Quotes About Loneliness

When one is lonely, one does foolish things.

elderly are left with a controlled and supervised institutional existence, a medically designed answer to unfixable problems, a life designed to be safe but empty of anything they care about.

we have no good metrics for a place's success in assisting people to live. By contrast, we have very precise ratings for health and safety. So you can guess what gets the attention from the people who run places for the elderly: whether Dad loses weight, skips his medications, or has a fall, not whether he's lonely.

There was a succession of roommates, never chosen with her input and all with cognitive impairments. Some were quiet. One kept her up at night. She felt incarcerated, like she was in prison for being old. The

For Thomas, it was the perfect demonstration of his theory about what living things provide. In place of boredom, they offer spontaneity. In place of loneliness, they offer companionship. In place of helplessness, they offer a chance to take care of another being.

The birds were drawing him out. For Thomas, it was the perfect demonstration of his theory about what living things provide. In place of boredom, they offer spontaneity. In place of loneliness, they offer companionship. In place of helplessness, they offer a chance to take care of another being.

Thomas laid out the thinking behind his proposal. The aim, he said, was to attack what he termed the Three Plagues of nursing home existence: boredom, loneliness, and helplessness. To attack the Three Plagues they needed to bring in some life. They'd put green plants in every room. They'd tear up the lawn and create a vegetable and flower garden. And they'd bring in animals.

When I saw him three months later [after the death of his wife], he was still despondent. 'I feel as if a part of my body is missing. I feel as if I have been dismembered,' he told me. His voice cracked and his eyes rimmed red.

LOU SANDERS WAS on his way to joining the infantilized and catatonic denizens belted into the wheelchairs of a North Andover nursing home

alone. His condition deteriorated rapidly.

So this is the way it unfolds. In the absence of what people like my grandfather could count on—a vast extended family constantly on hand to let him make his own choices—our elderly are left with a controlled and supervised institutional existence, a medically designed answer to unfixable problems, a life designed to be safe but empty of anything they care about.

Compounding matters, we have no good metrics for a place's success in assisting people to live. By contrast, we have very precise ratings for health and safety. So you can guess what gets the attention from the people who run places for the elderly: whether Dad loses weight, skips his medications, or has a fall, not whether he's lonely.

If you do not learn to hate you will never be lonely enough to love easily nor will you always be brave, although it does not grow any easier. Do not pretend to convenient beliefs, even when they are righteous; you will never be able to defend your city while shouting.

I remember how being young and Black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell.

Each of us struggles daily with the pressures of conformity and the loneliness of difference from which those choices seem to offer escape.

I feel trapped on a lonely star.

Dilnawaz is the most human, the most friendly, and the most real person I've met here, as well as the most spiritual. She is also the most lonely. She is very friendly and helpful toward everyone, and people respond to her with considerable respect, but there is still an air of isolation about her that says to me she is not quite a part.

Turn off the light, she says as she walks away, creating a small woosh that smells sweet and chemical. It makes me sad because it's the smell she makes when she's leaving.

But she did love him. I believe it. I know exactly how that is. To love somebody who doesn't deserve it. Because they are all you have. Because any attention is better than no attention.

Most of us have love in our lives. Most of us love other people are are ourselves loved by others. But make no mistake: you are alone in the world. You were born alone, even if you were born conjoined. And you die alone, unable to bring a single person with you.

Should I just sit down, right here at carousel seven, and shake until somebody's arms are around me and they're saying, 'It's okay, I'm here, I'm here, come with me to the institute.

I know exactly how that is. To love somebody who doesn't deserve it. Because they are all you have. Because any attention is better than no attention.

It terrified me to consider: What if, as a grown-up, I craved another body beside me as still as this one? What then?

Well, you know, just some old man all alone. God, I hope I don't end up alone like that. Some pathetic old woman with nobody to go on a whale watch with.