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Loneliness quotes

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“We live, as we dream—alone...” Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“You can be lonely even when you're loved by many people, since you're still not anybody's 'one and only'.” Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“Nearly everyone has his box of secret pain, shared with no one.” John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a...” Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all. It just leads to disappointment.” Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“He distrusted her affection; and what loneliness is more lonely than distrust?” George Eliot, Middlemarch

“No one should be alone in their old age, he thought. But it is unavoidable.” Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“Crying can bring relief, as long as you don't cry alone.” Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“It is a very strange sensation to inexperienced youth to feel itself quite alone in the world, cut adrift from every connection, uncertain whether the port to which it is bound can be reached, and prevented by many impediments from returning to...” Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.” Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

“I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other. In Heaven’s name, why is it so important to think the same things all together.” Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” George Orwell, 1984

“All great and precious things are lonely.” John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Does no one want to know the truth here, Mr. Archer? The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!"” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.” Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.” C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity too.” James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“I'm afraid that some times you'll play lonely games too. Games you can't win 'cause you'll play against you.” Dr. Seuss, Oh, The Places You'll Go!

“people living alone get used to loneliness.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“The best remedy for those who are frightened, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere they can be alone, alone with the sky, nature and God.” Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“My desolation does begin to make a better life.” William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra

“Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction, can be a difficult, lonely job; it’s like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. There’s plenty of opportunity for self-doubt.” Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one's self?” Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives.” George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“It is not difficult to be alone if you are poor and a failure. An artist is always alone—if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.” Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“More and more I feel like a letter—deposited here, collected there. But a letter addressed to no one.” Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“there are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone.” Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“I felt so lonesome, all of a sudden. I almost wished I was dead.” J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she murmured, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.” Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine.” Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friendship

“Deep down, the young are lonelier than the old.” Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and, by heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad.” Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.” George Orwell, 1984

“I had always been good company for myself.” Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

“To forget a friend is sad. Not every one has had a friend.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“And he who would be friends with God must remain alone, or make the whole world his friend.” Mahatma Gandhi, The Story of my Experiments with Truth

“A multitude of people, and yet a solitude!” Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“I am lonely, sometimes, but I dare say it's good for me” Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“The only person I really wanted to talk to about Augustus Waters’s death was Augustus Waters.” John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Virtue is not left to stand alone. He who practises it will have neighbors.” Confucius, Analects

“Life could be wonderful if people'd leave you alone.” Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator

“it is natural to believe in God when you're alone—quite alone, in the night, thinking about death...” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why?” Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“He woke the robot up because even a manically depressed robot is better to talk to than nobody.” Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“It was a lonely life to lead, for I had nothing to think of, having been made such a little while before.” L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

“I'm free, I think. I shut my eyes and think hard and deep about how free I am, but I can't really understand what it means. All I know is I'm totally alone. All alone in an unfamiliar place, like some solitary explorer who's lost his compass and...” Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no family. They don’t belong no place. They come to a ranch an’ work up a stake and then they go inta town and blow their stake, and the first thing you know...” John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

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Related topics

isolation friendship belief hypocrisy life madness freedom strength society world despair solitude depression love women death truth God self youth

Related authors

Anne Frank (4)
John Steinbeck (4)
Joseph Conrad (3)
George Orwell (2)
Haruki Murakami (5)
Stephen King (4)
Charlotte Brontë (3)
Ralph Waldo Emerson (3)
Charles Bukowski (3)
Jean-Paul Sartre (3)
Henry Miller (3)
Dr. Seuss (3)
Aldous Huxley (2)
Chuck Palahniuk (2)
Virginia Woolf (2)
Louisa May Alcott (2)
Edith Wharton (2)
Jules Verne (2)
Ernest Hemingway (1)
C. S. Lewis (1)

Related sources

Jane Eyre (3)
The Diary of a Young Girl (4)
Heart of Darkness (3)
Ham on Rye (3)
Oh, The Places You'll Go! (3)
Brave New World (2)
East of Eden (2)
Little Women (2)
The Stand (2)
The Age of Innocence (2)
Survivor (2)
Sputnik Sweetheart (2)
Antony and Cleopatra (1)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1)
Vanity Fair (1)
Nausea (3)
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2)
Tropic of Cancer (2)
Of Mice and Men (2)
1984 (2)