Quotes About Loneliness

A place so empty it was not even haunted

I didn't realize what a—comfortless thing respect is.

one shouldn't expect someone else to fill all the expectations in our lives, answer all the loneliness or the dreams, provide us with a social status, a roof over our heads, daily bread, clothes for our backs, and a purpose for living as well, not to mention laughter and hope and love, someone to justify our aspirations and decide our moral judgments.

It was odd how happiness unshared was only half as great, and yet any kind of misfortune alone was doubled.

They're empty, insecure alone; they only feel real when other people listen to them and take notice.

That was the worst truth of all: alone. The word was a kind of death.

It is not good for a woman to be alone," the vicar said grimly. He had a large, squarish face with a strong, thin mouth and heavy nose. He must have been quite fine as a young man. Charlotte was ashamed of how deeply she disliked him. One should not feel that way about a man of the Church. "It leaves her vulnerable to all kinds of dangers," he went on.

As one grew older, one remembered only the energy, the optimistic side of being young. Time removed many of the agonies of uncertainty, self-doubt, loneliness, and the confusion that can hurt so much. Maybe it was just as well. Age brought its own diffucult pains.

She would not want anyone she cared for to love a false reflection of her. After all, could there be a greater loneliness than that?

Hester, recently married herself, and knowing the depth and the sweep of love, ached for Callandra that she sacrificed so much. And yet loving her husband as she did, for all his faults and vulnerabilities, Hester, too, would rather have been alone than accept anyone else.

It was as if this night were only one of thousands of nights, world without end, night curving into night to make a great arching line of which I couldn't see the end, a night in which I roamed alone under cold, mindless stars.

You sense my loneliness, (...) my bitterness at being shut out of life. My bitterness that I'm evil, that I don't deserve to be loved and yet I need love hungrily. My horror that I can never reveal myself to mortals. But these things don't stop me, Mother. I'm too strong for them to stop me. As you said yourself once, I am very good at being what I am. These things merely now and then make me suffer, that's all

One will hate you for taking his life, another will run to excesses that you scorn. A third will emerge mad and raving, another a monster you cannot control. One will be jealous of your superiority, another shut you out... And the veil will always come down between you Make a legion, you will be, always and forever alone!

I feel like an outsider, and I always will feel like one. I've always felt that I wasn't a member of any particular group.

You are the night, and the night alone understands you and enfolds you in its arms

It's not so, I said. And how long do you think it will sustain you, feeling and seeing and touching and tasting, if there is no love? No one with you?

And so this young one, this young one whom I had so loved, I had to forsake, no matter how broken my heart, no matter how lonely my soul, no matter how bruised my intellect and spirit.

There is a horrifying loneliness at work in this time. No, listen to me. We lived six and seven to a room in those days, when I was still among the living. The city streets were seas of humanity; and now in these high buildings dim-witted souls hover in luxurious privacy, gazing through the television window at a faraway world of kissing and touching. It is bound to produce some great fund of common knowledge, some new level of human awareness, a curious skepticism, to be so alone.

I confided again that I wanted him, I wanted him to share my loneliness. I wanted him to share all that I could teach and give. Oh, the pain of it! All that I could teach and give.

I hear nothing. I hear nothing, but what does it mean that I hear nothing? I walk in the cemeteries of this city at night and I hear nothing. I walk among mortals and sometimes I hear nothing. I walk alone and I hear nothing, as if I myself had no inner voice.

I crossed the street. The snow felt rather good, but then I'm a monster.

But to think there was meaning, a scheme to things, well, that was quite beyond her philosophical reach. She feared as she always had, that all that was ever meant was loneliness, hard work, striving to make a difference when no difference could possibly be made. It was like dipping a stick into the ocean and trying to write something – all the little people of the world spinning out little patterns that lasted no more than a few years, and meant nothing at all.

how many like Antoine were roaming the world, weak, afraid, without comrades or the consolation of love, clinging to existence as he did?

Don't go, he said, and his voice was so soft and imploring that it took my breath away. But I was already going. I barely heard him call out to me: I need you. You're the only friend I have. How tragic those words! I wanted to say I was sorry, sorry for all of it. But it was too late now for that. And besides, I think he knew. All life seemed utterly unbearable to me now.