“Loneliness doesn't make it to my emotional core anymore. It's no longer disturbing. It's a little like... hunger.”— John Mayer, twitter.com
“When I came to New York I was in pieces, and though it sounds perverse, the way I recovered a sense of wholeness was not by meeting someone or by falling in love, but rather by handling the things that other people had made, slowly absorbing by way of this contact the fact that loneliness, longing,…”— Olivia Laing, amazon.com
“There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenizing, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feelings -- depression, anxiety,…”— Olivia Laing, amazon.com
“What did it mean to have AIDS at that time, when diagnosis was an almost certain death sentence? It meant being perceived as a monster, an object of terror even to medical personnel. It meant being trapped in a body that was regarded as repellent, toxic, unpredictable and dangerous.”— Olivia Laing, amazon.com
“There is no substitute for touch, no substitute for love, but reading about someone else's commitment to discovering and admitting their desires was so deeply moving that I sometimes found I was physically shaking as I read.”— Olivia Laing, amazon.com
“Before I knew the phrase ‘irl’ I knew that irl was never going to be the place I felt most at home, which is a lonely thing to know from a young age, maybe.”— Chrissy Stockton, thoughtcatalog.com
“Kill the part of you that believes it can't survive without someone else.”— Sade Andria Zabala, lulu.com
“A long time back, I used to listen to a song by Dennis Wilson. It was from 'Pacific Ocean Blue', the album he made after The Beach Boys fell apart. There was a line in it I loved: "loneliness is a very special place." As a teenager, sitting on my bed on autumn evenings, I used to imagine that place…”— Olivia Laing, amazon.com
“Loneliness feels like such a shameful experience, so counter to the lives we are supposed to lead, that it becomes increasingly inadmissible, a taboo state whose confession seems destined to cause others to turn and flee.”— Olivia Laing, amazon.com
“My life felt very empty and unreal and I was embarrassed about its thinness, the way one might be embarrassed about a stained or threadbare piece of clothing.”— Olivia Laing, amazon.com
“Human beings are not meant to be alone but sometimes that's our reality, so until we find a partner who truly deserves us, then we should have a stronger outlook on life and stronger arms.”— Mirtha Michelle Castro, amazon.com
“I've never wanted to seem weak because nobody likes people who are sad all the time.”— Anonymous, facebook.com
“I never really understood the word ‘loneliness’. As far as I was concerned, I was in an orgy with the sky and the ocean, and with nature.”— Bjork, goodreads.com
“But those are the things that God made us with so we could find other people and procreate and be healthy and bear children with our healthy bodies and love each other. They’re the most important things about being a human. And prescription drugs will take them away from you, like, ‘Oh, that’s nothi…”— Cat Marnell, washingtonpost.com
“My body miraculous. I spent an entire year sleeping on a bed of swords and was not cut once. What I mean is my lonely looks a lot like insomnia when you hold it up to the light.”— Sabrina Benaim, lauralethe.tumblr.com
“I felt alone, my loneliness suffocated me, and I craved to scream, shout and kill me while seeing all this. However, self-hatred also occupied me.”— Shaikh Ashraf, amazon.com