“If you were alone you would cut yourself in two so that one part would shape the other.”— Elia Canetti, amazon.com
“Oh lord when you are alone and do not want to be, you lie in bed with your own shoulder wrapped around and beneath yourself so that the surges of pain keep you company. This is hurtful but it is so much better than no nerves firing at all. The worst is when there’s no one near to press on you and ma…”— Jenny Holzer, artic.edu
“Yet writing a poem about something painful, she has discovered, can be her way of digesting it. 'One of the things I’ve learned is, if we try and put sadness off, it just waits. And in my experience, running away from sadness doesn’t do anybody any good.'”— Frieda Hughes, theguardian.com
“When somebody else comes along and makes you feel like something special — it’s like catnip. You want more of it. You want to say: ‘Let’s get lunch sometime.’ But in the end, you are what you are no matter how somebody makes you feel. It’s just a feeling.”— Anonymous, facebook.com
“Sometimes, the most healing thing we can do is remind ourselves over and over and over, 'Other people feel this way.'”— Andrea Gibson, youtube.com
“WE need to swap the Romantic view for a tragic (and at points comedic) awareness that every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us — and we will (without any malice) do the same to them. There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness.”— Alain de Botton, nytimes.com
“Human beings can withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness. It is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings.”— Paulo Coelho, amazon.com
“Loneliness does not come from being alone, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important.”— Carl Gustav Jung, amazon.com
“You want to ask, am I lonely? Well, of course, lonely as a woman driving across country day after day, leaving behind mile after mile little towns she might have stopped and lived and died in, lonely”— Adrienne Rich, amazon.com
“He is so lonely that he sometimes feels it physically, a sodden clump of dirty laundry pressing against his chest.”— Hanya Yanagihara, amazon.com