I drink to our ruined house, to the dolor of my life, to our loneliness together; and to you I raise my glass, to lying lips that have betrayed us, to dead-cold pitiless eyes, and to the hard realities; that the world is brutal and coarse, that God, in fact, has not saved us.
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The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one's people that has not previously been taken into account.
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A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer - to be living a kind of double life.
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It is easy to love the people far away. It is not always easy to love those close to us. It is easier to give a cup of rice to relieve hunger than to relieve the loneliness and pain of someone unloved in our home. Bring love into your home for this is where our love for each other must start.
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The chief mate of the Pequod was Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, and a Quaker by descent. He was a long, earnest man, and though born on an icy coast, seemed well adapted to endure hot latitudes, his flesh being hard as twice-baked biscuit. Transported to the Indies, his live blood would not spoil like bottled ale. He must have been born in some time of general drought and famine, or upon one of those fast days for which his state is famous. Only some thirty arid summers had he seen; those summers had dried up all his physical superfluousness. But this, his thinness, so to speak, seemed no more the token of wasting anxieties and cares, than it seemed the indication of any bodily blight. It was merely the condensation of the man. He was by no means ill-looking; quite the contrary. His pure tight skin was an excellent fit; and closely wrapped up in it, and embalmed with inner health and strength, like a revivified Egyptian, this Starbuck seemed prepared to endure for long ages to come, and to endure always, as now; for be it Polar snow or torrid sun, like a patent chronometer, his interior vitality was warranted to do well in all climates. Looking into his eyes, you seemed to see there the yet lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he had calmly confronted through life. A staid, steadfast man, whose life for the most part was a telling pantomime of action, and not a tame chapter of sounds. Yet, for all his hardy sobriety and fortitude, there were certain qualities in him which at times affected, and in some cases seemed well nigh to overbalance all the rest. Uncommonly conscientious for a seaman, and endued with a deep natural reverence, the wild watery loneliness of his life did therefore strongly incline him to superstition; but to that sort of superstition, which in some organizations seems rather to spring, somehow, from intelligence than from ignorance. Outward portents and inward presentiments were his.
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It is said of a lonely man that he does not appreciate the life of society. This is like saying he hates hiking because he dislikes walking in thick forest on a dark night.
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Your travel life has the aspect of a dream. It is something outside the normal, yet you are in it. It is peopled with characters you have never seen before and in all probability will never see again. It brings occasional homesickness, and loneliness, and pangs of longing... But you are like the Vikings who have gone into a world of adventure, and home is not home until you return.
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Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.
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A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey's gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind.
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Moon! Moon! am prone before you. Pity me, and drench me in loneliness.
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There's an old joke - um... two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of 'em says, 'Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.' The other one says, 'Yeah, I know; and such small portions.' Well, that's essentially how I feel about life - full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly.
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The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.
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Fame always brings loneliness. Success is as ice cold and lonely as the North Pole.
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What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
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When Christ said: I was hungry and you fed me, he didn't mean only the hunger for bread and for food; he also meant the hunger to be loved. Jesus himself experienced this loneliness. He came amongst his own and his own received him not, and it hurt him then and it has kept on hurting him. The same hunger, the same loneliness, the same having no one to be accepted by and to be loved and wanted by. Every human being in that case resembles Christ in his loneliness; and that is the hardest part, that's real hunger.
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Who knows what true loneliness is -- not the conventional word, but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion. Now and then a fatal conjunction of events may lift the veil for an instant. For an instant only. No human being could bear a steady view of moral solitude without going mad.
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A victory! To leave your loneliness panting behind you on some street corner while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas, luminous pink petals that have never felt loneliness, no matter how slowly they fell.
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A man in a bookstore buys a book on loneliness and every woman in the store hits on him. A woman buys a book on loneliness and the store clears out.
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The most terrible poverty is loneliness and the feeling of being unloved.
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When friendship disappears then there is a space left open to that awful loneliness of the outside world which is like the cold space between the planets. It is an air in which men perish utterly.
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A man is never completely alone in this world. At the worst, he has the company of a boy, a youth, and by and by a grown man --the one he used to be.
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Forget sex or politics or religion, loneliness is the subject that clears out a room.
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Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.
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Only in relationship can you know yourself, not in abstraction and certainly not in isolation. The movement of behavior is the sure guide to yourself. It's the mirror of your consciousness: this mirror will reveal its content, the images, the attachments, the fears, the loneliness, the joys and sorrow. Poverty lies in running away from this, either in its sublimations or its identities.
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It's a terrible thing to be alone -- yes it is -- it is -- but don't lower your mask until you have another mask prepared beneath --as terrible as you like --but a mask.
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Americans become unhappy and vicious because their preoccupation with amassing possessions obliterates their loneliness. This is why production in America seems to be on such an endless upward spiral: every time we buy something we deepen our emotional deprivation and hence our need to buy something.
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Skillful listening is the best remedy for loneliness, loquaciousness, and laryngitis.
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Marriage. Why do we do it Everybody knows the stats. One in two marriages end up in broken dishes and a trip to Tijuana. Is it loneliness Partly. Is it teamwork Definitely. Things just kind of go easier when there's two of you. One of you can wait in line at the movie theater while the other guy parks the car. Get better seats that way. Better room rate when it's a double. Are you ready to file jointly...Above you is the sun and sky. Below you, the ground. Like the sun, your love should be constant, like the ground, solid.
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The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.
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The eternal quest of the individual human being is to shatter his loneliness.
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