Loners Quotes

“Friends are a strange, volatile, contradictory, yet sticky phenomenon. They are made, crafted, shaped, molded, created by focused effort and intent. And yet, true friendship, once recognized, in its essence is effortless.

Best friends are formed by time.

Everyone is someone's friend, even when they think they are all alone.

If the friendship is not working, your heart will know. It's when you start being less than perfectly honest and perfectly earnest in your dealings. And it's when the things you do together no longer feel right.

However, sometimes it takes more effort to make it work after all.

Stick around long enough to become someone's best friend.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“You only grow when you are alone.”
― Paul Newman

“From day one it was like society was this violent, complicated dance and everybody had taken lessons but me. Knocked to the floor again, climbing to my feet each time, bloody and humiliated. Always met with disapproving faces, waiting for me to leave so I'd stop fucking up the party.

The wanted to push me outside, where the freaks huddled in the cold. Out there with the misfits, the broken, the glazed-eye types who can only watch as the normals enjoy their shiny new cars and careers and marriages and vacations with the kids.

The freaks spend their lives shambling around, wondering how they got left out, mumbling about conspiracy theories and bigfoot sightings. Their encounters with the world are marked by awkward conversations and stifled laughter, hidden smirks and rolled eyes. And worst of all, pity.”
― David Wong, John Dies at the End

“She is a loner, too bright for the slutty girls and too savage for the bright girls, haunting the edges and corners of the school like a sullen disillusioned ghost”
― Eleanor Catton, The Rehearsal

“We do not require company. In varying degrees, it bores us, drains us, makes our eyes glaze over. Overcomes us like a steamroller. Of course, the rest of the world doesn't understand.”
― Anneli Rufus, Party of One

“She's the first person to smile at me today.
The first to make me feel wanted.
Understood.
I blink back tears.
It's unknown how many students' lives
librarians have saved
by welcoming loners at lunch.”
― Lisa Fipps, Starfish

“If it's true what is said, that only the wise discover the wise, then it must also be true that the lone wolf symbolizes either the biggest fool on the planet or the biggest Einstein on the planet.”
― Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality

“I should have written you a letter, it was too late to make the deaths of my brothers an excuse. Since they died, I wrote a book; why not a letter? A mysterious but truthful answer is that while I can gear myself up to do a novel, letters, real-life communications, are too much for me. I used to rattle them off easily enough; why is the challenge of writing to friends and acquaintances too much for me now? Because I have become such a solitary, and not in the Aristotelian sense: not a beast, not a god. Rather, a loner troubled by longings, incapable of finding a suitable language and despairing at the impossibility of composing messages in a playable key--as if I no longer understood the codes used by the estimable people who wanted to hear from me and would have so much to reply if only the impediments were taken away.”
― Saul Bellow

“The lonesome and desperate kids out there, that pain will translate to magic perhaps.”
― Tenacious D

“Those who understand the true nature of humanity are always loners”
― Dean Cavanagh

“Strong creatures don't form herds.
Have they never heard of a lone wolf?
Cats are cute, and wolves are cool.
So in essence, loners are cute and cool.”
― Wataru Watari, やはり俺の青春ラブコメはまちがっている。2

“And there are loners in rural communities who, at the equinox, are said to don new garments and stroll down to the cities, where great beasts await them, fat and docile.”
― Louis Aragon

“People didn't stick because I was made of fucking Teflon. I'd always told myself that it was better that way, that being alone was easier. That I wasn't a coward for easing my way out of friendships before they could really start.”
― Sarah Gailey, Magic for Liars

“They say isolation drives you crazy. Sure it does - when you can't get enough of it.”
― Anneli Rufus

“Loners are the opposition. Pensive, thoughtful and furious, marooned with stories that need to be spoken out loud and no one to listen, curries to be cooked and no one to taste, days and days of traffic signals to be manoeuvred and no one to congratulate except other loners: they find each other because like all good maps there are familiar signs that lead the way. The loner who both observes and creates worlds necessarily speaks with many tongues. It is with these tongues that she explores the contours of the centre and the margins, the signs for somewhere and elsewhere and here and now.”
― Deborah Levy, Swallowing Geography

“In my mind, I took what had just happened to my shoulder, and I put it into a box. A box with a tight lid. I dropped the box into a deep brick-lined oubliette. It landed somewhere next to my mother's last words and my searing loneliness and everything else I needed to forget, and just like that, I was fine again.”
― Sarah Gailey, Magic for Liars

“To the loner, loneliness is a treasure that cannot be traded, even for the nicest of companies.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Book of Maxims, Poems and Anecdotes

“The man who is too isolated grows timid, abstracted, a little odd: He stumbles along amid realities like a sailor who has just come off his ship; he has lost the sense of the human lot; he seems to look on you as if you were a "proposition" to be inserted in a syllogism, or an example to be put down in a notebook.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods

“I often wish I could just passively watch people without being expected to participate myself, like television.”
― M.E. Thomas, Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight

“I grew up a dreamer, lonely, one foot on the earth, the other on the moon.”
― Philippe Lechermeier, The Secret Lives of Princesses

“She was of another world; different. But by then, secretly, so was I.”
― Sarah Winman, When God Was a Rabbit

“Whenever one speaks of lonely people one takes too much for granted. One thinks people all know what they're dealing with. No, they do not. They've never seen a lonely person, they've simply hated him without knowing him. They've been his neighbours who've used him up, they were the voices in the next room who tempted him. They roused things up against him, getting them to make a din and drown him out. Children ganged up against him when he was a tender child, and at every stage of his growing up he grew hostile to grown-ups . They tracked him to his hiding-place like an animal of chase and throughout his long youth there was no closed season. And when he didn't allow himself to be worn out so that he got away they yelled about what came forth from him and called it ugly and were suspicious of it. And as he didn't stop they grew more obvious and gobbled up his food and breathed up his air and spat into his poverty so that he himself became disgusted at it. They brought him into disrepute as if he were a contagion and threw stones at him to speed his departure. And they were right to follow their age-old instinct: because he really was their enemy. But then when he didn't look up they had second thoughts. They suspected that in all of this they had acted as he had willed them to act; they had strengthened him in his solitude and had helped him separate himself from them for ever.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“It was this situation that led mathematician Chris Hauert and his colleagues to consider another possibility in an important evolutionary model published in Science in 2002. In Axelrod's study and in most previous theoretical models, individuals were forced to interact with each other. But what if they could choose not to interact? Rather than attempting to cooperate and risking being taken advantage of, a person could fend for herself. In other words, she could sever her connections to others in the network. Hauert called the people who adopt this strategy "loners."

Using some beautiful mathematics, Hauert and his colleagues showed that in a world full of loners it is easy for cooperation to evolve because there are no people to take advantage of the cooperators that appear. The loners fend for themselves, and the cooperators form networks with other cooperators. Soon, the cooperators take over the population because they always do better together than the loners. But once the world is full of cooperators, it is very easy for free riders to evolve and enjoy the fruits of cooperation without contributing (like parasites). As the free riders become the dominant type in the population, there is no one left for them to take advantage of; then, the loners once again take over -- because they want nothing to do, as it were, with those bastards. In short, cooperating can emerge because we can do more together than we can apart. But because of the free-rider problem, cooperation is not guaranteed to succeed.”
― Nicholas A. Christakis

“Beautiful people are not usually loners.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

“Eagles do not live alongside with crows. Neither they fly in flocks, nor live in muds.”
― Mladen Đorđević, Svetioničar - Pritajeno zlo

“The Loners' Prayer

In every life,
On every road,
Give me the strength
to walk alone.
At every turn,
With every twist,
Give me the strength
to take the risk.

Under every roof,
Above every need,
Allow me to plant
sweet comfort's seed.

Beneath every skin,
Within every scar,
Give me the strength
to find respite for all.
Despite every word.
For every soul,
Give me the strength
to walk my path alone.

©2018 Adhish Mazumder - The Loners' Prayer.”
― Adhish Mazumder

“You interest me more and more … You don’t mix, have no girl – that I’m hundred per cent sure of – how do you love? Loners like you are the problem of this world!”
― Godwin Inyang, Gamblers Make Better Lovers

“There you are wrong … I know love not lust. When I love, it is done with my soul involved. As for loners, there are two worlds of loners. One, those who are alone and confused and get into evil; and two, those who are alone and productive. The latter group I belong to. I need to be away from the crowd, to think and find solutions to nagging problems around me. Being on my own enables me to think and see clearly the solutions to the many problems plaguing our world. I wish everyone could have some quality time to themselves and this world in no time would be a better place for all to live in.”
― Godwin Inyang, Gamblers Make Better Lovers

“The reality is that there are no successful loners in the history of social evolution. Being a solo survivalist is arduous and inefficient. Survival has only been accomplished in groups.”
― Billy Baker, We Need to Hang Out: A Memoir of Making Friends

“As he walked away, he had one question in his head. How was it possible, in the age of global communication, when all cultural, linguistic, geographical, and economic borders had been erased from the face of the earth, that this vast new realm had only created a multitude of loners, infinite numbers of lonely people in communication with one another, yes, but still in a state of utter solitude?”
― Andrea Camilleri