Loneliness Quotes - Page 29

• You write a story about loneliness, and you grab them all because everybody's an expert on that one.

  Theodore Sturgeon

  Being Alone, Writing, Experts

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• Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.

  William Styron

  Reading, Library, Being Lonely

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• I've never thought about songwriting as a weapon. I've only thought about it as a way to help me get through love and loss and sadness and loneliness and growing up.

  Taylor Swift

  Growing Up, Sadness, Loss

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• Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness.

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Emotional, Suffering, Poverty

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• God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through.

  Paul Valery

  Spiritual, Drinking, Being Alone

  "Mauvaises Pensées et Autres". Book by Paul Valery, 1941.

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• God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.

  Paul Valery

  Women, Solitude, Religion

  Tel Quel 1 "Moralites" (1941)

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• The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.

  David Foster Wallace

  Interesting, Being Lonely, Desperate

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• There's an old joke - um... two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of 'em says, "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know; and such small portions." Well, that's essentially how I feel about life - full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly.

  Woody Allen

  Boys, Elderly, Two

  Annie Hall, www.imdb.com. 1977.

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• In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in his cosmic loneliness. And God said, "Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done." And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close to mud as man sat, looked around, and spoke. "What is the purpose of all this?" he asked politely. "Everything must have a purpose?" asked God. "Certainly," said man. "Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this," said God. And He went away.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Men, Thinking, Purpose

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• He is one of those who has had the wilderness for a pillow, and called a star his brother. Alone. But loneliness can be a communion.

  Dag Hammarskjold

  Nature, Brother, Stars

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• We, unaccustomed to courage exiles from delight live coiled in shells of loneliness until love leaves its high holy temple and comes into our sight to liberate us into life. Love arrives and in its train come ecstasies old memories of pleasure ancient histories of pain. Yet if we are bold, love strikes away the chains of fear from our souls. We are weaned from our timidity In the flush of love's light we dare be brave And suddenly we see that love costs all we are and will ever be. Yet it is only love which sets us free.

  Maya Angelou

  Love, Pain, Memories

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• we use TV as we use tranquilizers- to even things out, to blot out unpleasantness, to dilute confusion, distress, unhappiness, loneliness.

  Bill McKibben

  Confusion, Use, Tvs

  Bill McKibben (2014). “The Age of Missing Information”, p.188, Random House

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• Actually loneliness has a kind of fascination; it's a state of egotistical, inner grace that you can achieve only by standing guard on old, forgotten roads that no one travels anymore.

  Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  Grace, Fascination, Kind

  Arturo Pérez-Reverte (1999). “The Fencing Master”, Harcourt

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• There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind--wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one's own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.

  Toni Morrison

  Feet, Skins, Sound

  FaceBook post by Toni Morrison from Nov 21, 2016

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• Loneliness is caused by an alienation from life. It is a loneliness from your real self.

  Maxwell Maltz

  Real, Self, Cybernetics

  Maxwell Maltz (1989). “Psycho-Cybernetics”, p.138, Simon and Schuster

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• I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Funny, Pain, Memories

  Edgar Allan Poe, Simon Marsden (1988). “Visions of Poe: a personal selection of Edgar Allan Poe's stories and poems”, Michael Joseph

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• Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.

  Franz Kafka

  Being Alone, Writing, Creativity

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• It's no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You've got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they've got to come. You can't force them.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Filled In, Waiting, Trying

  D.H. Lawrence (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)”, p.3815, Delphi Classics

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• I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.

  T. S. Eliot

  Thinking, Poetry, Mermaid

  "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" l. 122 (1917)

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• In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage- to know who we are and where we have come from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness.

  Alex Haley

  Adoption, Vacuums, Heritage

  Alex Haley (2007). “Alex Haley: The Man Who Traced America's Roots”, Reader's Digest Association

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• the way i need you is a loneliness i cannot bear.

  Carson McCullers

  Needs, Way, Bears

  Carson McCullers (2010). “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter”, p.217, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Inspirational, Graduation, Philosophy

  'Essays' (1841) 'Self-Reliance'

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• It's the only condition I know. Bitter Love, Loneliness, contempt for corruption, blind hope. It's where I live. A permanent state of bereavement. This is nothing new.

  Gregory Maguire

  Bereavement, Bitter, Blind

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• Any human face is a claim on you, because you can't help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it. But this is truest of the face of an infant. I consider that to be one kind of vision, as mystical as any.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Vision, Faces, Helping

  Marilynne Robinson (2004). “Gilead: A Novel”, p.66, Macmillan

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• But we are alone, darling child, terribly, isolated each from the other; so fierce is the world's ridicule we cannot speak or show our tenderness; for us, death is stronger than life, it pulls like a wind through the dark, all our cries burlesqued in joyless laughter; and with the garbage of loneliness stuffed down us until our guts burst bleeding green, we go screaming round the world, dying in our rented rooms, nightmare hotels, eternal homes of the transient heart.

  Truman Capote

  Laughter, Children, Home

  Truman Capote (2007). “Other Voices, Other Rooms”, p.124, Vintage

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