“She wanted to be herself again, to recover all that she had been obliged to give up in half a century of servitude that had doubtless made her happy but which, once her husband was dead, did not leave her even the vestiges of her identity.”
Lonely feeling
Lonely Quotes — page 263 of 309
“Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction.”
“we had made love without love, half-dressed most of the time and always in the dark so we could imagine ourselves as better than we were.”
“He was carrying a suitcase with clothing in order to stay and another just like it with almost two thousand letters that she had written him. They were arranged by date in bundles ties with colored ribbons, and they were all unopened.”
“And again, as always, after so many years we were still in the same place we always were.”
“She let him finish, scratching his head with the tips of her fingers, and without his having revealed that he was weeping from love, she recognized immediately the oldest sobs in the history of man.”
“Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia.”
“When Eleanor's arm touched his he felt his hands grow cold with deadly fear lest he should lose the shadow brush with which his imagination was painting wonders of her. He watched her from the corners of his eyes as ever he did when he walked with her-- she was a feast and a folly and he wished it had been his destiny to sit forever on a haystack and see life through her green eyes.”
“I don't much care where I am anymore, nor expect very much from places.”
“unloved women have no biographies-- they have histories”
“As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host but the two or three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an amazed way and denied so vehemently an knowledge of his movements that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table--the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone.”
“...one emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowly developing picture.”
“he wanted people to like his mind again-after awhile it might be such a nice place in which to live.”
“I'm not much like myself any more.”
“No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.”
“Travel, which had once charmed him, seemed, at length, unendurable, a business of color without substance, a phantom chase after his own dream's shadow.”
“I was too absorbed to be responsive”
“He snatched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast now for his burred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.”
“I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.”
“People living alone get used to loneliness.”