mistakes, all the loneliness. The colors are like jewels, ten times richer than they were before. The music is louder and clearer. "Love," the host will say, "makes life a little brighter.

Isolation and loneliness are central causes of depression and despair.