Quotes about loneliness

And I submit that this is what the real, no-shit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about. How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.

"How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words."

Hal, who's empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some sort of basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, goey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he's really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.

The greatest saints used to avoid as far as they could the company of men, and chose to live in secret with God.

One hath said, “As oft as I have gone among men, so oft have I returned less a man.” This is what we often experience when we have been long time in conversation.

She was indeed aching with that depression, which oddly takes the form of a sense of guilt, that comes to those who find themselves alone in sobriety among the alcoholized.

Self-expression is impossible in relation with other men; their self-expression interferes with it. The greatest heights of self-expression in poetry, music, painting – are achieved by men who are supremely alone.

The Outsider is always unhappy, but he is an agent that ensures the happiness for millions of 'Insiders'.

I try to like the way the world is changing, but there seems to be no extra room for me inside.

My friendships were not... transcendent. They were all tied to my work, and when my work went away, so did all my friends. They were not unkind, they still inquired after me, they made overtures, but there was nothing to say, our minds and our hearts did not really touch at any point. I discovered that I did not know anybody, and nobody knew me.

She had no fear of the shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind — or rather that cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.

To find themselves utterly alone at night where company is desirable and expected makes some people fearful; but a case more trying by far to the nerves is to discover some mysterious companionship when intuition, sensation, memory, analogy, testimony, probability, induction — every kind of evidence in the logician's list — have united to persuade consciousness that it is quite in isolation.