Quotes About Loneliness

The days he was away crept on tiny, unhurried feet.

Brother Anthony leaned forward in his chair. "Contemplative waiting is consenting to be where we really are," he explained. "People recoil from it because they don't want to be present to themselves. Such waiting causes a deep existential loneliness to surface, a feeling of being disconnected from oneself and God. At the depths there is fear, fear of the dark chaos within ourselves.

Far away, I heard the mournful call of an owl. The sound caused a pressure in my throat and I realized it was the need to fashion a story. To call into the blackness like the owl.

I turned off the light and tried to sleep but ended up nursing a sense of loss that seemed heavier than ever.

That night it felt strange to be in the honey house by myself. I missed Rosaleen's snoring the way you'd miss the sound of ocean waves after you've gotten used to sleeping with them. I didn't realise how it had comforted me. Quietness has a strange, spungy hum that can nearly break your eardrums.

The last living boy in America drops into my bedroom only he wants to be a monk. I think that pretty much sums up my life.

This past year I grew up to know hunger, grief, darkness, fear. I began to understand how lonely you can feel even when all you want is to be alone.

Is that some other creature with me, in the darkness?

Writing is one of the loneliest professions in the world because it has to be practiced in this very separate private world, in _here_. Not in the mind; in the imagination. And I think it is possible that the writing of fantasy is the loneliest job of the lot, since you have to go further inside. You have to make so close a connection with the unconscious that the unbiddable door will open and the images fly out, like birds.

I felt totally alone, I felt like an awful person, I felt really guilty and very overwhelmed because I was trying to fix things I couldn't fix.

Deep under the earth, inside its cardboard coffin, shrouded in the layers of white paper, the china doll with the jagged open crevasse in its skull was crying.

and I shivered as I thought once again how inexpressibly sad it was that the ending of a whole human life, from birth and childhood, through adult maturity to extreme old age, should here be marked by no blood relative or heart's friend, but only by two men connected by nothing more than business, one of whom had never so much as set eyes upon the woman during her life, besides those present in an even more bleakly professional capacity.

I think you'd agree that as far as marriage is concerned, there are two types of churchmen. One set feels that marriage distracts them from serving God as well as they can, and the other set feels that as single men they can't serve God properly because they're continually distracted by loneliness and by wondering (as the naval ratings would say) where the next fuck was coming from.

I'm very comfortable being right," she admitted. "We all are. But sometimes it's a lonely place.

The worst part is the unknown. The pain of being alone, the loneliness, is familiar. You've dealt with that. You understand it. But loving someone, risking everything, is unknown. There's no way to know how bad it's going to be. You barely survive the pain of being alone, so how can you deal with anything worse? So you don't bother to try.

The root of all fears. Not being accepted by those we care about. Being rejected and isolated. It's a primal fear. As a species, we are meant to be part of a group. A community. We mistrust loners because we don't understand them. With the exception of our romanticizing the loner in movies and novels, of course.

How was she supposed to find a man and fall in love when she couldn't even get asked out on a date?

Alone by herself or alone in a crowd, it still came down to lonely. She

It's so effortless to let my loneliness defeat me, make me mold myself to whatever would (in some way - but not wholly) relieve it. I must never forget it... I want sensuality and sensitivity, both... Let me never deny that... I want to err on the side of violence and excess, rather than to underfill my moments.

I don't feel guilt at being unsociable, though I may sometimes regret it because my loneliness is painful. But when I move into the world, it feels like a moral fall – like seeking love in a whorehouse.

I feel profoundly alone, cut off, unattractive…I feel unloveable. But I respect that unloveable solider—struggling to survive, struggling to be honest, just, honourable. I respect myself.

My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another. With him I have neither, neither privacy or passion. Neither the heightening of self which is won by privacy and loneliness, nor the splendid heroic beautiful loss of self that accompanies passion.

Pavese's continual prayers for the strength to lead a life of rigorous seclusion and solitude ("The only heroic rule is to be alone, alone, alone") are entirely of a piece with his repeated complaints about his inability to feel.

it's so effortless to let my loneliness defeat me, make me mold myself to whatever would (in some way—but not wholly) relieve it. I am infinite—I must never forget it … I want sensuality and sensitivity, both … I was more alive and satisfied with H than I have ever been with anyone else … Let me never deny that … I want to err on the side of violence and excess, rather than to underfill my moments …