#lines

...across the snowy field the barn light gleams - it's the loneliness of November twilight... ↗

— John Geddes

#field #loneliness #nature #poetry-quotes #twilight

...the story of the young woman whose death I witnessed in a concentration camp. It is a simple story. There is little to tell and it may sound as if I had invented it; but to me it seems like a poem. This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. "I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard," she told me. "In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously." Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, "This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness." Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. "I often talk to this tree," she said to me. I was startled and didn't quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. "Yes." What did it say to her? She answered, "It said to me, 'I am here-I am here-I am life, eternal life. ↗

— Viktor E. Frankl

#fate #friendship #illness #life #loneliness

How then can we deal with our tendency toward worldliness? It is *not* by determining that we will not be worldly, but by committing ourselves to becoming more godly. ↗

— Jerry Bridges

#jerry-bridges #respectable-sins #worldliness #respect

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

— Lois Lowry

#memories #pain #share #need

Today the individual has become the highest form, and the greatest bane, of artistic creation. The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other and without realizing that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other's eyes and yet deny each other's existence. We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster's whim and the purest ideal. ↗

— Ingmar Bergman

#loneliness #death

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. ↗

— Hermann Hesse

#solitude #spirit #alone

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. ↗

— D.H. Lawrence

#alone

You do not have to be alone. The world never inflicts loneliness upon us. That is something we choose or reject by ourselves. ↗

— Darren Shan

#loneliness #birth

Separation Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color. ↗

— W.S. Merwin

#loneliness #loss #poetry #influence

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. ↗

— William Gibson

#television