Quotes About Loneliness

If you're a caretaker, who are you when there's no one else to take care of?

My parents weren't around much, but I assumed everybody's family was the same. I didn't know people had mummies and daddies who would give them milk and cookies after school. I just thought everybody lived on Central Park West and they had a nanny to take care of them.

The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on. And one day you die. That is all there is to it.

Only children are weird. The only children I know, including myself, are either superweird or very talented and special or a mix of the two. I think there was always a certain independence and loneliness - I had a lot of imaginary friends as a kid.

The moon is a friend for the lonesome to talk to.

Many of my old friends are gone now. I have a hard time dealing with the fact that they're just not there to talk to. I can't call them up for a rabbit-skin glue recipe anymore.

If I were sufficiently romantic I suppose I'd have killed myself long ago just to make people talk about me. I haven't even got the conviction to make a successful drunkard.

I was a wallflower. I never talked to anybody. I was so afraid of people, I never said a word.

The thing is, I really can't relate to anyone my own age. Not in a superior way - an inferior way, if anything. Socially, I have no idea what my friends are talking about. I don't listen to any new music. I feel very secluded.

At 14, 15, everyone at school stopped talking to me, and I went completely into my shell. Basically, I'd be hiding. I had no friends. I hated it.

Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing.

When I wrote about media and technology, I had a lot of lonely, even intimate book talks. Since writing about dogs, I have a lot of company at book signings.

No stranger ever comes up and talks to me. I'm the invisible woman.

In 1922, I got a small stipend from the Swedish-American Foundation and went to Cambridge, England, for a few months and thereafter to Harvard University. In the summer, Cambridge was rather empty, but I am grateful for many pleasant talks about economics with Austin Robinson who, in the summer of 1922, seemed to be about as lonely as I was.

I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky; and all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.

I spent my whole childhood trying to find places to be on my own. I used to sit on the water tank in the attic or in the dog's kennel. I was quite a strange child.

Some days you exist like the last speaker of an extinct language. These are the silences that litter the heart.

Can you imagine a silence so desperate to be heard?

Those times we refused each other, we seemed to disappear. — Richard Jackson, from "Unable to Refuse," The Heart as Framed: New and Select Poems (Press 53, 2022)

I have only these words that seem as if they climbed up from the bottom of a dry well.

You're morbid tonight," said Largo. "I'm morbid every night. I just don't always get the chance to share it with others.

LOS ANGELES IS a busted jukebox in a forgotten bar at the ass end of the high desert. The city only exists between the pops, skips, and scratches of the old 45s.

I knock on the door and Flicker yells, "Come in." It's dark inside. The only illumination comes from an old Philco Predicta TV. She's watching The Tingler with someone or something else. I mean, it's person shaped but completely black. No face or anything else. It's like a kind of human void next to her on the battered red sofa.

Geryon looks at me like I'm a moldy ham sandwich someone forgot in the back of the fridge at work.