Quotes About Loneliness

The class's favorite book was Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading. In this novel, Nabokov differentiates Cincinnatus C., his imaginative and lonely hero, from those around him through his originality in a society where uniformity is not only the norm but also the law.

There was something to what he said, for it was true that the people I met on the job were generally much older than me, with a set of concerns and demands that created barriers to friendship. When I wasn't working, the weekends would usually find me alone in an empty apartment, making do with the company of books. I

But she wasn't prepared for the loneliness. It was constant, like a shortness of breath

It makes me wonder now, with the benefit of hindsight, whether Michelle's was the more honest response to all the changes we were going through; whether in my seeming calm as crises piled up, my insistence that everything would work out in the end, I was really just protecting myself—and contributing to her loneliness.

And so I sit on the dunes in my carefully mismatched clothes, hour after hour, day after day, frozen in my looking back. 'Do not look behind you...lest you be swept away.' That is what scripture say. Only there is nowhere for me to look but back. No future. No redemption. Like Lot's wife, I am turned to salt, my tired eyes trained on the blue-gray horizon, where sea meets sky, where my yesterday's met my tomorrows, a ragtag eccentric, watching and waiting for something that never comes.

Without people around, furniture has nothing to do but bear witness to the structural inadequacies of the human body: How much padding, cushioning, embracing, enfolding, and supporting we had needed just to stumble about through our days!

Sage's parents might just as well have been in a plane crash. They had fallen out of her life, and Sage had been horribly hurt. The kind of hurt that could turn you mean, when what you really were was scared. Scared and lonely. She guessed Owen had been trying to tell her that about Sage. But she hadn't wanted to listen-couldn't listen. Then. (pg. 117)

The pursuit of your power takes all that you have, if you will be great—it leaves neither time, nor energy, for anything else. We are born with the seeds of power in us and driven to be what we are by a hunger that knows no slaking. Knowledge—power—to know what songs the stars sing; to center all the forces of creation upon a rune drawn in the air—we can never give over the seeking of it. It is the stuff of loneliness.

But being a stay-at-home mom was the loneliest kind of lonely, in which she was always and never by herself.

I put my face to the window so nobody would see, if I tore up. Was this me now, for life? Taking up space where people wished I wasn't? Once on a time I was something, and then I turned, like sour milk. The dead junkie's kid. A rotten little piece of American pie that everybody wishes could just be, you know. Removed.

A city is the weirdest, loneliest thing.

After a while Estevan said, "What I really hate is not belonging in any place. To be unwanted everywhere.

You get used to it, not in the good way, to the extent of the entire world oftentimes feeling like a place where you weren't invited. If you've been here, you know. If not, must be nice.

It hit me pretty hard, how there's no kind of sad in this world that will stop it turning. People will keep on wanting what they want, and you're on your own.

I don't know, Magda says, Seems like that's just how it is with you and me. We're like islands on the moon.

If you're surprised a mom would discuss boyfriend hotness with a kid still learning not to pick his nose, you've not seen the far end of lonely.

If you're surprised a mom would discuss boyfriend hotness with a kid still learning not to pick his nose, you've not see the far end of lonely.

the lonely look down upon the hungry; the hungry look down upon the starving. The guilty blame the damaged. Those of doubtful righteousness speak of cannibals, the unquestionably vile, the sinners and the damned. It makes everyone feel much better.

a husband quits a wife, leaving her with her naked body curled around the emptied-out mine of her womb. I know people.

regular Niagara of blond highlights was Crystal, sitting alone with her breakfast, gazing at it with such earnest focus, you'd think she was on a first date with that Pepsi and glazed doughnut.

Lonesome! Nothing lonesomer than getting shackled to a bully-man in his house of spite.

you've not seen the far end of lonely.

She stops trying to talk for a while, since there is nothing to say about a lost child that can change one star in a father's lonely sky.

If it had been July, my heart already would have cracked for the beauty. As it was, I might die of loneliness.