Quotes About Loneliness

The lonely fancy that had not fact to feed on, nor the fancy of any other for fellowship, was for its loneliness mad.

Like the Dorothy Parker heroine who spends her days and nights not calling the lover who does not call her

This is the most enormous extension of vision of which life is capable: the projection of itself into other lives. This is the lonely, magnificent power of humanity. It is . . . the supreme epitome of the reaching out.

For the first time in four billion years a living creature had contemplated himself and heard with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of the wind in the night reeds.

Lights come and go in the night sky. Men, troubled at last by the things they build, may toss in their sleep and dream bad dreams, or lie awake while the meteors whisper greenly overhead. But nowhere in all space or on a thousand worlds will there be men to share our loneliness.

I felt hopeless. I was never going to get better. All I was doing was spending time that was really wasted since I was ultimately going to get done what had to be done. Put your finger in a bucket of water and pull it out. The hole left is how much I'd be missed. Killing myself was my job, my responsibility.

A woman who is willing to be herself and pursue her own potential runs not so much the risk of loneliness as the challenge of exposure to more interesting men and people in general.

I tried not to think about my life. I did not have any good solid plans for it long-term - no bad plans either, no plans at all - and the lostness of that, compared with the clear ambitions of my friends (marriage, children, law school), sometimes shamed me. Other times in my mind I defended such a condition as morally and intellectually superior - my life was open and ready and free - but that did not make it less lonely.

She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime.

Forgiveness lives alone and far off down the road, but bitterness and art are close, gossipy neighbors, sharing the same clothesline, hanging out their things, getting their laundry confused.

You can exclude the excluded middle, but when you ride through, on your way to a lonely and more certain place, out the window you'll see everyone you've ever known living there.

Through all the muck of themselves, the times they had unobligated each other, the anger, the permitted absences, the loneliness grown dangerous, she had always returned to him. He'd had faith in that - abracadabra! But eventually the deadlines set in again. Could you live in the dead excellence of a thing - the stupid mortar of a body, the stubborn husk love had crawled from? Yes, he thought.

I tried not to think about my life. I did not have any good solid plans for it long-term - not bad plans either, no plans at all - and the lostness of that, compared with the clear ambitions of my friends (marriage, children, law school), sometimes shamed me. Other times in my mind I defended such a condition as morally and intellectually superior - my life was open and ready and free - but that did not make it any less lonely.

All this wandering that you do, he said, leaning in the window, his face white as a cream cheese, his scar the carved zigzag of a snowmobile across a winter lake. Wind blew handsomely through his hair. How will anyone ever get close to you? I don't know, she said. She shook his hand through the window and then put on her gloves.

Sometimes there was a simultaneous quiet upstairs and down, like a blanket of snow, as if at that moment no one anywhere in the galaxy knew what to say.

One of the problems with people in Chicago, she remembered, was that they were never lonely at the same time. Their sadness occurred in isolation, lurched and spazzed, sent them spinning fizzly back into empty, padded corners, disconnected and alone.

The speech she made was done in the back, alone, like little shoes cobbled by an elf: spider is to web as weaver is to blank. That one was hers. She was proud of that. Also, blank is to heartache as forest is to bench.

She thought of gorillas, how when they had been kept too long alone in cages, they would smack each other in the head instead of mating.

Years later, when they were killed in a car crash on the Farm to Market Road, and the Nell-that-never-lived died with them, Olena, numbly rearranging the letters of her own name on the envelopes of the sympathy cards she received, discovered what the letters spelled: Olena; Alone.

One of the problems with people in Chicago, she remembered, was that they were never lonely at the same time.

There comes a point in life where each one of us who survives begins to feel like a ghost that has forgotten to die at the right time

A pesar de su incalculable riqueza y poder marchaba hacia la muerte con el convencimiento de que moriría sin ser amado ni respetado, y que nadie lloraría por él; que su muerte ya estaba siendo precedida por una reunión de buitres, que finalmente su vida había sido más absurda y menos satisfactoria que la de un retrasado mental congénito sin extremidades ni órganos de reproducción.

The only thing more pitiful than a middle-aged punk is a white Rastafarian. I did meet one of those once, and he was lonelier than I was.

Voltei só para mim mesmo, muito contente de ser ainda mais infeliz do que fora, porque trouxera para a minha solidão uma nova forma de angústia e qualquer coisa que se parecia a sentimento verdadeiro.