Lonesomeness

“ The man he was now, the personality his friends knew, had begun to grow strong during adolescence, during the years when he was always consciously or unconsciously conjugating the verb "to love"—in society and solitude, with people, with books, with the sky and open country, in the lonesomeness of crowded city streets. ”

“ The eerie plaint of the owl came wavering from the darkness, but the empty, ghostly note seemed only a part of the great hush that brooded over the wilderness. The last man left on earth could not feel a sense of lonesomeness more poignant than Dexter felt at that moment, as he stood before the doorway of death, vainly waiting for some sound or movement to break the stillness about him. ”

“ Life, through all happenings, could pass like this. Happenings would be disarmed, bright strangeness rooted in an unexamined sameness. There would be solace for all the wounds of thought in his unconsciousness. But no companionship. For a long while nothing at all of profound experience and then, perhaps, her whole being arranged round a new centre and reality once more accessible, but in a loneliness beside which the loneliness of the single life was nothing.
He would never know this. A listening radiance and superficial statements and activities would satisfy him. ”

“ Loneliness
This loneliness encaged in me
That has no curious heart for life,
No ribald blood, no treacherous flesh
Nor golden wickedness of song,
This loneliness that prays in me,
Is it not somewhat like a nun? ”

“ A sense of utter loneliness--loneliness inevitable, crushing, eternal, the loneliness of existence, encompassed by the infinite void of unconsciousness--enfolded him as a pall. Life lay like an incubus on his bosom. ”

“ Then, although seeming alone, it has companionship, it is not lonely. And there are hours of heart-felt loneliness, though surrounded by a crowd, when no look, word or touch of another can reach our hearts, so separated are we. ”

“ Loneliness, everlasting loneliness! Loneliness within herself: that feeling of which Jules had such a dread! Withdrawn from the world which had no charm for her, sinking away alone into emptiness! She was thirty, she was old, an old woman. Her house would be empty, her heart empty! Dreams, clouds of dreaming, which fly away, which lift like smoke, revealing only emptiness. Emptiness, emptiness, emptiness! ”

“ Images and observations which could easily be disposed of by a glance, a smile, an exchange of opinion, will occupy him unbearably, sink deep into the silence, become full of meaning, become life, adventure, emotion. Loneliness ripens the eccentric, the daringly and estrangingly beautiful, the poetic. But loneliness also ripens the perverse, the disproportionate, the absurd, and the illicit.—So, the things he had met with on the trip, the ugly old fop with his twaddle about sweethearts, the lawbreaking gondolier who was cheated of his pay, still left the traveller uneasy. ”

“ Yet I feel rarely rarefied, heavily rarefied, wornly rarefied in this living-place where Loneliness burns me in strong fire and where I can shake my life like a hollow gourd and hear the eerie rattling sound I make in it. ”

“ It is the loneliness which men are wont to associate with death: when the Eastern ceases for this—dialogue—he has attained Heaven, absorption into the Divine. ... Oh! the loneliness! Oh! the joy of loneliness and solitude; the joy of aloofness, each for each. The Soul and God together, alone together side by side, and at last, alone and one ... one Great Soul. For our souls are carrier pigeons, homing to God. ”

“ I am entirely of a lively disposition; I know not how to be low-spirited; I never knew what it was to be lonesome in my life. Some talk about being lonesome when they are alone; I know nothing about it. I never misuse a beast, and I am not inclined to misuse people ”

“ Each day he goes off to his work, and he always asks the same question: 'You won't be lonesome, little woman, will you?' and I answer, 'No.' But I am lonesome, so lonesome that I should have gone mad if I hadn't found someone--you--to whom I could speak out. ”

“ And the fireside by which you sit, now merry and noisy enough, may grow lonely,—lonely with the second loneliness, not the hopeful solitude of youth looking forward, but the desponding loneliness of age looking back. ”

“ Exceeding great and terrible is my solitude—behind me, before me and around me a yawning emptiness. It is the fearful loneliness of one who lives, feels and thinks, and is incomprehensibly alone; how small I seem, absurdly null, and so weak that I expect to be extinguished any moment. ”

“ When love has gone from us is loneliness.
The crying of a little child at night
In the big dark is crowding loneliness.
Slow death of woman on a Kansas farm;
The ache of those who think beyond their time;
Pain unassuaged of isolated lives,—
All this is loneliness.
Oh, we who are one body of one soul!
Great soul of man born into social form! ”

“ What would have been merely a fit of homesickness, and a loneliness soon to be conquered and forgotten with girls of a different temperament, was a longer and more lasting struggle with me. It was wholesome discipline, no doubt; but now, disheartened, I recognized no hope in all the dark horizon; saw nothing in the future that was worth living through the present for; disappointment, pain, and loneliness had taken the color out of every hope, and made what should have been morning, a night, and that of the blackest. ”

“ Yet if you do, and only if you do, you will feel lonely and helpless, because you are denying yourself everything.
I am come as a light into a world that does deny itself everything. It does this simply by dissociating itself from everything. It is therefore an illusion of isolation, maintained by fear of the same loneliness that is its illusion. I said that I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. That is why I am the light of the world. If I am with you in the loneliness of the world, the loneliness is gone. ”

“ Was I made for solitude or for a life in which there was no one to whom I could speak? The inability to communicate one's thoughts is in very truth the most terrible of all kinds of loneliness. Difference is a mask—which is more ironbound than any iron mask and perfect friendship is possible only inter pares! ”

“ The loneliness of the individual human soul is one of the saddest facts of human experience, but there are divine moments in the lives at least of some of us when by the contemplation of the supremely beautiful in Nature or in Art, or by the stirring of some profound emotion, we feel that our loneliness is a mere appearance that will pass away: moments in which we feel that we are in communion and fellowship with the perfect beauty and white truth that lie beyond the fleeting shadowland in which we daily move. ”

“ Loneliness—these are the three things by which I flee from haunting terrors towards numbness and indifference. Each one, of course, has his own weapons—these are mine. Years ago, when I was young and timid, I dreaded to leave the little rut down which I wandered. Now experience has given me the knowledge that Life is very little after all, and that it is for the most part worthless where there is no happiness, no forgetfulness of pain, no inner peace. The opinion of other people, beyond the few who love me, leaves me cold. ”

“ A strange unhappiness, a vague misery, a burden of unutterable nostalgia, troubles the loneliness of our soul. And yet it is not, this vague longing, a mere desire to break the isolating circle of the "I am I" and to invade, and mingle with, other personalities. It is something deeper than this, it is a desire to break the isolation of all personalities, and to enter, in company with all, some larger, fuller, freer level of life, where what we call "the limits of personality" are surpassed and transcended. ”

“ Suffering or sorrow, fortune, feud, or care,—
Whate'er he find or feel,—he may not share.
Lonely we join the world, and we depart
⁠Even as lonely, having lived alone,
The breast that feeds us, the beloved one's heart,
⁠The lips we kiss,—or curse—alike unknown.
Ay, even these lips of thine, so often kissed,
What certitude have I that they exist? ”

“ I surrounded myself with imaginary friends whom I loved and who loved me—charming, agreeable, superior people—men and women, not children. The misery that prevailed in our home had taken my childhood from me before I knew I possessed it. I early learned the solemn truth that ‘each soul in what is most itself, in what is deepest and nearest, lives alone, and that there is more loneliness in life than there is communion.’ I, too, like my little sister, suffered from a strange homesickness of the spirit, a longing for sympathetic association, for companionship, in short. ”

“ I can't tell you—you would never understand how lonely I get at times, and now with the children away it is worse than ever—the loneliness, I mean, and the feeling that there isn't anybody one could turn to in trouble. ”

“ My silent rivulets, over-brimmed.
What, I have secrets from you? Yes.
But, visiting Sea, your love doth press
⁠And reach in further than you know,
⁠And fills all these; and, when you go,
There's loneliness in loneliness. ”

“ I shall be very lonesome without you. How miserably things seem to be arranged in this world! If we have no friends we have no pleasure; and if we have them, we are sure to lose them, and be doubly pained by the loss. ”

“ Is not my recurrent feeling of almost intolerable loneliness an index, a sign of her remoteness? In her arms only have I been able to feel united with something not myself, bigger than myself, a part of something not myself, my larger self. Under the illusion of the senses and the amorous fancy I have felt a real bond. ”

“ Itself is my ancient daylight Loneliness dating from Three-Years-Old when I first began whisperingly analyzing things and finding little life-items to be of a fierce bitter importance.
If I were living among people, friendly people, then the Loneliness though unchanged would be disguised and vested with a padded muffling power—false, belike, and a mistake (but everything is false and a mistake: only there are wrong mistakes and right mistakes) —but made of the world-stuff that lets a human being get by in this nervous life. ”

“ But worst of all was the awful loneliness from which I suffered. It seemed to me as though there were no other living thing in all the Universe and never had been and never would be any other living thing. I felt as though I were the Universe rushing solitary through space for ages upon ages in a frantic search for fellowship, and finding none. ”

“ There are times when my Loneliness is a charmed and scintillant and resourceful Loneliness with a strange and ecstatic gleam in it. The miracle of being a person rushes upon and about and into me ‘with lightning and with music.’
One loses that in a day of many friendships.
But oftener are times when the tired, tired heart and the weary, weary brain beat-beat, beat-beat to anguished torturing self-rhythms. The spirit of me closes its eyes in turbulent dusks of wondering and wishing and leans its forehead against a mathematic dead-wall. ”

“ Through all the air floated that spirit of vast loneliness which at seasons seems to steal like a human mood over the breast of the great earth and leave her estranged from her transitory children. At such an hour the heart takes wing for home, if any home it have; or when, if homeless, it feels the quick stir of that yearning for the evening fireside with its half-circle of trusted faces, young and old, and its bonds of love and marriage, those deepest, most enchanting realities to the earthly imagination. ”

“ The Evening Star is waiting and I have found for you a man with the true measure of loneliness. It is impossible for this man to become any more or any less lonely. It isn't the Ultimate Possible Loneliness, understand that, General. ”

“ All the crowds and jams of people we see are merely, for the most part, huddling together, as an unconscious compensation for the sickening loneliness they feel in their heart of hearts. We see them in amusement parks, and in all places where hordes of people congregate; and undoubtedly a part of the impulse which moves them is their unconscious solitude for which they get only consciously perceptible consolation in the sight of each other and rubbing of elbows and treading on each other’s feet. ”

“ At eighty-three he was alone, and he deeply felt, as was natural, that loneliness. Yet he had affectionate children, and with his youngest son, who had four daughters, to him kind and pleasant granddaughters, he made his home for the remainder of his life. ”

“ Who has not felt that loneliness which oppresses the heart that loves it best! Think no longer that this gulf is eternally fixed, or is any necessity of human nature. It has no existence for the race of our fellow-men which I describe, and by that fact we may be assured that eventually it will be bridged also for us. ”

“ Being alone in body and spirit begets loneliness, and loneliness begets more loneliness. ”

“ Aloneness, a terrible loneliness (those who cannot love will know what I mean) , would be mankind’s lot.
Love means, in its very deepest sense, union; union between individuals, between women and women, men and men, men and women. ”

“ Though he and she loved each other very dearly, though they were all in all each to the other, yet he comprehended the loneliness she felt rather than analyzed--the infinite need of man for man, of woman for woman--the old social, group-instinct of the race beginning to reassert itself even in their Eden. ”

“ As a child, I grew up in the awe of these influences, fostered by loneliness and the moody companionship of a wayward woman, who held little intercourse with the outer world, and shut herself up in dreams and superstitions. ”

“ For the first time the loneliness of complete solitude gripped him, the more so that hitherto in all his life he had never known what it was to be absolutely alone. From babyhood he had been surrounded night and day by human beings, many of them evil, but human nevertheless. ”