#loneliness

But the battles against loneliness that I fought when I was 16 are very different from those I fought when I was 27, and those are very different from the ones I fight at 44. ↗

— Tom Hanks

#battles #different #fight #fought #i

The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#concept #continually #exile #loneliness #me

A man in a bookstore buys a book on loneliness and every woman in the store hits on him. A woman buys a book on loneliness and the store clears out. ↗

— Doug Coupland

#bookstore #buys #clears #every #him

Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. You simply say, "Here are the perimeters of our attention. If you prowl around under the windows till the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. If you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it." Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire. ↗

— Marilynne Robinson

#friend #loneliness #relationships #safety #sister

That's what Jamie didn't understand: it was never just sex. Even the fastest, dirtiest, most impersonal screw was about more than sex. It was about connection. It was about looking at another human being and seeing your own loneliness and neediness reflected back. It was recognising that together you had the power to temporarily banish that sense of isolation. It was about experiencing what it was to be human at the basest, most instinctive level. How could that be described as just anything? ↗

— Emily Maguire

#loneliness #sex #connection

One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said, "We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I'll make one. I'll make a voice like all of time and all of the fog that ever was; I'll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I'll make a sound that's so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and hearths will seem warmer, and being inside will seem better to all who hear it in the distant towns. I'll make me a sound and an apparatus and they'll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life." The Fog Horn blew. ↗

— Ray Bradbury

#fog #loneliness #sadness #life

In the midst of friends, home, and kind parents, she was alone. ↗

— William Makepeace Thackeray

#vanity

Being alone is best. I mean, it's true, isn't it? In the end you'll be absolutely alone; therefore, being alone is natural. If you accept that, nothing bad can happen. That's why I shut myself away in my six-mat one-room apartment. ↗

— Tatsuhiko Takimoto

#nature

I was alone in that room. Of course, there were bodies all around, but they were all dead. They were dead when I got there. Well, most of them were dead. The last few I had to strangle so I could enjoy some solitude. 
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#bodies #body #death #enjoy #joy

...until that moment I had not understood that this was a story about lonely people, about absence and loss, and that that was why I had taken refuge in it until it became confused with my own life, like someone who has escaped into the pages of a novel because those whom he needs to love seem nothing more than ghosts inhabiting the mind of a stranger. ↗

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

#loss #strangers #life