Loneliness Quotes

“Are you angry? Punch a pillow. Was it satisfying? Not hardly. These days people are too angry for punching. What you might try is stabbing. Take an old pillow and lay it on the front lawn. Stab it with a big pointy knife. Again and again and again. Stab hard enough for the point of the knife to go into the ground. Stab until the pillow is gone and you are just stabbing the earth again and again, as if you want to kill it for continuing to spin, as if you are getting revenge for having to live on this planet day after day, alone.”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“If you are afraid of being lonely, don't try to be right.”
― Jules Renard

“When we are most alone is when we embrace another's loneliness.”
― Mitch Albom, The Time Keeper

“I am lonely, sometimes, but I dare say it's good for me…”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“Betrayal is too kind a word to describe a situation in which a father says he loves his daughter but claims he must teach her about the horrors of the world in order to make her a stronger person; a situation in which he watches or participates in rituals that make her feel like she is going to die. She experiences pain that is so intense that she cannot think; her head spins so fast she can't remember who she is or how she got there.

All she knows is pain. All she feels is desperation. She tries to cry out for help, but soon learns that no one will listen. No matter how loud she cries, she can't stop or change what is happening. No matter what she does, the pain will not stop. Her father orders her to be tortured and tells her it is for her own good. He tells her that she needs the discipline, or that she has asked for it by her misbehavior. Betrayal is too simple a word to describe the overwhelming pain, the overwhelming loneliness and isolation this child experiences.

As if the abuse during the rituals were not enough, this child experiences similar abuse at home on a daily basis. When she tries to talk about her pain, she is told that she must be crazy. "Nothing bad has happened to you;' her family tells her Each day she begins to feel more and more like she doesn't know what is real. She stops trusting her own feelings because no one else acknowledges them or hears her agony. Soon the pain becomes too great. She learns not to feel at all. This strong, lonely, desperate child learns to give up the senses that make all people feel alive. She begins to feel dead.
She wishes she were dead. For her there is no way out. She soon learns there is no hope.

As she grows older she gets stronger. She learns to do what she is told with the utmost compliance. She forgets everything she has ever wanted. The pain still lurks, but it's easier to pretend it's not there than to acknowledge the horrors she has buried in the deepest parts of her mind. Her relationships are overwhelmed by the power of her emotions. She reaches out for help, but never seems to find what she is looking for The pain gets worse. The loneliness sets in. When the feelings return, she is overcome with panic, pain, and desperation.

She is convinced she is going to die. Yet, when she looks around her she sees nothing that should make her feel so bad. Deep inside she knows something is very, very wrong, but she doesn't remember anything. She thinks, "Maybe I am crazy.”
― Margaret Smith, Ritual Abuse: What It Is, Why It Happens, and How to Help

“To be alone is to be different, to be different is to be alone.”
― Suzanne Gordon

“The man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround himself with people. But the man who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at peace with his own loneliness, and to prefer its reality to the illusion of merely natural companionship, comes to know the invisible companionship of God. Such a one is alone with God in all places, and he alone truly enjoys the companionship of other men, because he loves them in God in Whom their presence is not tiresome, and because of Whom his own love for them can never know satiety.”
― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

“Loneliness is a hard thing to handle. I feel it, sometimes. When I do, I want it to end. Sometimes, when you're near someone, when you touch them on some level that is deeper than the uselessly structured formality of casual civilized interaction, there's a sense of satisfaction in it. Or at least, there is for me. It doesn't have to be someone particularly nice. You don't have to like them. You don't even have to want to work with them. You might even want to punch them in the nose. Sometimes just making that connection is its own experience, its own reward.”
― Jim Butcher, White Night

“I believe in whatever gets you throught the night. [...] Night is the hardest time to be alive. For me, anyway. It lasts so long, and four A.M.knows all my secrets.”
― Poppy Z. Brite

“The opposite of Loneliness is not Togetherness , It's Intimacy”
― Richard Bach

“You know why people pair up into couples? Because being a human is fucking terrifying. But it's a hell of a lot easier if you're not doing it by yourself.”
― Alice Oseman, Loveless

“Lingering is so very lonely when one lingers all alone.”
― Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan

“It’s how I fill the time when nothing’s happening. Thinking too much, flirting with melancholy.”
― Tim Winton, Breath

“Shrinking in a corner,
pressed into the wall;
do they know I'm present,
am I here at all?

Is there a written rule book,
that tells you how to be—
all the right things to talk about—
that everyone has but me?

Slowly I am withering—
a flowered deprived of sun;
longing to belong to—
somewhere or someone.”
― Lang Leav, Love & Misadventure

“I never really understood the word ‘loneliness’. As far as I was concerned, I was in an orgy with the sky and the ocean, and with nature.”
― Bjork

“A child blind from birth doesn't even know he's blind until someone tells him. Even then he has only the most academic idea of what blindness is; only the formerly sighted have a real grip on the thing. Ben Hanscom had no sense of being lonely because he had never been anything but. If the condition had been new, or more localized, he might have understood, but loneliness both encompassed his life and overreached it.”
― Stephen King, It

“You get lonely, is what it is. A person's not supposed to go through life with absolutely nobody. It's not normal. The longer you go by yourself the weirder you get, and the weirder you get the longer you go by yourself. It's a loop and you gotta do something to get out of it.”
― Jim Shepard

“Like you're riding a train at night across some vast plain, and you
catch a glimpse of a tiny light in a window of a farmhouse. In an
instant it's sucked back into the darkness behind and vanishes. But
if you close your eyes, that point of light stays with you, just
barely for a few moments.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.”
― Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy

“There’s a loneliness that only exists in one’s mind. The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is blink.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“People cannot win against their loneliness because loneliness is this world’s worst kind of pain.”
― Gaara

“And if I'm alone in bed, I will go to the window, look up at the sky, and feel certain that loneliness is a lie, because the Universe is there to keep me company.”
― Paulo Coelho, Manuscript Found in Accra

“Maybe reading was just a way to make her feel less alone, to keep her company. When you read something you are stopped, the moment is stayed, you can sometimes be there more fully than you can in your real life.”
― Helen Humphreys, Coventry

“I cannot help but wonder how many of us walk through our lives, day after day, feeling slightly broken and alone, surrounded all the time by others who feel exactly the same way.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Slow Regard of Silent Things

“I had been alone more than I could have been had I gone by myself.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“All I know is that I shall be alone again. There is nothing more terrible than to be alone among human beings.”
― Stefan Zweig, Letter from an Unknown Woman: The Fowler Snared

“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, Housekeeping

“That's what Jamie didn't understand: it was never just sex. Even the fastest, dirtiest, most impersonal screw was about more than sex. It was about connection. It was about looking at another human being and seeing your own loneliness and neediness reflected back. It was recognising that together you had the power to temporarily banish that sense of isolation. It was about experiencing what it was to be human at the basest, most instinctive level. How could that be described as just anything?”
― Emily Maguire, Taming the Beast

“Often it feels like I am breathing today only because a few years back I had no idea which nerve to cut...”
― Sanhita Baruah

“In the silence of night I have often wished for just a few words of love from one man, rather than the applause of thousands of people.”
― Judy Garland