“How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual friends, that we might go and meet their ideal cousins.”
Lonely feeling
Lonely Quotes — page 156 of 309
“With this book in my hands, reading aloud to my friends, questioning them, explaining to them, I was made clearly to understand that I had no friends, that I was alone in the world. Because in not understanding the meaning of the words, neither I nor my friends, one thing became very clear and that was that there were ways of not understanding and that the difference between the non-understanding of one individual and the non-understanding of another created a world of terra firma even more solid than differences of understanding.”
“We live in the mind, in ideas, in fragments. We no longer drink in the wild outer music of the streets - we remember only.”
“I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.”
“I couldn't allow myself to think about her very long; if I had I would have jumped off the bridge. It's strange. I had become so reconciled to this life without her, and yet if I thought about her only for a minute it was enough to pierce the bone and marrow of my contentment and shove me back again into the agonizing gutter of my wretched past.”
“We're not in love-we're just trying to wash away the dirt.”
“You won't make yourself a bit realer by crying.”
“It'll be no use their putting their heads down and saying "Come up again, dear!" I shall only look up and say "Who am I then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I'll come up: if not, I'll stay down here till I'm somebody else"--but, oh dear!' cried Alice, with a sudden burst of tears, 'I do wish they WOULD put their heads down! I am so VERY tired of being all alone here!”
“Everything you do makes my body scream with loneliness.”
“All I have is me. Over-worked, under-appreciated, middle-aged, and shriveled up.”
“O, though oft oppressed and lonely, All my fears are laid aside, If I but remember only Such as these have lived and died!”
“And the bright faces of my young companions Are wrinkled like my own, or are no more.”
“'He who seeks may easily get lost himself. It is a crime to go apart and be alone.' Thus speaks the herd.”
“We are always in our own company.”
“A fool with a heart and no sense is just as unhappy as a fool with sense and no heart.”
“What tender and devoted mother wouldn't be dismayed and ill with terror at her son's or daughter's stepping even one hair's breath off the beaten track. No, better let him be happy and live in comfort without originality, is what every mother thinks when she rocks the cradle. The only person among us who can fail to reach the general's rank is the original man - in other words, the man who won't be quiet.”
“As soon as any one is near me, his personality disturbs my self-complacency and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he's too long over his dinner; another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.”
“Could it be in longing we are most ourselves?”
“It is not a garment I cast off this day, but a skin that I tear with my own hands.”
“And when you were a silent word upon Life's quivering lips, I too was there, another silent word. Then life uttered us and we came down the years throbbing with memories of yesterday and with longing for tomorrow, for yesterday was death conquered and tomorrow was birth pursued.”