LONELINESS QUOTES III
quotations about loneliness
When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.
ELIZABETH GILBERT
Eat, Pray, Love
If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Brave New World
The truly solitary being is not the man who is abandoned by men, but the man who suffers in their midst, who drags his desert through the marketplace and deploys his talents as a smiling leper, a mountebank of the irreparable.
EMIL CIORAN
A Short History of Decay
If all the beasts were gone, men would die from a great loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beasts also happens to the man. All things are connected.
CHIEF SEATTLE OF THE SUWAMISH TRIBE
letter to President Franklin Pierce
He felt the cold silence between worlds, the thrust of rocketships, the harsh, glamorous loneliness.
RAYMOND Z. GALLUN
"Prodigal's Aura"
The ideal attitude is to be able to live in a way that, no matter what the conditions may be, loneliness is impossible. The mountain-dwellers, suddenly thrown into a great city, would become wretched victims of loneliness. They would long for solitude just as other kinds of lonely people long for company. Without their mountains, without the association that helped to establish their habits, they would feel themselves indeed helpless and alone. The people in the streets are alien, irritating. The huddled buildings are an ache. The noise is a torment. The loss of the familiar they may find so intolerable as to drive them precipitately back.
JOHN DANIEL BARRY
"Loneliness", Reactions and Other Essays Discussing Those States of Feeling and Attitude of Mind That Find Expression In Our Individual Qualities
I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an' he gets sick.
JOHN STEINBECK
Of Mice and Men
Even to loneliness there is an end, for those who are lonely enough, long enough.
THEODORE STURGEON
"Saucer of Loneliness"
Loneliness doesn't have much to do with where you are.
HUGH HEFNER
Esquire, Jun. 2002
The feeling of loneliness is unique to humans. A tree or a bird may seem to be lonely, but this is an attribute bestowed by the person making the observation. The tree or the bird is incapable of perceiving loneliness. This feeling occurs when a person is alone, and, moved by his emotions, associates his own circumstances with those of the bird or the tree that he sees before him. Since this feeling entails an element of self-examination, it is not a purely objective observation. The feeling of loneliness produced is thus a form of aesthetics, in that while observing one's external environment, one is at the same time examining the self that is located within it, and to a certain extent this is an affirmation of one's own personal worth.
GAO XINGJIAN
speech presented on receiving the Golden Plate Award at the Forty-first International Achievement Summit of the American Academy of Achievement, Jun. 8, 2002
It is loneliness that makes the loudest noise. This is as true of men as of dogs.
ERIC HOFFER
"Thoughts of Eric Hoffer", The New York Times Magazine, Apr. 25, 1971
Everyone's alone -- or so it seems to me.
They make noises, and think they are talking to each other;
They make faces, and think they understand each other.
And I'm sure they don't. Is that a delusion?
T. S. ELIOT
The Cocktail Party
Any decent society must generate a feeling of community. Community offsets loneliness. It gives people a vitally necessary sense of belonging. Yet today the institutions on which community depends are crumbling in all the techno-societies. The result is a spreading plague of loneliness.
ALVIN TOFFLER
The Third Wave
We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say -- and to feel -- "Yes, that's the way it is, or at least that's the way I feel it. You're not as alone as you thought."
JOHN STEINBECK
"In Awe of Words", The Exonian, 1930
Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Sputnik Sweetheart
What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
GEORGE ELIOT
Middlemarch
We live as we dream--alone.
JOSEPH CONRAD
Heart of Darkness
Self is the only prison that can ever bind the soul.
HENRY VAN DYKE
"The Prison and the Angel"
Nothing is more sterile or lamentable than the man content to live within himself.
HAROLD PINTER
Tea Party
Physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance