LONELINESS QUOTES IV
quotations about loneliness
Self is the only prison that can ever bind the soul.
HENRY VAN DYKE
"The Prison and the Angel"
Loneliness
Got a mind of its own
The more people around
The more you feel alone
BOB DYLAN
"Marchin' to the City", The Bootleg Series
There was nothing lonelier than a man with a million friends.
WILLIAM SHATNER
The Ashes of Eden
And I was alone, had been for a while, and might be for a while, but it no longer frightened me the way it had. I was discovering something terrifyingly simple: there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I was discovering this in the way, I suppose, that everybody does, but having tried, endlessly, to do something about it.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
The Great Gatsby
What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
GEORGE ELIOT
Middlemarch
Tranquility, allied to loneliness, possessed no charms.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY
Lodore
There is a wilderness we walk alone
However well-companioned.
STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT
Western Star
I see around me games and fun but I'm not asked to play.
Whence this awful loneliness amid life's grand buffet?
ROBERT H. OLANDER
The Traveler and Other Poems
A great many wise sayings have been uttered about the effects of solitary retirement; but the motives which impel men to seek it are not more various than the effects which it produces on different individuals. One thing is certain, that those who can with truth affirm that they are "never less alone than when alone," might generally add that they never feel more lonely than when not alone.
ARTHUR HELPS
Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd
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
Who knows what true loneliness is -- not the conventional word, but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion. Now and then a fatal conjunction of events may lift the veil for an instant. For an instant only. No human being could bear a steady view of moral solitude without going mad.
JOSEPH CONRAD
Under Western Eyes
No one ever discovers the depths of his own loneliness.
GEORGES BERNANOS
The Diary of a Country Priest
Lonely people, in talking to each other can make each other lonelier.
LILLIAN HELLMAN
The Autumn Garden
Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.
MAY SARTON
Journal of a Solitude
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
I don't think that loneliness is necessarily a bad or unconstructive condition. My own skill at jamming time may actually be dependent on some fluid mixture of emotions, among them curiosity, sexual desire, and love, all suspended in a solvent medium of loneliness.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Fermata
Each way means loneliness -- and communion.
T. S. ELIOT
The Cocktail Party
The loneliness you feel with another person, the wrong person, is the loneliest of all.
DEB CALETTI
The Fortunes of Indigo Skye
There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought--a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!
MARK TWAIN
"The Mysterious Stranger", The Complete Short Stories