β
The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It's the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.
β
β
Lois Lowry (The Giver (The Giver, #1))
β
Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.
β
β
Maya Angelou
β
Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.
β
β
Jodi Picoult (My Sisterβs Keeper)
β
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?
β
β
Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)
β
The loneliest moment in someoneβs life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald
β
Real loneliness is not necessarily limited to when you are alone.
β
β
Charles Bukowski
β
Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.
β
β
Arthur C. Clarke
β
Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony.
β
β
Douglas Coupland (Shampoo Planet)
β
Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all. It just leads to disappointment.
β
β
Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood)
β
All I ever wanted was to reach out and touch another human being not just with my hands but with my heart.
β
β
Tahereh Mafi (Shatter Me (Shatter Me, #1))
β
The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved.
β
β
Mother Teresa
β
I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don't know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. In reality those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my ''idea of them.
β
β
AnaΓ―s Nin
β
The worst loneliness is to not be comfortable with yourself.
β
β
Mark Twain
β
If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.
β
β
Jean-Paul Sartre
β
Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.
β
β
HonorΓ© de Balzac
β
Maybe everβbody in the whole damn world is scared of each other.
β
β
John Steinbeck (Of Mice and Men)
β
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.
β
β
Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)
β
All great and precious things are lonely.
β
β
John Steinbeck (East of Eden)
β
I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.
β
β
Edgar Allan Poe
β
Iβm here. I love you. I donβt care if you need to stay up crying all night long, I will stay with you. If you need the medication again, go ahead and take itβI will love you through that, as well. If you donβt need the medication, I will love you, too. Thereβs nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than Depression and I am braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.
β
β
Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)
β
Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.
β
β
C.G. Jung
β
I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.
β
β
Kahlil Gibran (The Madman)
β
there is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in the slow movement of
the hands of a clock.
people so tired
mutilated
either by love or no love.
people just are not good to each other
one on one.
the rich are not good to the rich
the poor are not good to the poor.
we are afraid.
our educational system tells us
that we can all be
big-ass winners.
it hasn't told us
about the gutters
or the suicides.
or the terror of one person
aching in one place
alone
untouched
unspoken to
watering a plant.
β
β
Charles Bukowski (Love Is a Dog from Hell)
β
being alone never felt right. sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.
β
β
Charles Bukowski (Women)
β
there is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock
β
β
Charles Bukowski (Love Is a Dog from Hell)
β
Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.
β
β
Edna St. Vincent Millay
β
The trouble is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely.
β
β
Charlotte BrontΓ«
β
I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish⦠You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.
β
β
Simone de Beauvoir
β
When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives.
β
β
George R.R. Martin (A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, #1))
β
I'll never forget how the depression and loneliness felt good and bad at the same time. Still does.
β
β
Henry Rollins (The Portable Henry Rollins)
β
Loneliness is a sign you are in desperate need of yourself.
β
β
Rupi Kaur (milk and honey)
β
If you know someone whoβs depressed, please resolve never to ask them why. Depression isnβt a straightforward response to a bad situation; depression just is, like the weather.
Try to understand the blackness, lethargy, hopelessness, and loneliness theyβre going through. Be there for them when they come through the other side. Itβs hard to be a friend to someone whoβs depressed, but it is one of the kindest, noblest, and best things you will ever do.
β
β
Stephen Fry
β
I donβt know whatβs worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what youβve always wanted to be, and feel alone.
β
β
Daniel Keyes (Flowers for Algernon)
β
I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
β
We live as we dream--alone....
β
β
Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness)
β
sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love
β
β
Gabriel GarcΓa MΓ‘rquez
β
I've never been lonely. I've been in a room -- I've felt suicidal. I've been depressed. I've felt awful -- awful beyond all -- but I never felt that one other person could enter that room and cure what was bothering me...or that any number of people could enter that room. In other words, loneliness is something I've never been bothered with because I've always had this terrible itch for solitude. It's being at a party, or at a stadium full of people cheering for something, that I might feel loneliness. I'll quote Ibsen, "The strongest men are the most alone." I've never thought, "Well, some beautiful blonde will come in here and give me a fuck-job, rub my balls, and I'll feel good." No, that won't help. You know the typical crowd, "Wow, it's Friday night, what are you going to do? Just sit there?" Well, yeah. Because there's nothing out there. It's stupidity. Stupid people mingling with stupid people. Let them stupidify themselves. I've never been bothered with the need to rush out into the night. I hid in bars, because I didn't want to hide in factories. That's all. Sorry for all the millions, but I've never been lonely. I like myself. I'm the best form of entertainment I have. Let's drink more wine!
β
β
Charles Bukowski
β
I don't want to be married just to be married. I can't think of anything lonelier than spending the rest of my life with someone I can't talk to, or worse, someone I can't be silent with.
β
β
Mary Ann Shaffer (The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society)
β
Come to me, squeeze my hand, know my loneliness, and give me the love, the strength to prevail on the perilous road before me.
β
β
Dang Thuy Tram
β
she was consumed by 3 simple things:
drink, despair, loneliness; and 2 more:
youth and beauty
β
β
Charles Bukowski (The People Look Like Flowers at Last)
β
If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.
β
β
Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)
β
A great fire burns within me, but no one stops to warm themselves at it, and passers-by only see a wisp of smoke
β
β
Vincent van Gogh
β
And the danger is that in this move toward new horizons and far directions, that I may lose what I have now, and not find anything except loneliness.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)
β
But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning.
β
β
Haruki Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)
β
β¨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 will 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.
β
β
Janet Fitch (White Oleander)
β
God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)
β
How we need another soul to cling to.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)
β
What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.
β
β
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage)
β
When you're surrounded by all these people, it can be lonelier than when you're by yourself. You can be in a huge crowd, but if you don't feel like you can trust anyone or talk to anybody, you feel like you're really alone.
β
β
Fiona Apple
β
I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.
β
β
Rainer Maria Rilke
β
I'm lonely. And I'm lonely in some horribly deep way and for a flash of an instant, I can see just how lonely, and how deep this feeling runs. And it scares the shit out of me to be this lonely because it seems catastrophic.
β
β
Augusten Burroughs (Dry)
β
Separation
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
β
β
W.S. Merwin
β
So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose and Diary Excerpts)
β
What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.
β
β
Friedrich Nietzsche (The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs)
β
Where are the people?β resumed the little prince at last. βItβs a little lonely in the desertβ¦β βIt is lonely when youβre among people, too,β said the snake.
β
β
Antoine de Saint-ExupΓ©ry (The Little Prince)
β
It is an absolute human certainty that no one can know his own beauty or perceive a sense of his own worth until it has been reflected back to him in the mirror of another loving, caring human being.
β
β
John Joseph Powell (The Secret of Staying in Love)
β
and when nobody wakes you up in the morning, and when nobody waits for you at night, and when you can do whatever you want. what do you call it, freedom or loneliness?
β
β
Milan Kundera
β
Some nights are made for torture, or reflection, or the savoring of loneliness.
β
β
Poppy Z. Brite
β
When you have nobody you can make a cup of tea for, when nobody needs you, that's when I think life is over.
β
β
Audrey Hepburn
β
It would be too easy to say that I feel invisible. Instead, I feel painfully visible, and entirely ignored.
β
β
David Levithan (Every Day (Every Day, #1))
β
The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love. The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty -- it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There's a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God.
β
β
Mother Teresa (A Simple Path: Mother Teresa)
β
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between starsβon stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
β
β
Robert Frost (The Poetry of Robert Frost)
β
Some people are just not meant to be in this world. It's just too much for them.
β
β
Phoebe Stone (The Boy on Cinnamon Street)
β
The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.
β
β
Mitch Albom (The Five People You Meet in Heaven)
β
I'm not much but I'm all I have.
β
β
Philip K. Dick (Martian Time-Slip)
β
I choose to love you in silenceβ¦
For in silence I find no rejection,
I choose to love you in lonelinessβ¦
For in loneliness no one owns you but me,
I choose to adore you from a distanceβ¦
For distance will shield me from pain,
I choose to kiss you in the windβ¦
For the wind is gentler than my lips,
I choose to hold you in my dreamsβ¦
For in my dreams, you have no end.
β
β
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi
β
It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know.
β
β
David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
β
Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.
β
β
David Foster Wallace
β
Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine.
β
β
Charlotte BrontΓ« (Jane Eyre)
β
In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness.
And God said, "Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done." And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close to mud as man sat up, looked around, and spoke. Man blinked. "What is the purpose of all this?" he asked politely.
"Everything must have a purpose?" asked God.
"Certainly," said man.
"Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this," said God.
And He went away.
β
β
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Catβs Cradle)
β
i felt her absence. it was like waking up one day with no teeth in your mouth. you wouldn't need to run to the mirror to know they were gone
β
β
James Dashner (The Scorch Trials (The Maze Runner, #2))
β
I feel too much. That's what's going on.' 'Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel in the wrong ways?' 'My insides don't match up with my outsides.' 'Do anyone's insides and outsides match up?' 'I don't know. I'm only me.' 'Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and outside.' 'But it's worse for me.' 'I wonder if everyone thinks it's worse for him.' 'Probably. But it really is worse for me.
β
β
Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close)
β
Man can never know the loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in the woman's womb only to gather strength, he nourishes himself from this fusion, and then he rises and goes into the world, into his work, into battle, into art. He is not lonely. He is busy. The memory of the swim in amniotic fluid gives him energy, completion. Woman may be busy too, but she feels empty. Sensuality for her is not only a wave of pleasure in which she is bathed, and a charge of electric joy at contact with another. When man lies in her womb, she is fulfilled, each act of love a taking of man within her, an act of birth and rebirth, of child rearing and man bearing. Man lies in her womb and is reborn each time anew with a desire to act, to be. But for woman, the climax is not in the birth, but in the moment man rests inside of her.
β
β
AnaΓ―s Nin (The Diary of AnaΓ―s Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934)
β
Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe. The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass.
β
β
D.H. Lawrence (Lady Chatterley's Lover)
β
There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction--every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and excitement at about a million miles an hour.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.
β
β
E.E. Cummings
β
I realize, for the first time, how very lonely I've been in the arena. How comforting the presence of another human being can be.
β
β
Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, #1))
β
What is hell? Hell is oneself.
Hell is alone, the other figures in it
Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from
And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.
β
β
T.S. Eliot
β
Sometimes I feel so- I donβt know - lonely. The kind of helpless feeling when everything youβre used to has been ripped away. Like thereβs no more gravity, and Iβm left to drift in outer space with no idea where Iβm goingβ
Like a little lost Sputnik?β
I guess so.
β
β
Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)
β
He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others--the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad.
β
β
Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything is Illuminated)
β
If a man cannot understand the beauty of life, it is probably because life never understood the beauty in him.
β
β
Criss Jami (Killosophy)
β
I was always holding onto people, and they were always leaving.
β
β
Lili St. Crow (Jealousy (Strange Angels, #3))
β
My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.
β
β
Ursula K. Le Guin
β
Are you upset little friend? Have you been lying awake worrying? Well, don't worry...I'm here. The flood waters will recede, the famine will end, the sun will shine tomorrow, and I will always be here to take care of you.
β
β
Charles M. Schulz
β
I wish I could tell you how lonely I am. How cold and harsh it is here. Everywhere there is conflict and unkindness. I think God has forsaken this place. I believe I have seen hell and it's white, it's snow-white.
β
β
Sandy Welch
β
She closes her eyes. He probably wonβt come back, she thinks. Or he will, differently. What they have now they can never have back again. But for her the pain of loneliness will be nothing to the pain that she used to feel, of being unworthy. He brought her goodness like a gift and now it belongs to her. Meanwhile his life opens out before him in all directions at once. Theyβve done a lot of good for each other. Really, she thinks, really. People can really change one another.
You should go, she says. Iβll always be here. You know that.
β
β
Sally Rooney (Normal People)
β
The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.
β
β
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Infidel)
β
We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being.
β
β
Hermann Hesse
β
Willβs voice dropped. βEveryone makes mistakes, Jem.β
βYes,β said Jem. βYou just make more of them than most people.β
βI ββ
βYou hurt everyone,β said Jem. βEveryone whose life you touch.β
βNot you,β Will whispered. βI hurt everyone but you. I never meant to
hurt you.β
Jem put his hands up, pressing his palms against his eyes. βWill ββ
βYou canβt never forgive me,β Will said in disbelief, hearing the
panic tinging his own voice. βIβd be ββ
βAlone?β Jem lowered his hand, but he was smiling now, crookedly. βAnd
whose fault is that?
β
β
Cassandra Clare (Clockwork Prince (The Infernal Devices, #2))
β
Loneliness is a strange sort of thing.
It creeps on you, quiet and still, sits by your side in the dark, strokes by your hair as you sleep. It wraps itself around your bones, squeezing so tight you almost can't breathe. It leaves lies in your heart, lies next to you at night, leaches the light out of every corner. It's a constant companion, clasping your hand only to yank you down when you're struggling to stand up.
You wake up in the morning and wonder who you are. You fail to fall asleep at night and tremble in your skin. You doubt you doubt you doubt.
do I
don't I
should I
why won't I
And even when you're ready to let go. When you're ready to break free. When you're ready to be brand-new. Loneliness is an old friend stand beside you in the mirror, looking you in the eye, challenging you to live your life without it. You can't find the words to fight yourself, to fight the words screaming that you're not enough never enough never ever enough.
Loneliness is a bitter, wretched companion.
Sometimes it just won't let go.
β
β
Tahereh Mafi (Unravel Me (Shatter Me, #2))
β
When God Created Mothers"
When the Good Lord was creating mothers, He was into His sixth day of "overtime" when the angel appeared and said. "You're doing a lot of fiddling around on this one."
And God said, "Have you read the specs on this order?" She has to be completely washable, but not plastic. Have 180 moveable parts...all replaceable. Run on black coffee and leftovers. Have a lap that disappears when she stands up. A kiss that can cure anything from a broken leg to a disappointed love affair. And six pairs of hands."
The angel shook her head slowly and said. "Six pairs of hands.... no way."
It's not the hands that are causing me problems," God remarked, "it's the three pairs of eyes that mothers have to have."
That's on the standard model?" asked the angel. God nodded.
One pair that sees through closed doors when she asks, 'What are you kids doing in there?' when she already knows. Another here in the back of her head that sees what she shouldn't but what she has to know, and of course the ones here in front that can look at a child when he goofs up and say. 'I understand and I love you' without so much as uttering a word."
God," said the angel touching his sleeve gently, "Get some rest tomorrow...."
I can't," said God, "I'm so close to creating something so close to myself. Already I have one who heals herself when she is sick...can feed a family of six on one pound of hamburger...and can get a nine year old to stand under a shower."
The angel circled the model of a mother very slowly. "It's too soft," she sighed.
But tough!" said God excitedly. "You can imagine what this mother can do or endure."
Can it think?"
Not only can it think, but it can reason and compromise," said the Creator.
Finally, the angel bent over and ran her finger across the cheek.
There's a leak," she pronounced. "I told You that You were trying to put too much into this model."
It's not a leak," said the Lord, "It's a tear."
What's it for?"
It's for joy, sadness, disappointment, pain, loneliness, and pride."
You are a genius, " said the angel.
Somberly, God said, "I didn't put it there.
β
β
Erma Bombeck (When God Created Mothers)
β
Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender, be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly, and listen to others, even the dull and ignorant; they too have their story. Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love β for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you from misfortune. But do not distress yourself with imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your labours and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.
β
β
Max Ehrmann (Desiderata: A Poem for a Way of Life)
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People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.
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Wendell Berry (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays)
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I ask the impossible: love me forever.
Love me when all desire is gone.
Love me with the single mindedness of a monk.
When the world in its entirety,
and all that you hold sacred advise you
against it: love me still more.
When rage fills you and has no name: love me.
When each step from your door to our job tires you--
love me; and from job to home again, love me, love me.
Love me when you're bored--
when every woman you see is more beautiful than the last,
or more pathetic, love me as you always have:
not as admirer or judge, but with
the compassion you save for yourself
in your solitude.
Love me as you relish your loneliness,
the anticipation of your death,
mysteries of the flesh, as it tears and mends.
Love me as your most treasured childhood memory--
and if there is none to recall--
imagine one, place me there with you.
Love me withered as you loved me new.
Love me as if I were forever--
and I, will make the impossible
a simple act,
by loving you, loving you as I do
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Ana Castillo (I Ask the Impossible)
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I'm tired of living unable to love anyone. I don't have a single friend - not one. And, worst of all, I can't even love myself. Why is that? Why can't I love myself? It's because I can't love anyone else. A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else. Do you understand what I am saying? A person who is incapable of loving another cannot properly love himself.
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Haruki Murakami (1Q84 (1Q84, #1-3))
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There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you're high it's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one's marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends' faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against-- you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.
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Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)
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No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.
At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.
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C.S. Lewis (A Grief Observed)
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First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons β but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which had lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world β a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring β this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth.
Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else β but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.
It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.
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Carson McCullers (The Ballad of the Sad CafΓ© and Other Stories)
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Why aren't you in school? I see you every day wandering around."
"Oh, they don't miss me," she said. "I'm antisocial, they say. I don't mix. It's so strange. I'm very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn't it? Social to me means talking to you about things like this." She rattled some chestnuts that had fallen off the tree in the front yard. "Or talking about how strange the world is. Being with people is nice. But I don't think it's social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don't; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film-teacher. That's not social to me at all. It's a lot of funnels and lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it's wine when it's not. They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can't do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people around, break windowpanes in the Window Smasher place or wreck cars in the Car Wrecker place with the big steel ball. Or go out in the cars and race on the streets, trying to see how close you can get to lampposts, playing 'chicken' and 'knock hubcaps.' I guess I'm everything they say I am, all right. I haven't any friends. That's supposed to prove I'm abnormal. But everyone I know is either shouting or dancing around like wild or beating up one another. Do you notice how people hurt each other nowadays?
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Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)
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1. Iβm lonely so I do lonely things
2. Loving you was like going to war; I never came back the same.
3. You hate women, just like your father and his father, so it runs in your blood.
4. I was wandering the derelict car park of your heart looking for a ride home.
5. Youβre a ghost town Iβm too patriotic to leave.
6. I stay because youβre the beginning of the dream I want to remember.
7. I didnβt call him back because he likes his girls voiceless.
8. Itβs not that he wants to be a liar; itβs just that he doesnβt know the truth.
9. I couldnβt love you, you were a small war.
10. We covered the smell of loss with jokes.
11. I didnβt want to fail at love like our parents.
12. You made the nomad in me build a house and stay.
13. Iβm not a dog.
14. We were trying to prove our blood wrong.
15. I was still lonely so I did even lonelier things.
16. Yes, Iβm insecure, but so was my mother and her mother.
17. No, he loves me he just makes me cry a lot.
18. He knows all of my secrets and still wants to kiss me.
19. You were too cruel to love for a long time.
20. It just didnβt work out.
21. My dad walked out one afternoon and never came back.
22. I canβt sleep because I can still taste him in my mouth.
23. I cut him out at the root, he was my favorite tree, rotting, threatening the foundations of my home.
24. The women in my family die waiting.
25. Because I didnβt want to die waiting for you.
26. I had to leave, I felt lonely when he held me.
27. Youβre the song I rewind until I know all the words and I feel sick.
28. He sent me a text that said βI love you so bad.β
29. His heart wasnβt as beautiful as his smile
30. We emotionally manipulated one another until we thought it was love.
31. Forgive me, I was lonely so I chose you.
32. Iβm a lover without a lover.
33. Iβm lovely and lonely.
34. I belong deeply to myself .
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Warsan Shire