Those reflective moments for me usually come from loneliness and separation from people.
Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.
We are living in dystopia, in a world that is dominated by technology and disconnect, alienation, loneliness, and dysfunction.
I don’t fear death so much as I fear its prologues: loneliness, decrepitude, pain, debilitation, depression, senility. After a few years of those, I imagine death presents like a holiday at the beach.
Myself, I suffer from loneliness. And I think we all feel alone. I’m looking for stories that help people deal with loneliness and help them if they are monsters: they don’t have to undertake monstrous actions. And maybe they’re not monsters.
There is a definite loneliness in the game. Most people stay away from you since they think they’re intruding upon your time. And after the ball game, when it’s 11 o’clock and you want to eat dinner some place, the restaurants are closed.
To fall in love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose steady presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be.
We are all born alone and die alone. The loneliness is definitely part of the journey of life.
I am an expert in loneliness and have wandered around a great deal.
Part of the reason people don’t talk about their loneliness is that they feel they will be judged for it.
Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering – and it’s all over much too soon.
When I went through my confirmation hearing to serve as surgeon general they asked me what my priorities would be and I didn’t list loneliness in that priority list because it was not one at the time.
The principal contributor to loneliness in this country is television. What happens is that the family ‘gets together’ alone.
Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness.
Even though loneliness affects so many of us, it has gotten scant research attention compared to related conditions like depression or anxiety.
The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.
Friendship needs no words – it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.
It’s clear to me that anyone, anywhere, can experience loneliness, isolation, solitude, and estrangement; and most people probably do encounter these things at some point in their lives.
Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better.
Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.
I did not find that writing a diary with a lead male character differed in any essential way from writing one with a female character. They all had the same challenges in terms of attempting to establish an identity, coping with loneliness, friendships, relationships.
One of the illusions that we live by is that we can really know anybody else, and we’re often surprised by traits in people that we thought we knew very well. The struggle to overcome loneliness, which is sort of our universal burden, leads us to leap to conclusions about who other people are.
In the short term if I feel loneliness, it’s like any other biological signals. It’s like hunger or thirst. It’s alerting me that something that’s critical for my survival is missing.
Gatherings and, simultaneously, loneliness are the conditions of a writer’s life.
What defines loneliness is our internal comfort level.
When you walk into a room, and you’re the only one of something – the only woman or the only African American – that immediate feeling of loneliness happens.
Solitude is pleasant. Loneliness is not.
There comes a real loneliness in celebrity where you’re constantly told you’re part of an out group in your own society.
We form friendships so that we can feel certain emotions, like love, want, magic – of missing people, avoid others – like loneliness.
Whether it’s music, loss of something, loneliness or friendship – if that emotion is heightened in some way and painted to fit in between the covers of 32 pages, that can become a picture book.
Directing is all tied up with childhood loneliness. It’s such an odd thing to end up doing.
Social acceptance, ‘being liked,’ has so much power because it holds the feelings of loneliness at bay.
We can experience an erosion of self-esteem when we’re lonely, as we come to believe that it’s because we’re not likable or because something is broken inside of us. And that can just compound that loneliness further and further.
Just before a fight, as the ring empties, you can feel it. There is danger and loneliness all around you. Soon it’s just the three of you in there: the referee, your opponent, and you. You’re in a very lonely moment then. But, strangely, that’s when I feel most comfortable. The ring becomes my office, and I go to work.
People talk about games and loneliness – it’s a lonely activity. I didn’t understand that. ‘Gears of War’ was the first multiplayer game for me that I enjoyed. But I wasn’t sad. I liked being alone. I liked playing games by myself. I had lots of companionship at the house.
Loneliness is always there, it’s a phase that comes and goes and it is a very difficult phase.
I’m learning to deal with my loneliness because then nobody can muck me around any more.
My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication – it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness – it is all that I have – and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well.
I relieved my loneliness with movies and books, and I had a strong desire to express what I felt through acting.
While the resurrection promises us a new and perfect life in the future, God loves us too much to leave us alone to contend with the pain, guilt and loneliness of our present life.
As an only child, I embrace loneliness. Hollywood loneliness helped to understand Marilyn Monroe in a real way. I was able to portray her very well.
There is a huge sense of loneliness as people leave villages and move to cities. It’s hard to find that human connection as you move away from where you started.
I have a lot of friends, but my biggest fear is loneliness. I miss my family in Mumbai, and my biggest nightmare every day is to go back home alone.
In 2016, I left Korea to further my modelling career overseas, and I spent a lot of time alone. At the time, the emotion that I felt the most was loneliness.
Forget sex or politics or religion, loneliness is the subject that clears out a room.
Language… has created the word ‘loneliness’ to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word ‘solitude’ to express the glory of being alone.
Every day, people serve their neighbors and our nation in many different ways, from helping a child learn and easing the loneliness of those without a family to defending our freedom overseas. It is in this spirit of dedication to others and to our country that I believe service should be broadly and deeply encouraged.
Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.
The cliche of call-centre work is that it’s mainly older people who will stay on the line to talk to you. Whether through loneliness or good manners, they tend to allow you to finish your sentences, hear you out.
If you go deeper and deeper into your own heart, you’ll be living in a world with less fear, isolation and loneliness.
Feelings such as loneliness, longing or love are sometimes hard to put into words; maybe that’s why we all love music, because it resonates with something we can’t share.
I have a feeling of complete balance. The sea, the house, the loneliness, the light. Everything is clearer. Much more precise. I have the feeling that I am living on a limit, and I’m crossing that limit sometimes.
If loneliness is part of our essence, that is, our essential nature, that is only because of the way, in practical terms, we actually exist; that is, the way we move and work and live in the world.
Karaoke was my family’s happy secret. In those early years in America, like many immigrants, my parents struggled with poverty and loneliness, but they also built provisional families, and inside our bubble there was joy, understanding, an intimate language I could never translate – and above all there was song.
A lot of my songs are about loneliness and losing relationships. Even the ones that are happy, there’s a lonely undertone to them.
There is extraordinary similarities between the Midwest in America and Europe in that there is this sense of vast, open sky and loneliness and cold.
Moon! Moon! I am prone before you. Pity me, and drench me in loneliness.
