Loneliness is an emotional state in which a person experiences a powerful feeling of emptiness and isolation, of being cut off, disconnected from, and alienated towards other people. The lonely person may find it difficult or even impossible to have any form of meaningful human contact. The first recorded use of the word "lonely" was in William Shakespeare's Coriolanus.
- I am very old... my people were once around me like the sands of the shore... many... many... They have all passed away. They have died like the grass... they have gone to the mountains. I do not complain, the antelope falls with the arrow. I had a son. I loved him. When the palefaces came he went away. I do not know where he is. I am a Christian Indian, I am all that is left of my people. I am alone.
- Who knows what true happiness is? Not the conventional word but the naked terror. To the lonely themselves, it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.
- Loneliness / Got a mind of its own / The more people around / The more you feel alone
- I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.
- It is loneliness that makes the loudest noise. This is as true of men as of dogs.
- Eric Hoffer, "Thoughts of Eric Hoffer, Including: 'Absolute Faith Corrupts Absolutely'", The New York Times Magazine (April 25, 1971), p. 55.
- They're sharing a drink they call loneliness
But it's better than drinking alone.
- He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone.
- Life is very long when you're lonely.
- We suffer a lot in our society from loneliness. So much of our life is an attempt to not be lonely: 'Let's talk to each other; let's do things together so we won't be lonely.' And yet inevitably, we are really alone in these human forms. We can pretend; we can entertain each other; but that's about the best we can do. When it comes to the actual experience of life, we're very much alone; and to expect anyone else to take away our loneliness is asking too much.
- It's not that I hate people, I just feel better when they're not around.
- Henry Chinaski in Bar Fly.
- It's pointless to cry. One is born and dies alone...
- Cesare Pavese, The house on the hill.
- Men who have a tempestuous inner life and do not seek to give vent to it by talking or writing are simply men who have no tempestuous inner life.
Give company to a lonely man and he will talk more than anyone.
- Cesare Pavese, This Business of Living, 1938-09-19.
- Insults have broken my heart and left me weak, I looked for sympathy but there was none; I found no one to comfort me.
- Psalm 69:20.
- Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.
- Loneliness has followed me my whole life. Everywhere. In bars, cars, sidewalks, stores. Everywhere. There's no escape. I'm God's lonely man.
- 'I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an' he gets sick.'
- John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men, (1937) page ??, Crooks.
- Such a lonely day / And it's mine / The most loneliest day of my life. (sic)