Best 2736 quotes in «loneliness quotes» category

Herveus is impervious to emotions, but Aveline has unlocked something in him. He is drowning in a great wave, just trying to get back to the shore. The main memories he has from his childhood are of hunger. Just the echo of the gnawing pain makes him double over clasping his stomach. The other strongest memories are of violence—beatings from strangers leaving him unable to move for days. In all the haunting recollections, it had always been just him, alone. How could I forget my sister? It was like an impenetrable gate had opened in his mind, bringing forth another set of sad blue eyes from a time forgotten. I hadn’t been alone

Her world fragmented into dozens of sharp, cutting shards, shedding the salty blood and saltier tears that ringed the bitter cocktail of her despair. She was caterpillar and butterfly, both, caught in a cocoon of raw nerves and open sores; she was insanity, wrapped up in the thin, transient wrappings of a temporary lucidity; and she was afraid, because an innate desire lay in the bottom reaches of her psyche for the very poison that was killing her.

He saw her red eyes filled with tears of anger. "Tell me why this rage?" He asked holding her in his arms. "Why do you fence for yourself so much? She sighed and muttered, "Because all I really want is nothing but to be proved wrong.

He saw the dawn again, watched with lonely anguish from that open door, in the violet-shaded light, a slow bomb bursting over the Sierra Madre-Sonnenaufgang!-the oxen harnessed to their carts with wooden disc wheels patiently waiting outside for their drivers, in the sharp cool pure air of heaven. The Consul's longing was so great his soul was locked with the essence of the place as he stood and he was gripped by thoughts like those of the mariner who, sighting the faint beacon of Start Point after a long voyage, knows that soon he will embrace his wife.

He sits amongst the crowd, entirely alone.

He’s like a hero come back from the war, a poor maimed bastard living out the reality of his dreams. Wherever he sits himself the chair collapses; whatever door he enters the room is empty: whatever he puts in his mouth leaves a bad taste. Everything is just the same as it was before; the elements are unchanged, the dream is no different than the reality. Only, between the time he went to sleep and the time he woke up, his body was stolen.

He shall rule, whom they look not for that dwell upon the earth, and the fowls shall take their flight away together:

He stared at the corner of the yellowed ceiling, at the spider web and its solitary occupant. “Why here?” he asked the spider. “You could choose anywhere instead of this house. I know I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have to be.” The spider said nothing. Come to think of it, Callum was sure the spider hadn’t moved even an inch in the last week. Maybe it was dead. Dead and crisp like the untouched wasp carcass on his window sill.

He stroked her back and kept a fierce grip on her like she’d fade away into one of the thousands of ghosts in this cemetery.

He's the only person who's entered my world apart from me.

He stopped, feeling lonely in his long speech.

He thought that fat boys were probably only allowed to love pretty girls inside. If he told anyone how he felt (not that he had anyone to tell), that person would probably laugh until he had a heart-attack.

He took deep breaths. He wanted to sleep. At least in sleeping, he could find a kind of peace. At least in sleeping, he could dream about his dead friends and maybe, until the sun came up, feel like he wasn't all alone.

He thought of night coming on. He thought of the loneliness of tonight, this first night in the ground. This, he thought, was the moment when the dead must first feel truly alone. This was the moment when the dead, in loneliness, feel the first stirrings of the long penance of decay. This was the moment when the dead realize the truth: This is it, it will never be different. To be dead, he thought, that was to know that nothing would ever be different.

He was free and unencumbered. Which is to say alone and unemployed.

He was in love with every pretty woman he saw now, their forms at a distance, their shadows on the walls.

He was smarter than most, more sensitive. In that regard he was more prepared for the loneliness of senescence than she was. He'd been a stranger in the world for most of his life.

he will have no one near him but Nature herself; and her he takes to wife in the wilderness of waters, and the best of wives she is, though she keeps so many moody secrets.

he writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated lo neliness, and a sense of local and global distress. The square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb and the cocktail party are variously identified as sources of the grudge. There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.

Hey, I wish we hung out more in high school. Why didn’t we?” “I was hiding,” Jake said thoughtfully. “Me too.” “You?” “In my own way.” Hearing that made Jake wonder if they’d all been in hiding, if he hadn’t been the only one who’d felt alone for so much of high school.

He would be lonely all his life. But a man took it for his share and went on.

His act was rather that of a harmless lunatic than an enemy. We were not so new to the country as not to know that the solitary life of many a plainsman had a tendency to develop eccentricities of conduct and character not always easily distinguishable from mental aberration. A man is like a tree: in a forest of his fellows he will grow as straight as his generic and individual nature permits; alone, in the open, he yields to the deforming stresses and tortions that environ him.

His cigarettes helped mark the passage of time, especially on days that seemed all sun and sky...The dependable dwindling of his cigarette supply reassured him that he hadn't been left out here, that eventually he would have to ride into town and things would still be there, that the world hadn't stopped whirling.

His life would be lonely too until he, too, died, ceased to exist, became a memory - if anyone remembered him.

Homer looked back at me. 'Pete, can I tell ya somethin' real important?' 'Sure, what is it?' I couldn't imagine what Homer was about to say. He sat down on a rounded rock. I sat down too. 'One thing I've learned is that ya never know what's gonna happen to ya in this old life. Everything can change, just like that.' He snapped his fingers, loud and fast. 'You never know what might happen to ya and that dawg ah yers. Ya know what you should do? You ought to settle down here ... On my mountain.' His words were coming quickly and eagerly. 'I'll teach ya all the ways of livin' up here, and someday when ya get a place built, you can have yerself a family.' Homer wasn't kidding me. 'And, besides, ya know I ain't gonna be here forever. When I leave, then you can take care of this place for me. You understand more than anyone why I love this place so much. I know ya wouldn't let them lumbermen and hunters come up here and hurt my place.' There was a shell around Homer and reaching his heart was like breaking a granite boulder with your bare hands. But now, Homer's heart was breaking. After he finished he turned away from me. When he turned back, his questioning eyes were teary. 'Homer, what you just said was beautiful.' I looked down at my boots and rolled a rock back and forth under my heel. 'But, I don't know. I'll have to give it some serious thought, okay?' As quickly as Homer had broken his stride and opened himself up, he was fast on his feet walking back up the mountain. He stayed as quiet as the king trees that he loved so much, never again saying a word to me about his amazing invitation.

Hold me, Gerty, hold me, or I shall think of things.

Home. the word always had air quotes around it in her mind. She'd done what she could to make her flat cozy, filling it with art, books, ornate lanterns, and a Persian carpet as soft as lynx fur. And of course there were her angel wings taking up one whole wall. But there was no help for the real emptiness; its close air was stirred by no breath but her own. When she was alone, the empty place within her, the missingness, as she thought of it, seemed to swell. Even being with Kaz had done something to keep it at bay, though not enough. Never enough.

How, and when shall these things come to pass? wherefore are our years few and evil?

How are we any different? You and I are the same. How are we any different? We both share the same name. Is that anyway to live with those who we supposed to love? Is that anyway to live by building walls between you and me?

How easily such a thing can become a mania, how the most normal and sensible of women once this passion to be thin is upon them, can lose completely their sense of balance and proportion and spend years dealing with this madness.

how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man's untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitude--utter solitude without a policeman--by the way of silence--utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion? These little things make all the great difference. When they are gone you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness

How do you explain to a child who likes everyone in the world that adult life consists to a great extent of cutting people away?

However, I must admit that keeping myself to myself has not always been comforting. At times, I seemed to suffer spells of depression and loneliness, longing to become healthy again; of going out and facing a world of injustices, of misery, of widespread indifference.

How long can I be a wall, keeping the wind off? How long can I be Gentling the sun with the shade of my hand, Intercepting the blue bolts of a cold moon? The voices of loneliness, the voices of sorrow Lap at my back ineluctably. How shall it soften them, this little lullaby?

How Gloomy it is, to pause, to cease and to rust unburn, to get used and be indistinct. Like to live is to breathe.

How much do you trade to defeat lonesomeness?

How long you will live in your dreams? The time is now, it's better to go and follow them..

how much he loved being alone except when he didn't, except when it got to be too much?

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.

How was it possible to be with someone and yet feel so utterly alone? How was it possible to be with someone as wonderful, warm and kind as Andrew and yet still wonder if love would ever find you?

Huh. Well you and I just disagree. Maybe the world just feels differently to us. This is all going back to something that isn't really clear: that avant-garde stuff is hard to read. I'm not defending it, I'm saying that stuff - this is gonna get very abstract - but there's a certain set of magical stuff that fiction can do for us. There's maybe thirteen things, of which who even knows which ones we can talk about. But one of them has to do with the sense of, the sense of capturing, capturing what the world feels like to us, in the sort of way that I think that a reader can tell "Another sensibility like mine exists." Something else feels this way to someone else. So that the reader feels less lonely.

I almost thought that marriage was a cure to loneliness, alas! so many are lonely inside marriage. Then I realized it is not marriage that takes the loneliness away, but when both within marriage honour God and the vows made before Him.

I always come here when I can't sleep [. . .] every night.

I always pictured it a grand thing, the moment I would take off. Someone waving long after I was out of sight and some tune playing soft from somewhere I couldn’t see. I pictured it a clear line, some sort of sharp edge between before and after. But there is no such thing. You can take a U-turn where you’re walking on the pavement but people are just on their own ways home, and now you’re in their way. You keep walking against the tide and you think you’re doing something great but really you’re just pissing people off and when you finally get out on the open field where no directions exist, you find yourself lonely, not free, just a big, vast lonely world that surrounds you and you can go anywhere you please but suddenly you don’t want to go anywhere at all. You just want to go home. Back to your people.

I also often ask my guests about what they consider to be their invisible weaknesses and shortcomings. I do this because these are the characteristics that define us no less than our strengths. What we feel sets us apart from other people is often the thing that shapes us as individuals. This may be especially true of writers and actors, many of whom first started to develop their observational skills as a result of being sidelined from typical childhood or adolescent activities because of an infirmity or a feeling of not fitting in. Or so I’ve come to believe from talking to so many writers and actors over the years.

I am always alone, pretending to be someone else or lost in a vast emptiness. I miss life. I miss conversation and laughter and shared joy and hurt. I miss dancing and painting. I miss waking up to a day with no evil in it - at least, none that I can see.

How should they know? I can't reveal to a single friend what my soul conceals, whom I'm in love with or what I believe - my dreams, my thoughts - or why I grieve.

Alone in my room, I pondered the evidence. A perfect phrase. I would jot it down for future use. Like it or not, there are times when you need to be alone; times when you need to be lonely; times when you need to need other people.

I always welcomed the comforting cloak of night except for the times when I lost something in it.

I AM ALWAYS ALONE. BUT JUST NOW I WANT TO BE ALONE BY MYSELF.