Lonely Quotes - Page 14

• I feel strangely free at such times. To behave properly is to be always courteous, always clever, and subtle and elegant. But now, when I am so alone, I do not have to be any of these things. For this moment, I am wholly myself, unshaped by the needs of others, by their dreams or expectations or sensibilities. But I am also lonely. With no one to shape me, who stands here, watching the moon, or the stars, or the clouds?

  Kij Johnson

  Dream, Stars, Clever

  Kij Johnson (2001). “The Fox Woman”, p.57, Macmillan

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• Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. You simply say, "Here are the perimeters of our attention. If you prowl around under the windows till the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. If you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it." Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Night, People, Safety

  Marilynne Robinson (2004). “Housekeeping: A Novel”, p.154, Macmillan

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• I never realized that the blue sky I saw was not the soft, nurturing sky of spring, but the cold, chilling, lonely sky of winter

  Virginia C. Andrews

  Spring, Winter, Blue

  Virginia C. Andrews (1984). “Seeds of yesterday”, Pocket

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• Besides, the normal people here wouldn’t see it. That was what “different” meant. It’s just another word for lonely.

  Lilith Saintcrow

  People, Different, Normal

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• Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness

  Richard Wright

  Self, White, America

  Richard Wright (2010). “American Hunger”, p.15, Harper Collins

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• Perhaps I am too tame, too domestic a magician. But how does one work up a little madness? I meet with mad people every day in the street, but I never thought before to wonder how they got mad. Perhaps I should go wandering on lonely moors and barren shores. That is always a popular place for lunatics - in novels and plays at any rate. Perhaps wild England will make me mad.

  Susanna Clarke

  Play, People, Mad

  Susanna Clarke (2009). “Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell”, p.707, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• Law and order is a social service. Crime and the fear which the threat of crime induces can paralyse whole communities, keep lonely and vulnerable elderly people shut up in their homes, scar young lives and raise to cult status the swaggering violent bully who achieves predatory control over the streets. I suspect that there would be more support and less criticism than today's political leaders imagine for a large shift of resources from Social Security benefits to law and order - as long as rhetoric about getting tough on crime was matched by practice.

  Margaret Thatcher

  Home, Practice, Elderly

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• What I learned The well-documented difference Between alone and lonely The comfort of knowing

  David Levithan

  Knowing, Differences, Comfort

  David Levithan (2008). “The Realm of Possibility”, p.184, Knopf Books for Young Readers

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• We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met?

  David Foster Wallace

  Loneliness, Being Alone, Missing

  "The Oscars Get It All Wrong Again: David Foster Wallace and the Best Film of 2015" by Allen Callaci, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 19, 2016.

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• I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous man, the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the man in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable

  Henry Miller

  Artist, Men, Forever

  Henry Miller (1962). “Stand Still Like the Hummingbird”, p.49, New Directions Publishing

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• But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests. Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself! And your way goes past yourself, and past your seven devils! You will be a heretic to yourself and witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and villain. You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Being Yourself, Lying, Past

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• She left me then, surrounded by my extravagantly simple finery and I sat for a long time, uncomfortable both with the person I had been and the person I was finally becoming. Caught between the two of them, I felt rather lonely, as one often does with a new acquaintance.

  Deanna Raybourn

  Simple, Two, Long

  Deanna Raybourn (2016). “Deanna Raybourn Lady Julia Grey Volume 1: Silent in the Grave\Silent in the Sanctuary\Silent on the Moor”, p.156, MIRA

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• ...sometimes it only makes one more lonely to know that somewhere else, one's friends and family are well.

  Robin Hobb

  Somewhere Else, Family And Friends, Sometimes

  Robin Hobb (2002). “Assassin's Quest: The Farseer Trilogy”, p.231, Spectra

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• Here I was again tonight forcing laughter, faking smiles Same old tired, lonely place

  Taylor Swift

  Laughter, Tired, Fake Smile

  Song: Enchanted, Album: Speak Now, 2010

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• She was lonely without Blunt, but she was lonelier at the idea that the world went on as though she had not loved him.

  Colm Toibin

  Ideas, World, Blunt

  Colm Toibin (2012). “The Empty Family: Stories”, p.13, Simon and Schuster

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• I don't want to go into a fridge at an undertaker's. I want you to keep me at home until the funeral. Please can someone sit with me in case I get lonely? I promise not to scare you.

  Jenny Downham

  Home, Funeral, Promise

  Jenny Downham (2007). “Before I Die”, David Fickling Books

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• We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Loneliness, Dying, Existence

  "On the Heights of Despair". Book by Emile M. Cioran, 1934.

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• Of all the needs (there are none imaginary) a lonely child has, the one that must be satisfied, if there is going to be hope and a hope of wholeness, is the unshaking need for an unshakable God. My pretty Black brother was my Kingdom Come.

  Maya Angelou

  Inspirational, Life, Motivational

  MAYA ANGELOU (1969). “I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS”

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• Oh, Black known and unknown poets, how often have your auctioned pains sustained us? Who will compute the lonely nights made less lonely by your songs, or by the empty pots made less tragic by your tales? If we were a people much given to revealing secrets, we might raise monuments and sacrifice to the memories of our poets, but slavery cured us of that weakness.

  Maya Angelou

  Inspirational, Song, Pain

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• The trouble is not really in being alone, it's being lonely. One can be lonely in the midst of a crowd, don't you think?

  Christine Feehan

  Being Single, Thinking, Like Being Alone

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• To the sea, to the sea! The white gulls are crying, The wind is blowing, and the white foam is flying. West, west away, the round sun is falling, Grey ship, grey ship, do you hear them calling, The voices of my people that have gone before me? I will leave, I will leave the woods that bore me; For our days are ending and our years failing. I will pass the wide waters lonely sailing. Long are the waves on the Last Shore falling, Sweet are the voices in the Lost Isle calling, In Eressea, in Elvenhome that no man can discover, Where the leaves fall not: land of my people forever!

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  Sweet, Fall, Men

  J. R. R. Tolkien, “The Sea”

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• Everything established, settled, everything to do with home and order and the common ground, has crumbled into dust and has been swept away in the general upheaval and reorganization of the whole of society. The whole human way of life has been destroyed and ruined. All that's left is the bare, shivering human soul, stripped to the last shred, the naked force of the human psyche for which nothing has changed because it was always cold and shivering and reaching out to its nearest neighbor, as cold and lonely as itself.

  Boris Pasternak

  Home, Dust, Order

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• I'm solitary as a pulled tooth, Lonely as an unwelcome truth, Lost as a minnow out of school, A genius in a crop of fools.

  Gail Carson Levine

  School, Teeth, Genius

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• How many Sundays - how many hundreds of Sundays like this - lay ahead of me? “Quiet, peaceful, and lonely,” I said aloud to myself. On Sundays, I didn't wind my spring.

  Haruki Murakami

  Spring, Sunday, Wind

  "Norwegian Wood". Book by Haruki Murakami, 2000.

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• But a mother-son relationship is not a coequal one, is it? He is lonely with only you just as you are lonely with only him.

  Mary Balogh

  Mother, Son, Mother And Son

  Mary Balogh (2006). “Simply Love”, p.59, Delacorte Press

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