Heartbreaking Quotes On Loneliness

Quotes About Loneliness

 

 

"Human beings can withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness. It is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings." 

Paulo Coelho

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. 

— Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

 “Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.” 

― Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections  

 “The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.”

― F. Scott Fitzgerald 

“Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony.”

― Douglas Coupland, Shampoo Planet  

“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.”

― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper 

“The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It's the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.”

― Lois Lowry, The Giver

“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. ”

― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“All I ever wanted was to reach out and touch another human being not just with my hands but with my heart.”

― Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me 

“Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.”

― Honoré de Balzac 

“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.”

― Edgar Allan Poe 

“being alone never felt right. sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.”

― Charles Bukowski, Women

“The trouble is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely.”

― Charlotte Brontë  

“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.”

 ― Edna St. Vincent Millay 

“
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.”

― Janet Fitch, White Oleander  

“Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.”

― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath  

“The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved.”

 ― Mother Teresa  

“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.”

― Augusten Burroughs, Dry

“If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.”

― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“A great fire burns within me, but no one stops to warm themselves at it, and passers-by only see a wisp of smoke”

― Vincent Van Gogh

“I was always holding onto people, and they were always leaving.”

― Lili St. Crow, Jealousy 

“Some nights are made for torture, or reflection, or the savoring of loneliness.”

― Poppy Z.Brite  

“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.”

― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.”

― May Sarton

“Everyone keeps telling me that time heals all wounds, but no one can tell me what I’m supposed to do right now. Right now I can’t sleep. It’s right now that I can’t eat. Right now I still hear his voice and sense his presence even though I know he’s not here. Right now all I seem to do is cry. I know all about time and wounds healing, but even if I had all the time in the world, I still don’t know what to do with all this hurt right now.”

― Nina Guilbeau, Too Many Sisters 

“The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of.”

― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“There is the solitude of suffering, when you go through darkness that is lonely, intense, and terrible. Words become powerless to express your pain; what others hear from your words is so distant and different from what you are actually suffering.”

― John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

 “But nothing makes a room feel emptier than wanting someone in it.”

― Calla Quinn, All the Time

“The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!”

― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

 “For the way loneliness is worse when you return to it after a reprieve—like the soul’s version of putting on a wet bathing suit, clammy and miserable.”

― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone

“She had become accustomed to being lonely. She was used to walking alone and to being considered 'different.' She did not suffer too much.”

― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“My loneliness was born when men praised my talkative faults and blamed my silent virtues.”

― Khalil Gibran, Sand and Foam

“Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you.”

― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“These days, loneliness is the new cancer - a shameful, embarrassing thing, brought upon yourself in some obscure way. A fearful, incurable thing thing, so horrifying that you dare not mention it; other people don't want to hear the word spoken aloud for fear that they might too be afflicted, or that it might tempt fate into visiting a similar horror upon them.”

― Gail Honeyman

“Absence makes the heart grow fonder, but it sure makes the rest of you lonely.”

― Charles M. Schulz