Quotes about loneliness

I felt that night, on the stage, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it? What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming? (p. 145)

It's pointless to cry. One is born and dies alone...

The courage to stand alone as if others didn't exist and think only of what you're doing. Not to get scared if people ignore you. You have to wait for years, have to die. Then after you're dead, if you're lucky, you become somebody.

That's the thing about L.A.- you can freeze to death under a rosebush, Richard says.

Jesus watches from the wall, but his face is cold as stone. And if he loves me - as she tells me - why do I feel so all alone?

So it is a very long time to look back upon in years, though, somehow or other, thank Heaven, the solitary days roll away peacefully and happily enough.

One of the many to whom, from straightened circumstances, a consequent inability to form the associations they would wish, and a disinclination to mix with the society they could obtain, London is as complete a solitude as the plains of Syria.

‘No one says it’s easy. Still, you are not alone.’ (Bibikov)

‘In my cell I’m alone. In my thoughts I’m alone. I don’t want to sound bitter to you because I’m thankful for your help – ’ (Yakov)

I had to be on my own, just so that I would not feel as alone. (p. 201).

When you are lonely, writing can keep you company. It is a form of self-compensation, a way of making up for things—as opposed to making things up—that did not quite happen. (p.11).

It was a truism that all civilisations were basically neurotic until they made contact with everybody else and found their place within the ever-changing meta-civilisation of other beings, because, until then, during the stage when they honestly believed they might be entirely alone in existence, all solo societies were possessed of both an inflated sense of their own importance and a kind of existential terror at the sheer scale and apparent emptiness of the universe.

The moon was drenching the sky with loneliness. (p107)