#loneliness

I couldn’t be with people and I didn’t want to be alone. Suddenly my perspective whooshed and I was far out in space, watching the world. I could see millions and millions of people, all slotted into their lives; then I could see me—I’d lost my place in the universe. It had closed up and there was nowhere for me to be. I was more lost than I had known it was possible for any human being to be. ↗

— Marian Keyes

#loneliness #sadness #family

My fear of loneliness is like a disease. ↗

— Irene Tomkinson

#loneliness #solitude #family

Given enough time, you could convince yourself that loneliness was something better, that it was solitude, the ideal condition for reflection, even a kind of freedom. Once you were thus convinced, you were foolish to open the door and let anyone in, not all the way in. You risked the hard-won equilibrium, that tranquility that you called peace ↗

— Dean Koontz

#loneliness #peace #reflection #solitude #tranquility

I have no privacy. But I feel so alone. ↗

— Susan Beth Pfeffer

#paradox #privacy #life

Dim loneliness came imperceivably into the fields and he turned back. The birds piped oddly; some wind was caressing the higher foliage, turning it all one way, the way home. Telegraph poles ahead looked like half-used pencils; the small cross on the steeple glittered with a sharp and shapely permanence. ↗

— A.E. Coppard

#loneliness #home

I was amazed by the fact that I was not the only writer living, not the only young man "with a locomotive in his chest, and that's a fact," not the only youth with a million hungers and not one of them appeasable, not the only one who is lonely among multitudes, and does not know why. ↗

— Jack Kerouac

#atop-an-underwood #beat #inspirational #jack-kerouac #locomotive

She imagined herself as some sort of vessel to be filled up with love. But it wasn't like that. The love was within her all the time, and its only renewal came from giving it away. ↗

— Kim Edwards

#love #imagination

The house is eerily quiet. All this time I thought silence would be a welcome reprieve, but it's less comforting than I imagined. The house feels so much bigger and colder than it ever has. ↗

— Hannah Harrington

#loneliness #loss #imagination

I need the pain of loneliness to make my imagination work. ↗

— Orhan Pamuk

#imagination

Durum semolina, golden wheat wafting in Italian fields. Can you imagine how astonished the Italians would be if they knew that what they were exporting in 1971 was really loneliness ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#imagination