71 Quotes On Loneliness

In the tapestry of human emotions, loneliness stands out as a complex and universally felt experience, often blending solitude with a longing for connection. Whether you're seeking solace, understanding, or a different perspective on this introspective state, quotes can serve as powerful companions. They offer insights into the minds and hearts of others who have tread similar paths, providing comfort and wisdom in moments of solitude. This curated collection of 71 quotes on loneliness aims to illuminate the beauty and challenges of being alone, reminding us that even in solitude, we are united by our shared experiences.

1. “We're going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, We're remembering. That's where we'll win out in the long run. And someday we'll remember so much that we'll build the biggest goddamn steamshovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in it and cover it up.” - Ray Bradbury

2. “Half of the time I don't know what they're talking about; their jokes seem to relate to a past that everyone but me has shared. I'm a foreigner in the world and I don't understand the language.” - Jean Webster

3. “Grey rocks, and greyer sea, And surf along the shore -- And in my heart a name My lips shall speak no more. ” - Charles G.D. Roberts

4. “You're reaching outAnd no one hears you cryYou're freaking out again'Cause all your fearsRemind you another dream has come undoneYou feel so small and lost like you're the only oneYou wanna scream 'cause you'reDesperateYou want somebody, just anybodyTo lay their hands on your soul tonightYou want a reason to keep believin'That someday you're gonna see the lightYou're in the darkThere's no one left to callAnd sleep's your only friendWell even sleepCan't hide you from all those tearsAnd all the pain and all the daysYou wasted pushin' them awayIt's your life, it's time you face it ” - David Archuletta

5. “All alone! Whether you like it or not, alone is something you'll be quite a lot!” - Dr. Seuss

6. “My life is like an autumn leafI lie around unclaimed.The breeze blows me around,To be trampled under the feet of men.Natures cruel feast has bestowed me with pain,Pain of being a part,Just a part of someone.Pain of departing,Departing from that one.Pick me up like a rose,And hold me to your heart.Keep me there till he does not come.And when he comes do a good deed,Dig the earth below,And bury me deepFor I don't want to lie around,Unclaimed, unloved.” - Dr. Amit Abraham

7. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder, but it sure makes the rest of you lonely.” - Charles M. Schulz

8. “I learned that day that there is no more lonely state than being in a lonely marriage.” - Julie Metz

9. “Have you ever met someone and felt . . . I don't know how to describe it, felt a chance at having something that eluded you? I don't know . . . Forget I said anything."I knew what he meant. He was describing that moment when you realize that you are lonely. For a time you can be alone and doing fine and never give a thought to living any other way and then you meet someone and suddenly you become lonely. It stabs at you, almost like a physical pain, and you feel both deprived and angry, deprived because you wish to be with that person and angry, because their absence brings you misery. It's a strange feeling, akin to desperation, a feeling that makes you wait by the phone even though you know that the call is an hour away. I was not going to lose my balance. Not yet.” - Ilona Andrews

10. “To share is precious, pure and fair.Don't play with something you should cherish for life. Don't you wanna care, ain't it lonely out there?” - Marvin Gaye

11. “We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of True Romance magazines—we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely—at least, not all the time—but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don't see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.” - Hunter S. Thompson

12. “I feel strangely free at such times. To behave properly is to be always courteous, always clever, and subtle and elegant. But now, when I am so alone, I do not have to be any of these things. For this moment, I am wholly myself, unshaped by the needs of others, by their dreams or expectations or sensibilities. But I am also lonely. With no one to shape me, who stands here, watching the moon, or the stars, or the clouds?” - Kij Johnson

13. “‎"But you're the toughest son of a b!&€# i've ever seen.You never let anybody get near you.You never let anybody know what you really think.” - Mario Puzo

14. “People who do a job that claims to be creative have to be alone to recharge their batteries. You can’t live 24 hours a day in the spotlight and remain creative. For people like me, solitude is a victory.” - Karl Lagerfeld

15. “Friends are a strange, volatile, contradictory, yet sticky phenomenon. They are made, crafted, shaped, molded, created by focused effort and intent. And yet, true friendship, once recognized, in its essence is effortless.Best friends are formed by time.Everyone is someone's friend, even when they think they are all alone.If the friendship is not working, your heart will know. It's when you start being less than perfectly honest and perfectly earnest in your dealings. And it's when the things you do together no longer feel right.However, sometimes it takes more effort to make it work after all.Stick around long enough to become someone's best friend.” - Vera Nazarian

16. “A dead dog is more quiet than a house on the steppes, a chair in a empty room.” - Per Petterson

17. “Lying in the bed that had once held two, Lisey thought alone never felt more lonely than when you woke up and discovered you still had the house to yourself. That you and the mice in the walls were the only ones still breathing.” - Stephen King

18. “Just tell me what's so irritating."(katsu)That's none of your damn business!"(kyok)Maybe not. But I'm curious."(katsu)It's EVERYTHING you prick! God, you're annoying! It's everything,okay?! EVERYTHING PISSES ME OFF! Them! And them! And them! And YOU! Everyone and everything!I HATE YOUR GODDAMN GUTS! You just...You all treat people like garbage. But you're all just as bad!QUIT TRYING TO ACT LIKE YOU'RE ALL FRIGGIN' PERFECT! Leave me alone. I wish everyone would just...go. Get out of my life. I'd be better off with YOU DEAD! DIE! DIE! GO TO HELL! YOU DISAPPEAR! YOU FALL APART!"(kyok)Really? I think you WANT them to care. You want them to look at you, don't you? All those people. You want them to need you. You want them.....to listen to you. To understand somehow. You want them to accept you. I think.... you want them to love you.You know something? I'm like that, too."(katsu)... Wh-why? Why did I....turn out....like this?"(kyok)You're asking me?"(katsu)That's what..That's what I wanna know. Why? Why...did I..?!"(kyok)Where did she go wrong? What was her mistake? "I'm miserable. I feel so alone!"(kyok)-Katsuya and Kyoko Honda” - Natsuki Takaya

19. “But a mother-son relationship is not a coequal one, is it? He is lonely with only you just as you are lonely with only him.” - Mary Balogh

20. “I'm lonely. And I'm lonely in some horribly deep way and for a flash of an instant, I can see just how lonely, and how deep this feeling runs. And it scares the shit out of me to be this lonely because it seems catastrophic.” - Augusten Burroughs

21. “Tore up my heart and shut it down. Nothing to do, nowhere to be. A simple little kind of free. Nothing to do, no one but me, and that's all I need. I'm perfectly lonely.” - John Mayer

22. “This is not to say, there never comes a day I'll take my chances and start again. And when I look behind on all my younger times, I'll have to thank the wrongs that led me to a love so strong.” - John Mayer

23. “Sometimes she would cry. I was so lonely, she'd say. You have no idea how lonely I was. And I had friends, I was a lucky one, but I was lonely anyway.I admired my mother in some ways, although things between us were never easy. She expected too much from me, I felt. She expected me to vindicate her life for her, and the choices she'd made. I didn't want to live my life on her terms. I didn't want to be the model offspring, the incarnation of her ideas. We used to fight about that. I am not your justification for existence, I said her to once.I want her back. I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.” - Margaret Atwood

24. “The loneliness you feel with another person, the wrong person, is the loneliest of all.” - Deb Caletti

25. “A lonely night is more profound then lonesome nights.” - Santosh Kalwar

26. “She had to go," said Rose."It was because of her angel," said Indigo."And because of Granddad," added Caddy."And because of her nose stud.""And because her name isn't on the color chart.""She's lonely," said Rose. "That's why.” - Hilary McKay

27. “Don't think you can frighten me by telling me that I am alone. France is alone. God is alone. And the loneliness of God is His strength.” - George Bernard Shaw

28. “There are people who like to be alone without feeling lonely at all.” - Toba Beta

29. “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

30. “No day shall erase you from the memory of time” - Virgil

31. “You know you're my best friend, right?' he said.I shrugged. I guessed it was true. Now that I wasn't going to be at the parade, they would all hate me. Everything had been carefully choreographed, and me not being there would throw them all off. I realized that kids like Theo and me weren't supposed to have real friends. We were supposed to be all alone and confused. By being each other's friend, we were defying our laws of gravity.” - Heather O'Neill

32. “Because it doesn't matter anymore, and because I'm so desperately lonely I can't stand it.” - Suzanne Collins

33. “Have you ever been lonely? No, neither have I. Solitary, yes. Alone, certainly. But lonely means minding about being on your own. I've never minded about it.” - Sebastian Faulks

34. “Sometimes the emptiness in a room becomes palpable as if you could reach out and touch it real, hear its silence, feel its black nothingness. It invades your spirit, your soul like a stealthy misperception; a liquid lie that whispers and will not die, and makes you fight to stay alive.” - Gloria Smith

35. “... even though it was beautiful and comfortable, and even though it was the world, it was also a little bit boring. No, wait. Maybe boring isn’t the right word. What’s the word I’m wanting here? Lonely. That’s it. It was a little bit lonely.” - Catherine Ryan Hyde

36. “Suddenly this defeat.This rain.The blues gone grayAnd the browns gone grayAnd yellowA terrible amber.In the cold streetsYour warm body.In whatever roomYour warm body.Among all the peopleYour absenceThe people who are alwaysNot you.I have been easy with treesToo long.Too familiar with mountains.Joy has been a habit.NowSuddenlyThis rain.” - Jack Gilbert

37. “As I stood on the lonely backroad, I'm sure I heard birds, kookaburras, laughing ...” - Steven Herrick

38. “Now it's serious. At last it's becoming serious. So I've grown older. Was I the only one who wasn't serious? Is it our times that are not serious? I was never lonely neither when I was alone, nor with others. But I would have liked to be alone at last. Loneliness means I'm finally whole. Now I can say it as tonight, I'm at last alone. I must put an end to coincidence. The new moon of decision. I don't know if there's destiny but there's a decision. Decide! We are now the times. Not only the whole town - the whole world is taking part in our decision. We two are now more than us two. We incarnate something. We're representing the people now. And the whole place is full of those who are dreaming the same dream. We are deciding everyone's game. I am ready. Now it's your turn. You hold the game in your hand. Now or never. You need me. You will need me. There's no greater story than ours, that of man and woman. It will be a story of giants... invisible... transposable... a story of new ancestors. Look. My eyes. They are the picture of necessity, of the future of everyone in the place. Last night I dreamt of a stranger... of my man. Only with him could I be alone, open up to him, wholly open, wholly for him. Welcome him wholly into me. Surround him with the labyrinth of shared happiness. I know... it's you.” - Wim Wenders

39. “I am a drifter, and as lonely as that can be, it is also remarkably freeing. I will never define myself in terms of anyone else. I will never feel the pressure of peers or the burden of parental expectation. I can view everyone as pieces of a whole, and focus on the whole, not the pieces. I have learned to observe, far better than most people observe. I am not blinded by the past or motivated by the future. I focus on the present because that is where I am destined to live.” - David Levithan

40. “I find a certain degree of loneliness not only tolerable but deeply pleasurable.” - Allen Shawn

41. “Aunt Syl must have conveniently stopped reading the childhood fairy tales when the knight left the damsel in distress to pursue a better damsel out of my bedtime routine.” - Rachel Higginson

42. “The little island seemed to float on the dark lake-waters. Trees grew on it, and a little hill rose in the middle of it. It was a mysterious island, lonely and beautiful. All the children stood and gazed at it, loving it and longing to go to it. It looked so secret - almost magic.“Well,” said Jack at last. “What do you think? Shall we run away, and live on the secret island?”“Yes!” whispered all the children.“Let’s!” - Enid Blyton

43. “I thought the love I'd had for him belonged to the past, to the foolish, lonely girl I never wanted to be again. I'd tried to bury that girl and the love she'd felt, just as I'd tried to bury my power. But I wouldn't make that mistake again.” - Leigh Bardugo

44. “Hey, Hank, I notice all the women around your place lately ... good looking stuff; you're doing all right.""Sam," I say, "that's not true; I am one of God's most lonely men.” - Charles Bukowski

45. “Oh, the places you'll go! There is fun to be done!There are points to be scored. There are games to be won.And the magical things you can do with that ballwill make you the winning-est winner of all.Fame! You'll be as famous as famous can be,with the whole wide world watching you win on TV.Except when they don'tBecause, sometimes they won't.I'm afraid that some timesyou'll play lonely games too.Games you can't win'cause you'll play against you.” - Dr. Seuss

46. “Love seeks out that desperate, lonely, frightened place inside each of us and coaxes it out into the daylight, so that it can eviscerate it in the burning heat of the sun.” - Cassondra Windwalker

47. “I suppose there has been nothing like the airports since the age of the stage-stops - nothing quite as lonely, as sombre-silent. The red-brick depots were built right into the towns they marked - people didn't get off at those isolated stations unless they lived there. But airports lead you way back in history like oases, like the stops on the great trade routes. The sight of air travellers strolling in ones and twos into midnight airports will draw a small crowd any night up or two. The young people look at the planes, the older ones look at the passengers with a watchful incredulity.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

48. “It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man , more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road. 'How do you get to West Egg village?' he asked helplessly. I told him. Ans as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He has casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

49. “Its good to be alone than being alone with everyone.” - Abhijit Tripathi

50. “Madoka: Won't anyone notice that Mami-san is dead?Homura: Mami Tomoe's only relatives are distant relations. It will be quite some time before anyone files a missing persons report. When one dies on that side of the wards, not even a body is left behind. She'll wind up forever a "missing person"... That is what happens to magical girls in the end.Madoka: ...That's too cruel! Mami-san has been fighting all alone for a long time for everyone's sake! For no one to even notice that she's gone... That's just too lonely a fate...Homura: It is just that kind of contract that gives us the power in the first place. It isn't for anyone else's sake. We fight on for the sake of our own prayer. So for no one to notice... for the world to forget us... That is just something we have to accept.” - Magica Quartet

51. “So, this is how it's become? This is how I've become? A walking contradiction? I'm surrounded by people and feel alone. I claim to crave a bit of normalcy but now that I have some, it's like I don't know what to do with it, I don't know how to be a normal person anymore.” - Gayle Forman

52. “Should you ever feel too lonely...listen for the roar of the sea- for in it are all those who've been and all those who are to come.” - Simon Van Booy

53. “It is beautiful, it is endless, it is full and yet seems empty. It hurts us.” - Jackson Pearce

54. “When you're alone and you feel sad, try reading a book. Try touching someone's heart. Try to imagine what they were thinking, what they wanted to convey. If you do that, you might get something amazing.” - Mizuki Nomura

55. “She didn't want to have anything to do with the party. She was tired of feeling like she didn't fit in, but she didn't want to go home, either, because she was a tired of being lonely and she was a little drunk.” - Candace Bushnell

56. “Such people, while useful, even agreeable, to others, are, if truth be told, frequently unhappy–lonely in fact. Yes, they seek out others, and it may even seem to them that in a certain country or city they have managed to find true kinship and fellowship, having come to know and learn about a people; but they wake up one day and suddenly feel that nothing actually binds them to these people, that they can leave here at once. They realize that another country, some other people, have now beguiled them, and that yesterday’s most riveting event now pales and loses all meaning and significance. For all intents and purposes, they do not grow attached to anything, do not put down deep roots. Their empathy is sincere, but superficial. If asked which of the countries they have visited they like best, they are embarrassed–they do not know how to answer. Which one? In a certain sense–all of them. There is something compelling about each. To which country would they like to return once more? Again, embarrassment–they had never asked themselves such a question. The one certainty is that they would like to be back on the road, going somewhere. To be on their way again–that is the dream.” - Ryszard Kapuściński

57. “I did not know I was on a search for passionate aliveness. I only knew I was lonely and lost and that something was drawing me deeper beneath the surface of my life in search of meaning. There is a hunger in people to go to those deep depths; to know that our lives are sacred; that our hearts are truly capable of love. It is a yearning to be all the we can be. A longing for what is real.” - Anne Hillman

58. “I am not alone, in my aloneness.” - T. Scott McLeod

59. “I've been trying not to think about the things I wanted but couldn't have.I figured life must be about what you can't have.Some part of me has given up wanting anything. Why? I'm human, aren't I?Even though I knew that this was pointless.Why did I fall in love?” - Yoneda Kou

60. “She was smart and terribly determined, this girl-her will was pure steel, through and through-but she was as human as anyone else. She was lonely, too. Lonely in a way that perhaps only single girls fresh from small Midwestern towns know. Homesickness is not always a vague, nostalgic, almost beautiful emotion, although that is somehow the way we always seem to picture it in our mind. It can be a terribly keen blade, not just a sickness in metaphor but in fact as well. It can change the way one looks at the world; the faces one sees in the street look not just indifferent but ugly....perhaps even malignant. Homesickness is a real sickness- the ache of the uprooted plant.” - Stephen King

61. “I think that is supposed to be good, that I get less from him but I feel worthless.” - Thalia Chaltas

62. “they have seen the likes of you before, they may be intrigued by the looks of you, but they know that you-like everyone else-will leave them in the end.” - Terra Elan McVoy

63. “I’m lonely, and he can see it. Maybe everyone can see it.” - Madeleine Roux

64. “People are... Full of contradictions. They're lonely. And then they're not. They're missed. And then they're not.” - Kou Yoneda

65. “I don't mind being alone either. The only problem is that if you're always alone, you get lonely.” - Colleen Houck

66. “They don't know those places in me. Only he does. Only he has seen the darkness inside of me and turns into love and light.” - Tara Brown

67. “There's a world out there that nobody has bothered to promise her.” - Lauren DeStefano

68. “I am lost in my world,invisible - unknown.Moon please lend meyour light that someonewill me see me.” - Susie Clevenger

69. “The church grew very lonely about him, and he began to feel like a child whose mother has forsaken it. Only he knew that to be left alone is not always to be forsaken.” - George MacDonald

70. “I was lonelier than I should be, for a woman in love, or half in love.” - Edna O'Brien

71. “He stretched out on the bed and was suddenly struck by how utterly lonely he was.” - Tim LaHaye