#loneliness

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness. ↗

— Maya Angelou

#back #between #could #crawl #curl

I fall in love with Paraíso. It’s like a giant playground where I’m never scolded for running around recklessly, where I’m almost overwhelmed with the amount of attention and love I receive from Mami’s family. In New York, I’m invisible. ↗

— Raquel Cepeda

#coming-of-age #family #home #identity #invisibility

My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it. ↗

— Ursula K. Le Guin

#humanity #imagination #loneliness #poetry #solipsism

The loneliness is when you pick up and move, even if you are not originally from that place, and you have some memories that you want to embrace. Having a life in transit, I feel like you are always looking out the back window. ↗

— Ajay Naidu

#back #embrace #even #feel #having

There are extremes within any population, but on average, at least among young adults, those who feel lonely actually spend no more time alone than do those who feel more connected. They are no more or less physically attractive than average, and they do not differ, on average, from the non-lonely in terms of height, weight, age, education, or intelligence. Most important, when we look at the broad continuum (rather than just the extremes) of people who feel lonely, we find that they have the capacity to be just as socially adept as anyone else. Feeling lonely does not mean that we have deficient social skills. ↗

— John T. Cacioppo

#age

...alone in this city, alone on this sea. The days were strewn about him, he was a drunkard of days. He had achieved nothing. He had his life--it was not worth much--not like a life that, though ended, had truly been something. If I had had courage,he thought, if I had had faith. We preserve ourselves as if that were important, and always at the expense of others. We hoard ourselves. We succeed if they fail, we are wise if they are foolish, and we go onward, clutching, until there is no one--we are left with no companion save God. In whom we do not believe. Who we know does not exist. ↗

— James Salter

#faith #loneliness #regret #selfishness #age

I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger. ↗

— Simone de Beauvoir

#books #friends #greedy #life #loneliness

People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other. (pg. 61, "Racism and the Economy") ↗

— Wendell Berry

#drugs #health #loneliness #art

There is no loneliness like that of a failed marriage. ↗

— Alexander Theroux

#like #loneliness #marriage

When we are lonely we not only react more intensely to the negatives; we also experience less of a soothing uplift from the positives. ↗

— John T. Cacioppo

#experience