"Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness."
— Maya Angelou

"Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony."
— Douglas Coupland (Shampoo Planet)

"I’m here. I love you. I don’t care if you need to stay up crying all night long, I will stay with you. There’s nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than Depression and I am braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?"
— Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

"

'Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. And intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.'
"
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"We live as we dream--alone...."
— Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness)

"I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom."
— Edgar Allan Poe

"But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning."
— Haruki Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)

"The trouble is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely."
— Charlotte Brontë

"there is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock"
— Charles Bukowski (Love Is a Dog from Hell: Poems, 1974-1977)

"may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone."
— e.e. cummings

"They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places."
— Robert Frost

"Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated."
— David Foster Wallace

"Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine."
— Honoré de Balzac

"All great and precious things are lonely."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"Are you angry? Punch a pillow. Was it satisfying? Not hardly. These days people are too angry for punching. What you might try is stabbing. Take an old pillow and lay it on the front lawn. Stab it with a big pointy knife. Again and again and again. Stab hard enough for the point of the knife to go into the ground. Stab until the pillow is gone and you are just stabbing the earth again and again, as if you want to kill it for continuing to spin, as if you are getting revenge for having to live on this planet day after day, alone."
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"A joker is a little fool who is different from everyone else. He's not a club, diamond, heart, or spade. He's not an eight or a nine, a king or a jack. He is an outsider. He is placed in the same pack as the other cards, but he doesn't belong there. Therefore, he can be removed without anybody missing him."
— Jostein Gaarder (The Solitaire Mystery)

"I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

". . . No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence--that which makes its truth, its meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream--alone. . . ."
— Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness)

"Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe. The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass."
— D.H. Lawrence (Lady Chatterley's Lover)

"On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of.
"
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

"Throwing herself into learning helped Miri ignore the painful chill of solitude around her [p. 63]."
— Shannon Hale (Princess Academy)

"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 (Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters 1940-1977)

"I hope somebody cares because I sure don't. I sure don't. Not anymore. I'm ashamed to go around my family. I'm too embarrassed to confide in my friends. Outside of work I don't have a life."
— Mary B. Morrison

".... there is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along...."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

"and it came to me then
that we were wonderful travelling companions
but in the end, we were no more but lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits
from far off, they looked like beautiful shooting stars
when the orbits that these two satellite of ours, happened to cross paths, we could be together
maybe even open our hearts to each other
but that was only for the briefest moment
the next instant, we would be in absolute solitude
until we'd burn up and became nothing"
— Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

"In the weeks that followed, we amazed ourselves. Our habits slid apart easily...And our very few intimacies were simply discontinued. Where did they go, those things we did? Were they recycled? Did some new couple in China do them? Were a Swedish man and woman foot to foot at this very moment? "
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"Two turtle doves will show thee
Where my cold ashes lie
And sadly murmuring tell thee
How in tears I did die"
— Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

"Consider A Move

The steady time of being unknown,
in solitude, without friends,
is not a steadiness that sustains.
I hear your voice waver on the phone:

Haven't talked to anyone for days.
I drive around. I sit in parking lots.
The voice zeroes through my ear, and waits.
What should I say? There are ways

to meet people you will want to love?
I know of none. You come out stronger
having gone through this? I no longer
believe that, if I once did. Consider a move,

a change, a job, a new place to live,
someplace you'd like to be. That's not it,
you say. Now time turns back. We almost touch.
Then what is? I ask. What is?"
— Michael Ryan (New and Selected Poems)

"Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery."
— Marilynne Robinson (Housekeeping: A Novel)

"My despair is less despair than boredom and loneliness."
— Anthony Swofford (Jarhead)

"Loneliness breaks the spirit."
— Jewish Proverb

"'Oh, this coming back to an empty house,' Rupert thought, when he had seen her safely up to her door. People - though perhaps it was only women - seemed to make so much of it. As if life itself were not as empty as the house one was coming back to."
— Barbara Pym (An Unsuitable Attachment)

"Even the company of the mad was better than the company of the dead."
— Stephen King (The Stand)

"Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away... and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast.... be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn't be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn't necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

"I can go years thinking that it seems impossible that I will ever satisfy that appetite again and then it is easy to satisfy and no one notices or cares, nor does it make me happy, when loneliness surrounds me like water I've already drowned in without dying."
— Francisco Goldman (The Divine Husband: A Novel)

"This was what I came to found. The conquest of loneliness was the missing link that was one day going to make a decent novelist out of me. If you are out here and cannot close off the loves and hates of all that back there in the real world the memories will overtake you and swamp you and wilt your tenacity. Tenacity stamina... close off to everything and everyone but your writing. That s the bloody price. I don t know maybe it's some kind of ultimate selfishness. Maybe it's part of the killer instinct. Unless you can stash away and bury thoughts of your greatest love you cannot sustain the kind of concentration that breaks most men trying to write a book over a three or four year period."
— Leon Uris

"Song of a Second April

APRIL this year, not otherwise
Than April of a year ago
Is full of whispers, full of sighs,
Dazzling mud and dingy snow;
Hepaticas that pleased you so
Are here again, and butterflies.

There rings a hammering all day,
And shingles lie about the doors;
From orchards near and far away
The gray wood-pecker taps and bores,
And men are merry at their chores,
And children earnest at their play.

The larger streams run still and deep;
Noisy and swift the small brooks run.
Among the mullein stalks the sheep
Go up the hillside in the sun
Pensively; only you are gone,
You that alone I cared to keep."
— Edna St. Vincent Millay

"In a world filled with people, some happy, others like me, I feel so all alone."
— Mary B. Morrison

""What is the difference in being alone with another and being alone by one's self?"
~Hedda Gabler in the play "Hedda" (sequel to "Hedda Gabler")"
— Henrik Johan Ibsen

"And loneliness. I should say something of loneliness. The panic, the sweeping hysteria that comes not when you are without others, but when you are without yourself, adrift. I should describe the filthy province of mind, the blighted district inside, the place so crowded you cannot raise the lids of your eyes. Your shoulders are drawn and your head has fallen and your chest is bruised by the constant assault of your heart."
— H.T. Hamann

"We have talked about Suzy and about her last days, but it's as if our lives stopped then and there. If I say anything to him about feeling lonesome, he goes outside and does some little chore. I can't tell if he is secretly blaming me, or himself, or just too full of pain to talk. That was the one thing we could always do together. I wish for the old days. I wish for the struggling days and the days of Geronimo, and the days of birthing Charlie with no one but Jack to help me. How happy and in love we were then. I want to be in love again, but all I feel is darkness and shadows. Everything is changed and different (p. 364)."
— Nancy E. Turner (These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901 : A Novel)

"Why should you want to give up a child's wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn, since not-understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and scorn are a participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

"It was somehow clear, even then, that the monster had been lonely. The folds above its eye made the old face look wistful, and it emanated such a strong sense of solitude that each human standing in the park that day felt miles from the others, though we were shoulder-to-shoulder, touching."
— Lauren Groff (The Monsters of Templeton)