The Anatomy of Loneliness Quotes

“All too often, people take no action until the fear goes away. But life cannot be lived like that. It cannot be lived like that anymore than it can be lived in spite of fear.”
― Teal Swan, The Anatomy of Loneliness: How to Find Your Way Back to Connection

“The word loneliness never seems adequate to describe the torment of starvation for closeness. My life had been plagued by loneliness. And fame, which came as a natural accessory to my career, only served to accentuate it like a magnifying glass. I had spent my life never feeling seen, heard, understood or wanted. Fame made finding that closeness that I craved so desperately even harder to attain. To the outside world it seemed that everyone valued and wanted me, but nothing could be further from the truth. People saw me, felt me and understood me less than before. I was surrounded by people but I was nothing more to them than the projections they placed on me. The only value I had, and the only reason they wanted me, was for what they could get through me.”
― Teal Swan, The Anatomy of Loneliness: How to Find Your Way Back to Connection

“the more we hate something in someone else, the more we rejected it within our self long ago. And the opposite is true: the more we love something in someone else, the more we sorrowfully disowned it in our self.”
― Teal Swan, The Anatomy of Loneliness: How to Find Your Way Back to Connection

“There is only one type of pain in this universe and it is separation. There is only one kind of happiness in this universe and it is unity. Any time you feel pain of any kind, it means that you feel separate from something and any time you feel happiness of any kind, it means that you feel united with something.”
― Teal Swan, The Anatomy of Loneliness: How to Find Your Way Back to Connection

“When a strong emotion arises, face it within yourself instead of reacting to it or reacting in order to try to get away from it. When you feel it, use the feeling as a reminder that this is the emotional body becoming activated or charged like an electric fence. Remember, it’s not the emotion itself that is causing the suffering, it’s the fact that you identify with it.”
― Teal Swan, The Anatomy of Loneliness: How to Find Your Way Back to Connection

“Essentially, we are only shown love in response to things that people around us want to include as part of themselves and their lives.”
― Teal Swan, The Anatomy of Loneliness: How to Find Your Way Back to Connection

“The word loneliness never seems adequate to describe the torment of starvation for closeness.”
― Teal Swan, The Anatomy of Loneliness: How to Find Your Way Back to Connection

“This is Earth
Where each breath and step is none but progression toward death.
Where pain is the loud and bloody birthing ground for peace.
Our cowardice saves us from nothing
in a world where bravery was never a choice.
It leaks like sweat from the pores
It's dried in the sun of our commitment to live.
Where a trillion lives are spinning through the cosmos,
at a thousand miles per hour
with no destination in sight.
Our faith is placed in the colour of our blood,
in the salt of our tears.
Where the heart is broken and it keeps of beating just the same.
Where love is the only evidence we have that God exists
something greater than ourselves
and the blindness with which we fumble through life.
Our cowardice saves us from nothing
in a world where bravery was never a choice.
Where no matter how careful you are, you will die.
some of us simply arrive at death safely.
But in honest defeat,
with a life half lived.
Drenched in the sweat of our own cowardice,
having made no commitment to fully live.
Where in some distant desert, a flower opens,
offering its frailty to the world.
And therein lies its strength.
A coward is incapable of love.
And so he has no evidence that God exists,
something greater than himself.
Our cowardice saves us from nothing
in a world where bravery was never a choice...
So love
because
This is Earth.
This is Earth.”
― Teal Swan, The Anatomy of Loneliness: How to Find Your Way Back to Connection

“When you feel shame, you feel like something about you is so bad and so wrong that it’s inconceivable that someone or something could be attached to and connected to you. You run around desperately trying to be valuable enough or to earn the right to not be abandoned. But because you don’t believe that you are worthy of connection, it always feels like abandonment is right around the corner. The only attachment you can recognize is the attachment that you have to others. You cannot recognize the attachment that they have to you.”
― Teal Swan, The Anatomy of Loneliness: How to Find Your Way Back to Connection

“Love is an instinctual reaction to pull something closer to you. Fear is an instinctual reaction to push something away from you. And shame is an instinctual reaction to push yourself away from yourself. Of course, you cannot actually do this because your consciousness experiences a singular embodiment. The only way to push yourself away from yourself is through fragmentation. For this reason, we could say that shame is the mechanism for fragmentation as well as suppression. And shame creates internal separation.”
― Teal Swan, The Anatomy of Loneliness: How to Find Your Way Back to Connection

“Be aware that your disowned or denied aspects will be completely invisible to you, but completely obvious to other people.”
― Teal Swan, The Anatomy of Loneliness: How to Find Your Way Back to Connection

“This kind of self-rejection is the birth of self-hate and the deep loneliness that we feel is the result of those missing rejected or disowned parts of our self. The soul wants one thing and that is to make us whole again. We will be provided with every single opportunity to become whole again as we proceed through life. But in order to become whole again, we need to see and accept the aspects of ourselves that we disowned, denied and rejected. This is painful.”
― Teal Swan, The Anatomy of Loneliness: How to Find Your Way Back to Connection

“The most dominant ones are the ones that protect you from hurt, especially rejection, in the specific environment that you grew up in.”
― Teal Swan, The Anatomy of Loneliness: How to Find Your Way Back to Connection

“The fragmentation in the external world is nothing but a mirror of the fragmentation of your internal world.”
― Teal Swan, The Anatomy of Loneliness: How to Find Your Way Back to Connection