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Quotes About Loneliness

Writing is one of the loneliest of the arts; unlike the actor we have no immediate audience and must wait many long months, even years on occasion, for the splatter of applause to reach our ears, if indeed we are not damned by total neglect.
~ Bryan Forbes
The path of the king is a lonely one, and few are fit to walk it.
~ buchan john iv
Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief.
~ Herman Melville
Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it?
~ Herman Melville
So, cutting the lashing of the waterproof match keg, after many failures Starbuck contrived to ignite the lamp in the lantern; then stretching it on a waif pole, handed it to Queequeg as the standard-bearer of this forlorn hope. There, then, he sat, holding up that imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness. There, then, he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair.
~ Herman Melville
Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe.
~ Herman Melville
He lived in the world, as the last of the Grisly Bears lived in settled Missouri.And as Spring and Summer had departed, that wild Logan of the woods, burying himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out the winter there, sucking his own paws; so, in his inclement, howling old age, Ahab's soul, shut up in the caved trunk of his body, there fed upon the sullen paws of its gloom!
~ Herman Melville
Ahab era inaccesible socialmente [...]. Vivía en el mundo como vivieran en el Misuri colonizado los últimos osos grises. Y así como al término del estío aquel Lotario de las selvas se encerraba en el tronco de un árbol a pasar el tiempo chupándose las patas, así Ahab se encerraba, en su inclemente ancianidad, en el tronco hueco de su propio cuerpo, comiéndose las lúgubres patas de su propia melancolía.
~ Herman Melville
Ye two are the opposite poles of one thing; Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck; and ye two are all mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the millions of the peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors! Cold, cold—I shiver!—How now? Aloft there! D'ye see him? Sing out for every spout, though he spout ten times a second!
~ Herman Melville
Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.
~ Herman Melville
palsied as it were, and leaning over sadly. It stood on
~ Herman Melville
Usher—threadbare
~ Herman Melville
Call me Ishmael
~ Herman Melville
Ahab stands alone among the millions of the peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors
~ Herman Melville
As I sat there in that now lonely room; the fire burning low, in that mild stage when, after its first intensity has warmed the air, it then only glows to be looked at; the evening shades and phantoms gathering round the casements, and peering upon us silent, solitary twain; the storm booming without its solemn swells; I began to be sensible of strange feelings.
~ Herman Melville
Todavía puedo ver aquella figura, pálidamente pulcra, lastimosamente respetable, incurablemente solitaria. Era Bartleby.
~ Herman Melville
Como la gaviota sin tierra que, al atardecer, pliega las alas y se mece hasta dormirse entre el oleaje, al caer la noche el hombre de Nantucket, lejos de la tierra, recoge las velas y se echa a dormir, mientras bajo su almohada corren morsas y ballenas.
~ Herman Melville
siauras, pailgas ir li?dnas virš keter? pakibo m?nulio pjautuvas, užsimoj?s pj??iai, bet nekertantis.
~ Hermann Broch
The Elephant of Depression wasn't just parked on my chest, it was relaxing there with the Walrus of Gloom and the Hippo of Bleak Friday Nights in Alone. They had beers. They were settling in.
~ Hester Browne
When night falls and the world lies lost in sleep, I take to my bed, my heart throbbing, about to break, anxieties swarming, piercing—I may go mad with grief.
~ Homer
It was the gray sea that bore you and the towering rocks, so sheer the heart in you is turned from us.
~ Homer
Grief wrapped around her, eating at her heart. The house was full of chairs but she could not bear to sit upright.
~ Homer
I miss her when I can't remember what works best on insect bites, and when nobody else cares how rude the receptionist at the doctor's office was to me. Whether she actually would have flown in to act as baby nurse or mailed me cotton balls and calamine lotion if she were alive isn't really the issue. It's the fact that I can't ask her for these things that makes me miss her all over again.
~ Hope Edelman
I've seen her kind so many times in town on Saturdays coming in to buy what they can with what they have left over from their husband's drinking. Old before their time, stooped and bent from overwork. Wasting their youth. Sitting around ... waiting for some old man to change, that probably couldn't change if he wanted to, until they have a house full of kids, and at forty look like old women.
~ Horton Foote