#lone

You’re lost in your own world, in the things that happen there, and you’ve locked all the doors. Sometimes I look at you sleeping. I wake up and look at you and I feel closer to you when you’re like that, unguarded, than when you’re awake. When you’re awake you’re like someone with her eyes closed, watching a movie on the inside of your eyelids. I can’t reach you anymore. Once upon a time I could, but not now, and not for a long time. ↗

— Nicole Krauss

#great-house #loneliness #nicole-krauss #movies

A half-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold; While high overhead, green, yellow and red, the North Lights swept in bars?- Then you've a hunch was the music meant...hunger and night and the stars. ↗

— Robert Service

#alone #gold #music #music

Music eliminates my gravity. When I'm singing, I'm a ravenous pterodactyl. I'm alive and free and hungry, and I know who I am. But the flood is coming; it's weighing me down, making me prisoner to my loneliness and pain. -character Joanna (Broken) ↗

— J. Matthew Nespoli

#music #pain #music

Real relief from loneliness requires the cooperation of at least one other person, and yet the more chronic our loneliness becomes, the less equipped we may be to entice such cooperation. ↗

— John T. Cacioppo

#nature

To enslave an individual troubles your consciences, Archivist, but to enslave a clone is no more troubling than owning the latest six-wheeler ford, ethically. Because you cannot discern our differences, you assume we have none. But make no mistake: even same-stem fabricants cultured in the same wombtank are as singular as snowflakes. ↗

— David Mitchell

#dystopia #science-fiction #slavery #science

Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness , dear, my happiness will remain,in the moist reflection of a street lamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal's black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#path

I thought that if I owned nothing, had nothing, was nothing, I would have nothing left to lose, and I wouldn't be scared anymore. Because my whole life I’ve been so damn scared. Scared to live because I was scared to die. But at the same I was so scared of living, so I wanted to die. Or maybe so scared of dying that I refused to live. You don't have to be afraid to fall, when you're already on the ground. You don't have to be scared to lose someone, when there's no one around to lose. ↗

— Charlotte Eriksson

#afraid-to-die #alone #freedom #homeless #journey

Now Doon seemed to care for his new friends more than he did for her. Every time she thought about him she felt a thud of pain, like a bruised place inside her. ↗

— Jeanne DuPrau

#city-of-ember #friendship #jeanne-duprau #lef-out #loneliness

You’re like a god from a Greek myth, Saiman. You have no empathy. You have no concept of the world beyond your ego. Wanting something gives you an automatic right to obtain it by whatever means necessary with no regard to the damage it may do. I would be careful if I were you. Friends and objects of deities’ desires dropped like flies. In the end the gods always ended up miserable and alone." — Kate Daniels ↗

— Ilona Andrews

#ego #empathy #friendship #gods #greek-mythology

Our society is so fragmented, our family lives so sundered by physical and emotional distance, our friendships so sporadic, our intimacies so 'in-between' things and often so utilitarian, that there are few places where we can feel truly safe. ↗

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

#brokenness #despair #isolation #loneliness #society