“I belonged here the way I belonged to this planet and its people, but on one condition: alone, always alone.”
“I feel profoundly alone, cut off, unattractive…I feel unloveable. But I respect that unloveable solider—struggling to survive, struggling to be honest, just, honourable. I respect myself.”
“I’m not alone, I will never be alone. God is with me,”
“There are people out there who do this. They pick up and they leave. Sometimes they were never really there. Other times they are with you, but in their minds they are a thousand miles away. They are taking a walk down an endless road; they are standing in a field of daisies on some unknown cliff; they are floating through space. -The Art of Leaving”
“I hate when I can t control my loneliness”
“And I am the most miserable man alive, and more so because no one at this dinner table has the slightest notion of what s tearing me up.”
“Well, since you re not going to do anything with me—can you at least read me a story? I d settle for that. I wanted him to read me a story. Something by Chekhov or Gogol or Katherine Mansfield. Take your clothes off, Oliver, and come into my bed, let me feel your skin, your hair against my flesh, your foot on mine, even if we won t do a thing, lets cuddle up, you and I, when the night is spread out against the sky, and read stories of restless people who always end up alone and hate being alone because it s always themselves they can t stand being alone with . . .”
“The pavements were blocks of ice under my feet, and I could feel the cold through the soles of my shoes. I thought about the past ... The terrifying blackouts of my youth. I thought about never seeing my sister again. I thought about [girl]. First scared, then alone, then dead.”
“Sometimes you feel alone because, like you, others aren t so ready to confess their shortcomings and struggles.”
“You are not a failure. And you are not alone. This I know to be true. Read these lines as many times as you need to in order to start believing.”
“I often choose to be alone, but I never feel lonely.”
“You are never alone; if you can talk to your conscience.”
“All at once I feel desperate, outraged. Why am I alone doomed to spend nights of torment, with an unseen jailer, when all the rest of the world sleeps peacefully? By what laws have I been tried and condemned, without my knowledge, and to such a heavy sentence, too, when I do not even know of what or by whom I have been indicted? A wild impulse comes to me to protest, to demand a hearing, to refuse to submit any longer to such injustice. But to whom can one appeal when one does not even know where to find the judge? How can one ever hope to prove one’s innocence when there is no means of knowing of what one has been accused? No, there’s no justice for people like us in the world: all that we can do is to suffer as bravely as possible and put our oppressors to shame.”
“The years passed like the steps of a staircase leading lower and lower. I did not walk any more in the sun or hear the songs of larks like crystal fountains playing against the sky. No hand enfolded mine in the warm clasp of love. My thoughts were again solitary, disintegrate, disharmonious – the music gone. I lived alone in a few pleasant rooms, feeling my life run out aimlessly with the tedious hours: the life of an old maid ran out of my fingertips.”
“Being alone is not synonymous with incompleteness. Having a partner is not a precondition for completeness.”
“We are not meant to live in isolation. Not in nuclear families or bubbled existence. The richness of life is found in community, in cooperation, in becoming a part of a greater whole. Expand your bubble, drop your shield. Invite love in. Do not attempt to do it alone.”
“But every stroke of the brush, every lyric, every word whispered between human beings resulted from the pain of being alone. In our haunted heads, our imperfect bodies. Islands carved from clay and bone, our skulls like shells full of mist.”