Quotes about loneliness

Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?

In her spare time, she looked to books or the stars for company.

Are we all with acute loneliness,

chronic patients trying to recover

the will to love?

...Sometimes the love

of another wounded one acts like a salve

which soothes the dying self but cannot heal

our lives. And perhaps this is what it feels

like to be human, and we are all well?

Why couldn't she stop talking? Did all lonely people have that problem?

He seemed decent and kindly enough, but Prentice was cautioned by an old and trusted rule of his schooldays: Beware of the first friendly one; he's probably an outcast himself.

Anything we fully do is an alone journey. […] You are alone when you write a book. Accept that and take in any love and support that is given to you, but don't have expectations of how it is supposed to be.

Jane has learned that there is a fate more terrible than solitude: it’s solitude in the company of a husband who essentially misunderstands you.

But most of all, it seems to me now, has been the courage to know and to sense my feelings that has come, slowly, from the emotionally charged silent films at the old library at first and then later from the poems and novels and histories and biographies and how-to-do-it books that I have read. All of those books—even the dull and nearly incomprehensible ones—have made me understand more clearly what it means to be a human being. And I have learned from the sense of awe I at times develop when I feel in touch with the mind of another, long-dead person and know that I am not alone on this earth. There have been others who have felt as I feel and who have, at times, been able to say the unsayable.

Why don’t we talk to one another? Why don’t we huddle together against the cold wind that blows down the empty streets of this city? Once, long ago, there were private telephones in New York. People talked to one another then—perhaps distantly, strangely, with their voices made thin and artificial by electronics, but they talked. Of the price of groceries, the presidential elections, the sexual behavior of their teen-age children, their fear of the weather and their fear of death. And they read, hearing the voices of the living and the dead speaking to them in eloquent silence, in touch with a babble of human talk that must have filled the mind in a manner that said; I am human. I talk and I listen and I read.

Why can no one read? What happened?

I looked at Annabel’s coffin in front of me and said, “I am the resurrection and the life,” saith the Lord. “He that believeth in me, though he perish, yet shall he live.”

The words were no comfort. I wanted Annabelle to be alive and with me. I looked at all the Baleens in front of me with their heads reverently bowed and I felt no communion with them and with their faith. Without Annabel I was alone again.

Human beings have a kind of optical illusion, Einstein once said. We think ourselves separate rather than part of the whole. This imprisons our affection to those few nearest us.

Not long ago your conciousness

was wandering alone.

Swept by karma,

it took its present birth.

Soon, like a hair pulled out of butter,

Leaving everything behind,

you’ll go on alone.