Uncategorized Quotes - Page 229

I remember arriving by train in a small Swiss town. I had walked up a steep, cobblestoned street that offered a sweeping view of the village below and a lake, which, in the late afternoon light, was like a great cloudy opal. And I remember thinking, with a sense of mounting joy, that not a single soul knew where I was at that moment. No one could find me. No one could phone me. No one could see me who knew me by name.For someone whose childhood experiences had pounded home the Sartrian concept that hell, truly, is other people, that was an awesome moment. I knew, at least for an instant, that I was free.That feeling is one I've sought to find again and again. Often I've succeeded, other times, for no reason I can figure out, the feeling of elation and freedom degenerates into a profound loneliness and sense of bitter isolation. But there is still something about arriving in a strange or unexplored city, in Hong Kong or Paris or Sydney, wandering streets one has never walked before, in a place where, only against the most astronomical odds, would one encounter a familiar
Lucy Taylor
The supermarket is still open; it won't close till midnight. It is brilliantly bright. Its brightness offers sanctuary from loneliness and the dark. You could spend hours of your life here, in a state of suspended insecurity, meditating on the multiplicity of things to eat. Oh dear, there is so much! So many brands in shiny boxes, all of them promising you good appetite. Every article on the shelves cries out to you, take me, take me; and the mere competition of their appeals can make you imagine yourself wanted, even loved. But beware - when you get back to your empty room, you'll find that the false flattering elf of the advertisement has eluded you; what remains is only cardboard, cellophane and food. And you have lost the heart to be hungry.
Christopher Isherwood
Try listening to yourself sometime, alone in a transient room in a strange town. The worst is when you draw a blank, and the ash-blonde ghosts of the past carry on long twittering long-distance calls with your inner ear, and there's no way to hang up.
Ross Macdonald
72. It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one's solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem. Can blue solve the problem, or can it at least keep me company within it?—No, not exactly. It cannot love me that way; it has no arms. But sometimes I do feel its presence to be a sort of wink—Here you are again, it says, and so am I.
Maggie Nelson
...accustomed like the white blackbird to the loneliness of eccentricity yet never quite reconciled to it, they found in each other's oddness a most comforting compatibility.
Elizabeth Goudge
Loneliness made or ruined a man. It frightened him so that he must either sing and build in the face of the dark, like a bird or a beaver, or hide from it like a beast in his den. There were perhaps always only the two ways to go, God or the jungle.
Elizabeth Goudge
it would hurt him to know she had felt that way for a while, that her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Loneliness was like an ogre hovering over those activities
Mitch Albom
Lupita thought that people who didn’t dance were selfish and lonely.
Laura Esquivel
Maybe my time's running out, but at least I'm living. And if that's what it is for you, being here inside where nothing ever happens, where you think you're safe, then stay. Stay right here and you let me know how that works for you.Bacause I'm gessing it'll never be enough.
John Corey Whaley
When you are alone you can easily judge yourself.
ArslanHaider
At some point, loneliness become less a condition than a habit. In time, you stop looking at your phone wondering why you can't think of anyone to call, stop getting you hair cut, stop working out, stop thinking that tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life. Because tomorrow is today, and today is yerterday, and yesterday beat the shit out of you and brought you to your knees. The only way to stay sane is to stop hoping for something better.
Jonathan Tropper
He looked down the slope and, at the base, in the shadow of the wall of the Park, he saw some human figures lying. Those venal and furtive loves filled him with despair. He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt that he had been outcast from life’s feast.
James Joyce
the pavement makes no soundas it touches your feetcalm and constantlike silence on repeatlanguidly your thoughts bleedinto the evening airin crimson red the words read'some things are beyond repair
Anna Jae
Because in some men, it is in them to give up everything personal at some time, before it ferments and poisons - throw it to some human being or some human idea.
Carson McCullers
And what’s the use of talking, if you already know that others don’t feel what you feel?
Louise Bourgeois
She raised her head and stared at the birds with him, caught in a web of awe and loneliness.
Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi
Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.
Henry David Thoreau
It was a lonely place. A place for the dark-hearted. It's where I deserve to be, Maleficent told herself every time she arrived. For only someone with a heart as dark as mine could do something so evil to a girl with a heart as light as Aurora's.
Elizabeth Rudnick
NocturneWhere are you now,my poems,my sleepwalkers?No mumbles tonight?Where are you, thirst,fever, humming tedium?The sodium streetlightsburr outside my window,steadfast, unreachable,little astonishmentslighting the way uphill.Where are you now,when I need you most? It’s late. I’m old. Come soon, you feral cats among the dahlias.
W. S. Di Piero
I wanted very much not to be where I was. In fact part of the trouble seemed to be that where I was wasn’t anywhere at all. My life felt empty and unreal... I felt like I was in danger of vanishing, though at the same time the feelings I had were so raw and overwhelming that I often wished I could find a way of losing myself altogether, perhaps for a few months, until the intensity diminished.
Olivia Laing
When we suffer in silence, we think that we are alone, different, separate. When we share our stories of suffering, we find that we are the same.
Vironika Tugaleva
I am isolated. I sit in a glass ball, I see people through a glass wall. I scream, but they do not hear me.- Ellen West
Carl R. Rogers
When he stepped into the shower, the hot water scalded him. He let it run over his face, burning his eyelids. He put up with the pain, his jaw clenched and his muscles taut, suppressing the urge to howl with loneliness in the suffocating steam. For four years, one month, and twelve days, Nikon always got into the shower with him after they made love and soaped his back slowly, interminably. And often she put her arms around him, like a little girl in the rain. One day I'll leave without ever really knowing you. You'll remember my big, dark eyes. The reproachful silences. The moans of anxiety as I slept. The nightmares you couldn't save me from. You'll remember all this when I'm gone.
Arturo Pérez-Reverte
The memory of having sat at someone’s feet will later make you want to trample him underfoot. I’m trying to fend off your admiration for me, you see, in order to save myself from your future contempt. I prefer to put up with my present state of loneliness rather than suffer more loneliness later. We who are born into this age of freedom and independence and the self must undergo this loneliness. It’s the price we pay for these times of ours.
Sōseki Natsume
Speech failures, communication breakdowns, misunderstandings, mishearings, episodes of muteness, stuttering and stammering, word forgetfulness, even the inability to grasp a joke: all these things invoke loneliness, forcing a reminder of the precarious, imperfect means by which we express our interiors to others. They undermine our footing in the social, casting us as outsiders, poor or non-participants.
Olivia Laing
Giving up on a purposeful journey of life is as deadly as death! When you pursue with tenacity, and strive through the adversities and the vicissitudes of life with a mind of fortitude and get to the end of the journey, you shall surely see life. Awake! Arise and go! Never ever give up!!!
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Listening to their argument made me aware of how empty my life was, and I hated the life I was living all the more. It was quite obvious to me this lady was deeply in love, for she was fighting for what she thought to be hers. Even though I was dating two females at the time, and stringing a third one along, yet I’ve yet to discover that kind of love. I guess this was why my favorite song was ‘I wane be love’, by the Jamaican reggae super star Buru Banton.
Drexel Deal
But in her loneliness in the palace she learned to know him, they learned to know each other, and she discovered with great delight that one does not love one’s children just because they are one’s children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.
Gabriel García Márquez
We've been very lonely, but we had it easy. Because death is so heavy - we, too young to know about it, couldn't handle it. After this you and I may end up seeing nothing but suffering, difficulty and ugliness, but if only you'll agree to it, I want for us to go on to more difficult places, happier places, what ever comes, together. I want you to make the decision after you're completely better, so take your time thinking about it. In the mean time, though, don't disappear on me.
Banana Yoshimoto
I am lonely here sometimes. I'm like the gate, swinging in the breeze when I long for someone to just secure the latch and stop me from flailing about
Sarah Jio
Jack looked around for understanding, but found only respect.
William Golding
Loving each other began with longing, weaving her loneliness into his.
Leah Kaminsky
With solitude, however, fervently it is desired and embraced, comes loneliness. T. H White, the author, offered advice to those in sadness -- learn something new.
Carolyn G. Heilbrun
Out in the cold I stand,Looking on at the world sitting tight,With its people in their nice little worlds,And the friends who don’t even know me.It really makes no difference to their world where I am.If I'm there, it keeps going.If I’m not, it goes on.While I walk around, wandering, wondering,My mind a mass of mixed-up machinery,Clashing with conflicts and unanswered questions.I don’t ask the world if it is real-It sits up there on its foundations,Secure, concrete, hard, stone and real.But maybe I’m not realOr if I am, maybe I shouldn’t be.They answer, ‘Smile, God loves you’,But I can’t smile.I’m numbed by cold inside and out.Even the heat in the square brick buildingsWould only warm my body, nothing else.I’m alone in a world full of people,Apart, shut up inside myself,Cold, unfeeling, in a cold unfeeling world.
Andrea Lovestrand Hanna
,,, let go of the real source of our unhappiness: our own self-obsession. Stress, loneliness, pessimism, financial worries, and unhappy relationships all have one thing in common: they're all about "me".
David Michie
The greatest tragedy is not death but a life without love
Robin Dabhi
In any case, there was only one tunnel, dark and lonely, mine, the tunnel in which I had spent my childhood, my youth, my whole life. And in one of those transparent lengths of the stone wall I had seen this girl and had gullibly believed that she was traveling another tunnel parallel to mine, when in reality she belonged to the broad world, to the world without confines of those who do not live in tunnels; and perhaps she had peeped into one of my strange windows out of curiosity and had caught a glimpse of my doomed loneliness, or her fancy had been intrigued by the mute language, the clue of my painting.And then, while I advanced always along my corridor, she lived her normal life outside, the exciting life of those people who live outside, that strange, absurd life in which there are dances and parties and gaiety and frivolity. And it happened at times that when I walked by one of my windows she was waiting for me, silent and longing (why was she waiting for me? why silent and longing?); but other times she did not get there on time, or she forgot about this poor creature hemmed in, and then I, with my face pressed against the glass wall, could see her in the distance, smiling or dancing carefree, or, what was worse, I could not see her at all and I imagined her in inaccessible or vile places. And then I felt my destiny a far lonelier one than I had imagined.
Ernesto Sabato
How sad it was to realize that sometimes you never got there. That sometimes you lived a whole life skittering across the surface as the years passed, unblessed.
Emma Cline
It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one's solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem. Can blue solve the problem, or can it at least keep me company within it?—No, not exactly. It cannot love me that way; it has no arms. But sometimes I do feel its presence to be a sort of wink—Here you are again, it says, and so am I.
Maggie Nelson
I think one of the reasons why people tend to fake an entire relationship is maybe they are just afraid of being alone or are lonely right now!
Saif Ullah
I think loneliness is much better than companionship of a selfish.
Tanmaya Guru
Mr. Heathcliff, you have nobody to love you; and, however miserable you make us, we shall still have the revenge of thinking that your cruelty rises from your greater misery! You are miseable, are you not? Lonely, like the devil, and envious like him? Nobody loves you - nobody will cry for you, when you die! I wouldnt't be you!
Emily Brontë
I think the hardest part of being a teenage, or any age really, is the misconception that you're alone. You're not alone. You're not the only one going through what you're going through, and life does get better if you want it to.
Ellie Elisabeth
The things I was good at had no real application: addressing envelopes in bubble letters with smiling creatures on the flap. Making sludgy coffee I drank with grave affect. Finding a certain desired song playing on the radio, like a medium scanning for news of the dead.
Emma Cline
I expect you to vanishup and up into the tree,a shake of the branchesand gone like youhad never happened.But you came down and handed me a leaf"from seven limbs up,already yellow," you said,and then you walked awayand you were still real.
Karen Finneyfrock
Well, I’m just going to say it.I’m listening, Louis said.I wonder if you would consider coming to my house sometimes to sleep with me.
Kent Haruf
Whether Neil left today or tomorrow or next week, he'd leave alone. Two, five, ten years from now, if Neil was even still alive, he'd still be alone. He could be anyone, anywhere in the world, but he'd be alone until the day he died. He'd never trust anyone enough to let them in.
Nora Sakavic
Happiness is often presented as being very dull but, he thought, lying awake, that is because dull people are sometimes very happy and intelligent people can go around making themselves and everyone else miserable. He had never found happiness dull. It always seemed more exciting than any other thing and capable of as great intensity as sorrow to those people who were capable of having it. This may not be true but he had believed it to be true for a long time and this summer they had experienced happiness for a month now and, already, in the nights, he was lonely for it before it had ever gone away.
Ernest Hemingway
People bear loneliness every day. They think they won't be able to, that they won't survive, but somehow one second slips into another, becomes an hour, a day, a week, and they are still living. They are still alone, even in the middle of a crowd of people. Even with a partner, a child.
Laura Barnett
Stars, too, were time travelers. How many of those ancient points of light were the last echoes of suns now dead? If all the suns but ours collapsed tonight, how many lifetimes would it take us to realize we were alone?
Ransom Riggs
we used to talk all nightand do things alone togetherand i’ve begun(as a reaction to a feeling)to balancethe pleasure of lonelinessagainst the painof loving you
Nikki Giovanni
I, for instance, was triumphant over everyone; everyone, of course, was in dust and ashes, and was forced spontaneously to recognise my superiority, and I forgave them all. I was a poet and a grand gentleman, I fell in love; I came in for countless millions and immediately devoted them to humanity, and at the same time I confessed before all the people my shameful deeds, which, of course, were not merely shameful, but had in them much that was "sublime and beautiful" something in the Manfred style. Everyone would kiss me and weep (what idiots they would be if they did not), while I should go barefoot and hungry preaching new ideas and fighting a victorious Austerlitz against the obscurantists. Then the band would play a march, an amnesty would be declared, the Pope would agree to retire from Rome to Brazil; then there would be a ball for the whole of Italy at the Villa Borghese on the shores of Lake Como, Lake Como being for that purpose transferred to the neighbourhood of Rome; then would come a scene in the bushes, and so on, and so on — as though you did not know all about it?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
By now he had learned. Choices are made in brief seconds and paid for in the time that remains.
Paolo Giordano
Just slowly, among his growing riches, Siddhartha had assumed something of the childlike people's ways for himself, something of their childlikeness and of their fearfulness. And yet, he envied them, envied them just the more, the more similar he became to them. He envied them for the one thing that was missing from him and that they had, the importance they were able to attach to their lives, the amount of passion in their joys and fears, the fearful but sweet happiness of being constantly in love. These people were all of the time in love with themselves, with women, with their children, with honours or money, with plans or hopes.
Hermann Hesse
And then, for an hour, he became aware of the strange life he was leading, of him doing lots of things which were only a game, of, though being happy and feeling joy at times, real life still passing him by and not touching him. As a ball-player plays with his balls, he played with his business-deals, with the people around him, watched them, found amusement in them; with his heart, with the source of his being, he was not with them. The source ran somewhere, far away from him, ran and ran invisibly, had nothing to do with his life any more. And at several times he suddenly became scared on account of such thoughts and wished that he would also be gifted with the ability to participate in all of this childlike-naive occupations of the daytime with passion and with his heart, really to live, really to act, really to enjoy and to live instead of just standing by as a spectator.
Hermann Hesse
Loneliness isn't a disease, it is only a moment to learn something better
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Don't be afraid of the dark." She tousled his hair tolerantly. "I've never known a man who wasn't scared of more things than I was.
Edward Hoagland
I’m considering keeping the shutters open, even if people are spying on me at night from the apartment across the street. Especially if they are spying on me. It makes me feel less alone. I have a mental camaraderie with that imaginary person and their imaginary gaze. I find myself performing myself for them and exaggerating my facial expressions so they can see me more clearly, like actors project their voices on stage. I’m miming myself.
Jalina Mhyana
Although it's great to appear to a feast, home is always sweet, though it may be lonely and cold like death
Bangambiki Habyarimana

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