Loneliness

Loneliness is an emotional state in which a person experiences a powerful feeling of emptiness and isolation, of being cut off, disconnected from, and alienated towards other people. The lonely person may find it difficult or even impossible to have any form of meaningful human contact. The first recorded use of the word "lonely" was in William Shakespeare's Coriolanus.

Sourced

• 'I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an' he gets sick.'
  • Crooks in, Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

• Loneliness has followed me my whole life. Everywhere. In bars, cars, sidewalks, stores. Everywhere. There's no escape. I'm God's lonely man.
  • Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver

• Well I'm the only one here.
  • Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver

• They're sharing a drink they call loneliness
  But it's better than drinking alone.
  • Billy Joel, "Piano Man", Piano Man (1973)

• Life is very long when you're lonely.
  • Morrissey, in "The Queen Is Dead", from the album of the same name by The Smiths (1986)

• All the lonely people, where do they all come from?
  • The Beatles, "Eleanor Rigby"

• Loneliness / Got a mind of its own / The more people around / The more you feel alone
  • Bob Dylan, "Marchin' to the City", The Bootleg Series Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs

• We suffer a lot in our society from loneliness. So much of our life is an attempt to not be lonely: 'Let's talk to each other; let's do things together so we won't be lonely.' And yet inevitably, we are really alone in these human forms. We can pretend; we can entertain each other; but that's about the best we can do. When it comes to the actual experience of life, we're very much alone; and to expect anyone else to take away our loneliness is asking too much.
  • American Buddhist monk Ajahn Sumedho: The Way it is

• It's not that I hate people, I just feel better when they're not around.
  • Henry Chinaski in Bar Fly

• It's pointless to cry. One is born and dies alone...
  • Cesare Pavese, The house on the hill

• Men who have a tempestuous inner life and do not seek to give vent to it by talking or writing are simply men who have no tempestuous inner life.
  Give company to a lonely man and he will talk more than anyone.
  • Cesare Pavese, This Business of Living, 1938-09-19

• Insults have broken my heart and left me weak, I looked for sympathy but there was none; I found no one to comfort me.
  • Psalm 69:20

• Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.
  • Octavio Paz in The Labyrinth of Solitude

• Who knows what true happiness is? Not the conventional word but the naked terror. To the lonely themselves, it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.
  • Joseph Conrad in Under Western Eyes

• I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.
  • T.S. Eliot in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

• He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone.
  • James Joyce in Dubliners, "A Painful Case"

• Such a lonely day / And it's mine / The most loneliest day of my life. (sic)
  • System of a Down "Lonely Day" from "Hypnotize"

• I am very old... my people were once around me like the sands of the shore... many... many... They have all passed away. They have died like the grass... they have gone to the mountains. I do not complain, the antelope falls with the arrow. I had a son. I loved him. When the palefaces came he went away. I do not know where he is. I am a Christian Indian, I am all that is left of my people. I am alone.
  • Pedro Alcantara "Last of the Yelamu" in Congressional Edition 1853 [1]

Unsourced

• Loneliness is a barrier that prevents one from uniting with the inner self.
  • Carl Rogers

• Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.
  • Mother Teresa

• Don't attach yourself to anyone who shows you the least bit of attention because you're lonely. Loneliness is the human condition. No one is ever going to fill that space.
  • White Oleander by Janet Fitch

• Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.
  • White Oleander by Janet Fitch

• At the innermost core of all loneliness is a deep and powerful yearning for union with one's lost self.
  • Brendan Francis

• When so many are lonely… as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.
  • Tennessee Williams

• Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.
  • Maya Angelou

• To break the silence the old man said the first thing that came to his mind: "Loneliness is a type of violence."
  • Hiding Out by Jonathan Messinger