Quotes about loneliness

Someone will read as moral

That the people of Rome or Warsaw

Haggle, laugh, make love

As they pass by martyrs' pyres.

Someone else will read

Of the passing of things human,

Of the oblivion

Born before the flames have died. But that day I thought only

Of the loneliness of the dying,

Of how, when Giordano

Climbed to his burning

There were no words

In any human tongue

To be left for mankind,

Mankind who live on.

Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference. They don’t have to make speeches. Just believing is usually enough.

Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym.

Writing is a desperate attempt to extract some dignity – and a modicum of money – from solitude.

"I am never lonely...Or rather I never suffer from loneliness. I suffer much from the idea that my loneliness might be taken away from me by a lot of mercilessly well meaning people. Of course I never hope that you will understand me, so all I ask is that you do not imagine that you are persuading me into something when you are actually forcing me against my will." (p18)

The worst cliques are those which consist of one man.

When from our better selves we have too long

Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,

Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,

How gracious, how benign, is Solitude.

Where the statue stood

Of Newton with his prism and silent face,

The marble index of a mind forever

Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.

How men lived

Even next-door neighbours, as we say, yet still

Strangers, not knowing each the other's name.

And I was taught to feel, perhaps too much,

The self-sufficing power of Solitude.

If this one, most essential freedom was taken from you, the freedom, that is, to withdraw from other people when necessity called, then all other freedoms were worthless. Then life had no more meaning. Then it would be better to be dead.

He succeeded in being considered totally uninteresting. People left him alone. And that was all he wanted.