#lon

To be alone with yourself is to be alone. To be in the company of others is to be alone together. The only time you are not alone is when you forget yourself and reach out in love -- the lines of self blur, and just for a wild, flickering moment you experience the miracle of other. And now you know the secret. ↗

— Vera Nazarian

#loneliness #not-alone #others #self #experience

There was an enjoyment to being alive, he felt, that because of an underlying meaninglessness–like how a person alone for too long cannot feel comfortable when with others; cannot neglect that underlying the feeling of belongingness is the certainty, really, of loneliness, and nothingness, and so experiences life in that hurried, worthless way one experiences a mistake–he could no longer get at. ↗

— Tao Lin

#loneliness #meaninglessness #void #experience

I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can't go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places. ↗

— Wallace Stegner

#depth #familiarity #home #intimacy #shallowness

Secret to what?" "Secret to shutting you up," he said. "I just have to beat you till you're half-dead, then give you chicken soup and"--he raised his hands--"blessed silence. ↗

— Ilona Andrews

#curran #ilona-andrews #kate #kate-daniels #magic-burns

There is no river in the world to be compared for majesty and the witchery of association, to the Thames; it impresses even the unreading and unimaginative watcher with a solemnity which he cannot account for, as it rolls under his feet and swirls past the buttresses of its many bridges; he may think, as he experiences the unusual effect, that it is the multiplicity of buildings which line its banks, or the crowd of sea-craft which floats upon its surface, or its own extensive spread. In reality he feels, although he cannot explain it, the countless memories which hang for ever like a spiritual fog over its rushing current. ("The Phantom Model") ↗

— Hume Nisbet

#thames #experience

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. ↗

— Charles M. Schulz

#friendship #loneliness #love #faith

Robin told only a little of her life, but she kept repeating in one way or another her wish for a home, as if she were afraid she would be lost again, as if she were aware, without conscious knowledge, that she belonged to Nora, and that if Nora did not make it permanent by her own strength, she would forget. ↗

— Djuna Barnes

#home

simply-quotes Follow I close my eyes, thinking that there is nothing like an embrace after an absence, nothing like fitting my face into the curve of his shoulder and filling my lungs with the scent of him. ↗

— Jodi Picoult

#long-distance-love #love #faith

For Beatrice, when we first met, I was lonely, and you were pretty. Now I am pretty lonely. ↗

— Lemony Snicket

#love #love

For a Catholic understanding of the faith there is no reason why the basic concern of Evangelical Christianity as it comes to expression in the three “only's” should have no place in the Catholic Church. Accepted as basic and ultimate formulas of Christianity, they do not have to lead a person out of the Catholic Church. . . . They can call the attention of the Catholic church again and again to the fact that grace alone and faith alone really are what saves, and that with all our maneuvering through the history of dogma and the teaching office, we Catholic Christians must find our way back to the sources again and again, back to the primary origins of Holy Scripture and all the more so of the Holy Spirit. ↗

— Karl Rahner

#ecumenism #evangelicalism #faith-alone #grace-alone #salvation