Often it feels like I am breathing today only because a few years back I had no idea which nerve to cut...
I learned much too late that what you called love was nothing but a desperate and irrational fear of a life lived alone.
I left the library. Crossing the street, I was hit head-on by a brutal loneliness. I felt dark and hollow. Abandoned, unnoticed, forgotten, I stood on the sidewalk, a nothing, a gatherer of dust. People hurried past me. and everyone who walked by was happier than I. I felt the old envy. I would have given anything to be one of them.
When I'm in turmoil, when I can't think, when I'm exhausted and afraid and feeling very, very alone, I go for walks. It's just one of those things I do. I walk and I walk and sooner or later something comes to me, something to make me feel less like jumping off a building.
There never can be a man so lost as one who is lost in the vast and intricate corridors of his own lonely mind, where none may reach and none may save.
But there are other words for privacy and independence. They are isolation and loneliness.
I knew this feeling, the 2 a.m. loneliness that I'd practically invented.
All that he had of her was his memory, where he held every moment, every single moment that she had been his. That was all he had, to keep out the loneliness.
In the silence of night I have often wished for just a few words of love from one man, rather than the applause of thousands of people.
You do not have to be alone. The world never inflicts loneliness upon us. That is something we choose or reject by ourselves.
People cannot win against their loneliness because loneliness is this world’s worst kind of pain.
There’s a loneliness that only exists in one’s mind. The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is blink.
Maybe reading was just a way to make her feel less alone, to keep her company. When you read something you are stopped, the moment is stayed, you can sometimes be there more fully than you can in your real life.
And if I'm alone in bed, I will go to the window, look up at the sky, and feel certain that loneliness is a lie, because the Universe is there to keep me company.
Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.
You get lonely, is what it is. A person's not supposed to go through life with absolutely nobody. It's not normal. The longer you go by yourself the weirder you get, and the weirder you get the longer you go by yourself. It's a loop and you gotta do something to get out of it.
Like you're riding a train at night across some vast plain, and you catch a glimpse of a tiny light in a window of a farmhouse. In an instant it's sucked back into the darkness behind and vanishes. But if you close your eyes, that point of light stays with you, just barely for a few moments.
The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature (or the ‘tonic of wildness’ as Thoreau called it) solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself.
You know why people pair up into couples? Because being a human is fucking terrifying. But it's a hell of a lot easier if you're not doing it by yourself.
Shrinking in a corner, pressed into the wall; do they know I'm present, am I here at all? Is there a written rule book, that tells you how to be— all the right things to talk about— that everyone has but me? Slowly I am withering— a flowered deprived of sun; longing to belong to— somewhere or someone.