“There pass the careless people That call their souls their own: Here by the road I loiter, How idle and alone. Ah, past the plunge of plummet, In seas I cannot sound, My heart and soul and senses, World without end, are drowned. His folly has not fellow Beneath the blue of day That gives to man or woman His heart and soul away. There flowers no balm to sain him From east of earth to west That s lost for everlasting The heart out of his breast. Here by the labouring highway With empty hands I stroll: Sea-deep, till doomsday morning, Lie lost my heart and soul.”
“Every choice we make affects the other. It always has… We share our choices and our burdens. But that way neither of us has to carry the weight alone—You have never been alone.”
“But he also knew that, as much as he wanted to aid and console the soldier, he wanted to be alone in his room with the night coming down and a book close by and pen and paper and the knowledge that the door would remain shut until the morning came and he would ne be disturbed. The gap between these two desires filled him with sadness and awe at the mystery of the self, the mystery of having a single consciousness, knowing merely its own bare feelings and experiencing singly and alone it own pain or fear or pleasure or complacency.”
“Where they had once ambled alone, they now walked together home.”
“They were drinking, laughing and dancing, but I was sitting alone in the corner and talking to your soul.”
“And I think, I m so fucking lonely . I go home and cry for a while. I am almost 32. That s not old especially in New York. But the fact is it has been years since I even liked someone. So how likely is it I ll meet someone I love enough to marry? I m tired of not knowing who I ll be with, or if I ll be with anyone.”
“Home. the word always had air quotes around it in her mind. She d done what she could to make her flat cozy, filling it with art, books, ornate lanterns, and a Persian carpet as soft as lynx fur. And of course there were her angel wings taking up one whole wall. But there was no help for the real emptiness; its close air was stirred by no breath but her own. When she was alone, the empty place within her, the missingness, as she thought of it, seemed to swell. Even being with Kaz had done something to keep it at bay, though not enough. Never enough.”
“Begin. . . where you are, NOT where you want to be. Begin stuck in the doldrums of your false story--if that is where you are. Begin there because, in truth, there is no other place to start from. Tell yourself that you are going to listen for the sound of your own voice--and remind yourself when you forget. And you will forget, over and over again.”
“Madoka: Won t anyone notice that Mami-san is dead? Homura: Mami Tomoe s only relatives are distant relations. It will be quite some time before anyone files a missing persons report. When one dies on that side of the wards, not even a body is left behind. She ll wind up forever a missing person ... That is what happens to magical girls in the end. Madoka: ...That s too cruel! Mami-san has been fighting all alone for a long time for everyone s sake! For no one to even notice that she s gone... That s just too lonely a fate... Homura: It is just that kind of contract that gives us the power in the first place. It isn t for anyone else s sake. We fight on for the sake of our own prayer. So for no one to notice... for the world to forget us... That is just something we have to accept.”
“A half-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold; While high overhead, green, yellow and red, the North Lights swept in bars?- Then you ve a hunch was the music meant...hunger and night and the stars.”
“Barbaric is letting the woman suffer to be alone for the rest of her life.”
“I don’t care too much about talking, but I don’t like being alone.”
“The church grew very lonely about him, and he began to feel like a child whose mother has forsaken it. Only he knew that to be left alone is not always to be forsaken.”
“But it doesn t happen that way, I keep telling myself knowingly and sadly. Only in our fraternity pledges and masonic inductions, our cowboy movies and magazine stories, not in our real-life lives. For, the seventeenth-century humanist to the contrary, each man is an island complete unto himself, and as he sinks, the moving feet go on around him, from nowhere to nowhere and with no time to lose. The world is long past the Boy Scout stage of its development; now each man dies as he was meant to die, and as he was born, and as he lived: alone, all alone. Without any God, without any hope, without any record to show for his life. ( New York Blues )”
“I turned my ear toward the door because I heard him breathing. When you’re alone and afraid, the simple sound of the steady in and out of air being drawn by another person is good medicine.”
“A game like sardines is scary, not so much for the hider but for the seekers. It s scary because you lose your companions and the whole world creeps up quiet and you slowly realize you re going to stumble upon a secret place where everyone will jump out at you. And then, when you are the very last seeker, you start to wonder if you re the only person in the world. If the hiding place somehow sucked up the players and the last one has to decide to run away or get sucked up, too.”
“No one ever said aloud any of the kinds of things he was so constantly thinking, because no one in the parish, not Alice, not Lady Higgs, not anybody, ever seemed to see the things he saw. If they thought as he did, if they saw what he did, they never mentioned it; and to have things which are precious to one eternally unmentioned makes one, he had long discovered, lonely. These August nights, for instance—remarkably and unusually beautiful, warm and velvety as he had never known them, ushered in each evening by the most astonishing variety of splendid sunsets—nobody had said a single word about them. They might have been February ones, for all the notice they got. Sometimes he climbed up to the top of Burdon Down towards evening, and stood staring in amazement at what looked like heaven let loose in flames over England; but always he stood alone, always there was no one but himself up there, and no one afterwards, when he descended from his heights, seemed to be aware that anything unusual had been going on.”