Quotes About Loneliness

brooding on a Colorado barstool, picking unhappily at my existential scabs

I have been thinking more and more that I shall always be a lone wanderer of the wilderness. God, how the trail lures me. You cannot comprehend its resistless fascination for me. After all the lone trail is the best….I'll never stop wandering. And when the time comes to die, I'll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is.

He did a lot of socializing. Sometimes I think it was like he was storing up company for the times he knew nobody would be around

At Naval Air Station Grosse Ile in Michigan, he and Barbara took a room in town for fourteen dollars a week, but without kitchen privileges. "It is sort of a lonely existence for poor Bar," Bush wrote home to Greenwich, "but she doesn't complain at all, and I am just in heaven having her here.

She chuckled to herself, pressed send, and wandered around the airport for half an hour, sporadically checking Twitter. "I got nothing," she told me. "No replies." I imagined her feeling a bit deflated about this—that sad feeling when nobody congratulates you for being funny, that black silence when the Internet doesn't talk back.

Tony said just being here can be enough to turn someone crazy.

Don't you know the name of your lonely, Walker?

For many weeks after [my wife] died, I could not get used to the feeling of coldness and lifelessness on her side of the bed - and it was even worse when they took the body away and buried her.

cuando Gill salió del coche aquella mañana tan fría, consciente de su ausencia definitiva, la invadió la mayor sensación de soledad que recordaba haber tenido nunca.

Take that bike ride I went on the other week. Agony, it was. Complete bloody agony. But at least I met some people, went for a drink afterwards, got a couple of dinner invitations out of it. It may not sound like very much, but after a while you realize … there's nothing worse than being on your own. Nothing.

Mr. Franzen said he and Mr. Wallace, over years of letters and conversations about the ethical role of the novelist, had come to the joint conclusion that the purpose of writing fiction was "a way out of loneliness." (NY Times article on the memorial service of David Foster Wallace.)

Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude, in their pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness.

And if the world refused to square with his version of reality then it was necessarily an uncaring world, a sour and sickening world, a penal colony, and he was doomed to be violently lonely in it. He bowed his head at the thought of how much strength a man would need to survive an entire life so lonely.

Power, power, power: how could the world be organized around the struggle for a thing so lonely and oppressive in the having of it?

Every writer is first a member of a community of readers, and the deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness; and so a novel deserves a reader's attention only as long as the author sustains the reader's trust.

There's a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else's work in the morning; it's as if stillness experiences pain in being broken. The first minute of the workday reminds you of all the other minutes that a day consists of, and it's never a good thing to think of minutes as individuals. Only after other minutes have joined the naked, lonely first minute does the day become more safely integrated into dayness.

The following afternoon, alone in their room, and oppressed by not yet having made the promised call to Connie...

And if the world refused to square with his version of reality then it was necessarily an uncaring world, a sour and sickening world, a penal colony, and he was doomed to be violently lonely in it.

I know Martin sometimes watches pornography, we don't have secrets from each other, and if he didn't watch it he probably would be the only man in Germany who didn't—I think Internet pornography was designed for German men, because they like to be alone and control things and have fantasies of power. But he says he only watches it because I have so many female Internet friends.

There's a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else's work in the morning; it's as if stillness experiences pain in being broken. The first minute of the workday reminds you of all the other minutes that a day consists of, and it's never a good thing to think of minutes as individuals. Only after other minutes have joined the naked, lonely first minute does the day become more safely integrated in its dayness. Patty waited for this to happen before she left the bathroom.

Dad, Dad, Dad. What's wrong?" Alfred looked up at his son and into his eyes. He opened his mouth, but the only word he could produce was "I—" I— I have made mistakes— I am alone— I am wet— I want to die— I am sorry— I did my best— I love my children— I need your help— I want to die— "I can't be here," he said.

Not only had Mr. Butcavage's questions been reasonable, he also had an unfortunate name and no friends in his neighborhood. He was probably a lonely person like her mother, and Pip felt helplessly compassionate toward anyone who reminded her of her mother.

I segreti erano potere. I soldi erano potere. Essere necessari a qualcuno era potere. Potere, potere, potere: com'era possibile che il mondo girasse intorno alla lotta per una cosa che creava solitudine e angoscia in chi la possedeva?

Nowhere is more nowhere than this place, I agree.