#lon

I wander thro' each charter'd street, Near where the charter'd Thames does flow, And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe. In every cry of every Man, In every Infant's cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forg'd manacles I hear. How the Chimney-sweeper's cry Every black'ning Church appalls; And the hapless Soldier's sigh Runs in blood down Palace walls. But most thro' midnight streets I hear How the youthful Harlot's curse Blasts the new born Infant's tear, And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse. ↗

— William Blake

#experience

An emptiness rules at its core, a rottenness, a silence when one of you retires to bed without saying good night, when you eat together without conversation, when the phone's passed wordlessly to the other. An emptiness when every night you lie in the double bed, restlessly awake, astounded at how closely hate can nudge against love, can wind around it sinuously like a cat. An emptiness when you realize that the loneliest you've ever been is within a marriage, as a wife. ↗

— Nikki Gemmell

#marriage #love

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness. ↗

— Joseph Conrad

#belief #capable #every #evil #men

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

— Kahlil Gibran

#men

I can see we're going to get along like a house on fire," said Miss Tick. "There may be no survivors. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#men

I know nothing - nothing in the world - of the hearts of men. I only know that I am alone - horribly alone. ↗

— Ford Madox Ford

#loneliness #people #men

Only boxers can understand the loneliness of tennis players - and yet boxers have their corner men and managers. Even a boxer's opponent provides a kind of companionship, someone he can grapple with and grunt at. In tennis you stand face-to-face with the enemy, trade blows with him, but never touch him or talk to him, or anyone else. The rules forbid a tennis player from even talking to his coach while on the court. People sometimes mention the track-and-field runner as a comparably lonely figure, but I have to laugh. At least the runner can feel and smell his opponents. They're inches away. In tennis you're on an island. Of all the games men and women play, tennis is the closest to solitary confinement.... ↗

— Andre Agassi

#loneliness #opponents #solitary-confinement #tennis #men

The strongest men are the most alone. ↗

— Henrik Ibsen

#men

Yet through their endeavor, men would glimpse the unimaginable artistry of Yahweh's work, in seeing how ingeniously the world had been constructed. By this construction, Yahweh's work was indicated, and Yahweh's work was concealed. ↗

— Ted Chiang

#knowledge #spirituality #tower-of-babylon #men

I introduced Nora as my wife, though that was a lie. Old people, that's what they wanted to hear. If you were married, you were mature, reliable, exactly like them, because in their day men and women didn't just live together--they made a commitment, they had children and went on cruises and built big houses on lakes and filled them with all the precious trinkets and manufactured artifacts they'd collected along the way. ↗

— T.C. Boyle

#cohabitation #commitment #marriage #maturity #reliability