LONELINESS QUOTES III
quotations about loneliness
Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.
MAY SARTON
Journal of a Solitude
Nothing is more sterile or lamentable than the man content to live within himself.
HAROLD PINTER
Tea Party
There is a wilderness we walk alone
However well-companioned.
STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT
Western Star
Alone! -- that worn-out word,
So idly spoken, and so coldly heard;
Yet all that poets sing and grief hath known
Of hopes laid waste, knells in that word ALONE!
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
The New Timon
All the lonely people, where do they all come from?
THE BEATLES
"Eleanor Rigby", Revolver
The ideal attitude is to be able to live in a way that, no matter what the conditions may be, loneliness is impossible. The mountain-dwellers, suddenly thrown into a great city, would become wretched victims of loneliness. They would long for solitude just as other kinds of lonely people long for company. Without their mountains, without the association that helped to establish their habits, they would feel themselves indeed helpless and alone. The people in the streets are alien, irritating. The huddled buildings are an ache. The noise is a torment. The loss of the familiar they may find so intolerable as to drive them precipitately back.
JOHN DANIEL BARRY
"Loneliness", Reactions and Other Essays Discussing Those States of Feeling and Attitude of Mind That Find Expression In Our Individual Qualities
The truly solitary being is not the man who is abandoned by men, but the man who suffers in their midst, who drags his desert through the marketplace and deploys his talents as a smiling leper, a mountebank of the irreparable.
EMIL CIORAN
A Short History of Decay
Physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and -- in spite of True Romance magazines -- we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way.
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
The Proud Highway
Loneliness will sit over our roofs with brooding wings.
BRAM STOKER
Dracula
Labor in loneliness is irksome.
MARK TWAIN
The Innocents Abroad
God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter -- they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.
SYLVIA PLATH
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.
JANET FITCH
White Oleander
The survival of the fittest is going to make some man very lonesome some day.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.
ELIZABETH GILBERT
Eat, Pray, Love
Loneliness is a prerequisite for freedom. Freedom depends on the ability to reflect, and reflection can only begin when one is alone.
GAO XINGJIAN
speech presented on receiving the Golden Plate Award at the Forty-first International Achievement Summit of the American Academy of Achievement, Jun. 8, 2002
There was nothing lonelier than a man with a million friends.
WILLIAM SHATNER
The Ashes of Eden
The Loneliness One dare not sound --
And would as soon surmise
AS in its Grave go plumbing
To ascertain the size --
The Loneliness whose worst alarm
Is lest itself should see --
And perish from before itself
For just a scrutiny --
The Horror not to be surveyed --
But skirted in the Dark --
With Consciousness suspended --
And Being under Lock --
I fear me this -- is Loneliness --
The Maker of the soul
Its Caverns and its Corridors
Illuminate -- or seal --
EMILY DICKINSON
"The Loneliness One Dare Not Sound", Poems
Late at night, when you're so lonely,
your shoulders curl toward the center of your body,
you call no one and you don't call out.
This is dignity. This is the pure loneliness
that made Christ think he was God.
This is why lunatics smile at their thoughts.
MICHAEL RYAN
"The Pure Loneliness", New and Selected Poems
Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Sputnik Sweetheart