Feeling alone is an experience many of us encounter at various points in our lives. Whether it’s due to changes in our relationships, life transitions, or simply the ebb and flow of daily interactions, loneliness can be a challenging emotion to navigate. Yet, there is solace in knowing that countless others have faced similar feelings and emerged stronger, wiser, and more connected. This curated collection of 79 quotes about overcoming loneliness serves as a beacon of hope and inspiration, offering insights and comforting words from those who have walked this path before. These quotes encourage reflection, resilience, and a renewed sense of belonging, reminding us that loneliness, while difficult, is not insurmountable. Dive into this compilation and discover the wisdom that can light your way back to a fulfilling sense of connection.
1. “If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.” - Jean-Paul Sartre
2. “But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning.” - Haruki Murakami
3. “What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.” - Kurt Vonnegut
4. “I hope somebody cares because I sure don't. I sure don't. Not anymore. I'm ashamed to go around my family. I'm too embarrassed to confide in my friends. Outside of work I don't have a life.” - Mary B. Morrison
5. “At bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise or even help another, a lot must happen, a lot must go well, a whole constellation of things must come right in order once to succeed.” - Rainer Marie Rilke
6. “The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved.” - Mother Teresa
7. “Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine.” - Charlotte Brontë
8. “l(aleaffalls)oneliness” - E.E. Cummings
9. “It was as if the empty nights were made for thinking of him. And sometimes I found myself so vividly aware of him it was as if he had only just left the room and the ring of his voice were still there. And somehow, there was a disturbing comfort in that, and, despite myself, I’d envision his face.” - Anne Rice
10. “Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.” - Marilynne Robinson
11. “When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.” - Tennessee Williams
12. “My despair is less despair than boredom and loneliness.” - Anthony Swofford
13. “I believe in whatever gets you throught the night. [...] Night is the hardest time to be alive. For me, anyway. It lasts so long, and four A.M.knows all my secrets.” - Poppy Z. Brite
14. “Given enough time, you could convince yourself that loneliness was something better, that it was solitude, the ideal condition for reflection, even a kind of freedom.Once you were thus convinced, you were foolish to open the door and let anyone in, not all the way in. You risked the hard-won equilibrium, that tranquility that you called peace” - Dean Koontz
15. “Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better.” - Henry Rollins
16. “I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away — yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit ——————————— and wanted to shoot myself.” - Søren Kierkegaard
17. “to the glory of His name let me witness that in far away lands, in loneliness (deepest sometimes when it seems least so), in times of downheartedness and tiredness and sadness, always always He is near. He does comfort, if we let Him. Perhaps someone as weak and good-for-nothing as even I am may read this. Don't be afraid! Through all circumstances, outside, inside, He can keep me close.” - Amy Carmichael
18. “I believe that you control your destiny, that you can be what you want to be. You can also stop and say, 'No, I won't do it, I won't behave his way anymore. I'm lonely and I need people around me, maybe I have to change my methods of behaving,' and then you do it.” - Leo F. Buscaglia
19. “Dim loneliness came imperceivably into the fields and he turned back. The birds piped oddly; some wind was caressing the higher foliage, turning it all one way, the way home. Telegraph poles ahead looked like half-used pencils; the small cross on the steeple glittered with a sharp and shapely permanence.” - A.E. Coppard
20. “Hoyt was by himself right under one of the portable lights rigged up for the occasion. He had his hands thrust in his pockets, and he looked more serious than I’d ever seen him. There was something strange about the sight, and after a second I figured out why.It was one of the few times I’d ever seen Hoyt alone.” - Charlaine Harris
21. “How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be as ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.” - Margaret Atwood
22. “I was lonely. I felt it deeply and permanently, that this state of being on my own might never disappear. But I welcomed the lonliness, which had everything to do with being anonymous. It's never lonliness that nibbles away at a person's insides, but not having room inside themselves to be comfortably alone.” - Rachel Sontag
23. “[...] We have to realize that this wound [of loneliness] is inherent in the human condition and that what we have to do is walk with it instead of fleeing from it. We cannot accept it until we discover that we are loved by God just as we are, and that the Holy Spirit in a mysterious way is living at the centre of the wound.” - Jean Vanier
24. “Sometimes I feel so- I don’t know - lonely. The kind of helpless feeling when everything you’re used to has been ripped away. Like there’s no more gravity, and I’m left to drift in outer space with no idea where I’m going’Like a little lost Sputnik?’I guess so.” - Haruki Murakami
25. “It was bad enough not having a boyfriend for New Year's Eve. Now I had to cope with Valentine datelessness, feeling consummate social pressure from every retailer in America who stuck hearts and cupids on their windows by January second to rub it in. (Thwonk)” - Joan Bauer
26. “That’s why; he’s worried about how his life is turning out, and he’s lonely, and lonely people are the bitterest of them all” - Nick Hornby
27. “The American appetite for loneliness impressed me, and there was something about this solitude that freed conversation. One night at a bar, I met a man, and within five minutes he explained that he had just been released from prison. Another drinker told me that his wife had passed away, and he had recently suffered a heart attack, and now he hoped that he would die within the year. I learned that there's no reliable small talk in America; at any moment a conversation can become personal.” - Peter Hessler
28. “I lay there with my mind running amuck, on the brink of madness. And somehow, gradually, early Sunday morning, I became calm. I can't think of any other word for it. I was thinking about the beach poem again, and I started to feel that I was being looked after, that everything was OK. It was strange: if there was ever a time in my life when I had the right to feel alone this was it. But I lost that sense of loneliness. I felt like there was a force in the room with me, not a person, but I had a sense that there was another world, another dimension, and it would be looking after me. It was like, "This isn't the only world, this is just one aspect of the whole thing, don't imagine this is all there is.” - John Marsden
29. “What is hell? Hell is oneself. Hell is alone, the other figures in it Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.” - T.S. Eliot
30. “being alone never felt right. sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.” - Charles Bukowski
31. “The strength of a love is always misjudged if we evaluate it by its immediate cause and not the stress that went before it, the dark and hollow space full of disappointment and loneliness that precedes all the great events in the heart's history.” - Stefan Zweig
32. “I won,” said Chelsea’s dad, and went to give Chelsea a high-five, but missed, as they were standing too close.“My fault,” he said. “That was my fault.”“Oh,” Chelsea said.And he stepped back a little and tried again, but Chelsea, distracted now by something—maybe the plant in the far corner, standing and waiting like a person in a dream; or maybe the green shoe or some other thing that was out there and longing, to be looked at, and taken—wasn’t ready, and their hands, his then hers, passed through the air in a kind of wave, a little goodbye.” - Tao Lin
33. “Loneliness is about the scariest thing out there.” - Joss Whedon
34. “I realize, for the first time, how very lonely I've been in the arena. How comforting the presence of another human being can be.” - Suzanne Collins
35. “The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!” - Edith Wharton
36. “I think it takes an amazing amount of energy to convince oneself that the Forever Person isn't just around the corner. In the end I believe we never do convince ourselves. I know that I found it increasingly hard to maintain the pose of emotional self-sufficiency lying on my bed and sitting at my desk, watching the gulls cartwheeling in the clouds over the bridges, cradling myself in my own arms, breathing warm chocolate-and-vodka breath on a rose I had found on a street corner, trying to force it to bloom.” - Douglas Coupland
37. “Solitude is the soil in which genius is planted, creativity grows, and legends bloom; faith in oneself is the rain that cultivates a hero to endure the storm, and bare the genesis of a new world, a new forest.” - Mike Norton
38. “To break the silence the old man said the first thing that came to his mind: "Loneliness is a type of violence.” - Jonathan Messinger
39. “There are times when you don't belong and you think you're going to kill yourself. Once I went to a hotel. Later that night I made a plan. The plan was I would leave my family when my second child was born. And that's what I did. I got up one morning, made breakfast, went to the bus stop, got on a bus. I'd left a note. I got a job in a library in Canada. It would be wonderful to say you regretted it. It would be easy. But what does it mean? What does it mean to regret when you have no choice? It's what you can bear. There it is. No-one's going to forgive me. It was death. I chose life." -Laura Brown-” - Michael Cunningham
40. “The opposite of Loneliness is not Togetherness , It's Intimacy” - Richard Bach
41. “Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you.” - Haruki Murakami
42. “In his face there came to be a brooding peace that is seen most often in the faces of the very sorrowful or the very wise. But still he wandered through the streets of the town, always silent and alone.” - Carson McCullers
43. “Like crying wolf, if you keep looking for sympathy as a justification for your actions, you will someday be left standing alone when you really need help.” - Criss Jami
44. “She had never before minded being alone. Now she dreaded it. When she was alone now she felt so dreadfully alone.” - L.M. Montgomery
45. “Human beings, in point of fact, are lonely by nature, and one should feel sorry for them and love them and mourn with them. It is certain that people would understand one another better and love one another more if they would admit to one another how lonely they were, how sad they were in their tormented, anxious longings and feeble hopes.” - Halldor Laxness
46. “Why were we so far apart, even when we were together? It was a nice loneliness, like the sensation of washing your face in cold water.” - Banana Yoshimoto
47. “On the plane leaving Tokyo I’m sitting alone in back twisting the knobs on Etch-A-Sketch and Roger is next to me singing “Over the Rainbow” straight into my ear, things changing, falling apart, fading, another year, a few more moves, a hard person who doesn’t give a fuck, a boredom so monumental it humbles, arrangements so fleeting made by people you don’t even know that it requires you to lose any sense of reality you might have once acquired, expectations so unreasonable you become superstitious about ever matching them. Roger offers me a joint and I take a drag and stare out the window and I relax for a moment when the lights of Tokyo, which I never realized is an island, vanish from view but this feeling only lasts a moment because Roger is telling me that other lights in other cities, in other countries, on other planets, are coming into view soon.” - Bret Easton Ellis
48. “I am vehemently grateful that, by whatever means, I learned to assume that loneliness should be in part pleasure, sensitizing and clarifying, and that it is even a truer bond among people than any kind of proximity.” - Marilynne Robinson
49. “An emptiness rules at its core, a rottenness, a silence when one of you retires to bed without saying good night, when you eat together without conversation, when the phone's passed wordlessly to the other. An emptiness when every night you lie in the double bed, restlessly awake, astounded at how closely hate can nudge against love, can wind around it sinuously like a cat. An emptiness when you realize that the loneliest you've ever been is within a marriage, as a wife.” - NIkki Gemmell
50. “All I ever wanted was to reach out and touch another human being not just with my hands but with my heart.” - Tahereh Mafi
51. “I left the library. Crossing the street, I was hit head-on by a brutal loneliness. I felt dark and hollow. Abandoned, unnoticed, forgotten, I stood on the sidewalk, a nothing, a gatherer of dust. People hurried past me. and everyone who walked by was happier than I. I felt the old envy. I would have given anything to be one of them.” - Nicole Krauss
52. “There is no living being on earth at this moment except myself. I could walk down the halls, and empty rooms would yawn mockingly at me from every side. God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of 'parties' with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter — they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship — but the loneliness of the soul in it's appalling self-consciousness, is horrible and overpowering.” - Sylvia Plath
53. “That's the strangest thing about this life, about being in the ministry. People change the subject when they see you coming. And then sometimes those very same people come into your study and tell you the most remarkable things. There's a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn't really expect to find it, either.” - Marilynne Robinson
54. “I kept staring into the blackness of the woods, drawn into the darkness as I always had been. I suddenly realized how alone I was. (But this is how you travel, the wind whispered back, this is how you've always lived.)” - Bret Easton Ellis
55. “I have a mouth for kisses / No one to give or to take / I have a heart in my bosom / Beating for nobody's sake.” - Lana Citron
56. “One as deformed and horrible as myself, could not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species, and have the same defects... with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being...” - Mary Shelley
57. “Connection is life; disconnection, death.” - Deborah Day
58. “Sometimes the silence is the loudest thing in the room.” - Cory Basil
59. “I had never liked, even feared a little, this wild reach of marsh and mud flats where everything seemed turned away from the land, looking off desperately toward the horizon as if in mute search for a sign of rescue.” - John Banville
60. “Companionship is a foreign concept to some people. They fear it as much as the majority of people fear loneliness.” - Criss Jami
61. “If our greatest fear is to sink away alone and unremembered, the brutality that time will inflict upon each of us will always run stronger than any river's murky waves.” - Miguel Syjuco
62. “i felt her absence. it was like waking up one day with no teeth in your mouth. you wouldn't need to run to the mirror to know they were gone” - James Dashner
63. “...real loneliness is having no one to miss. Think yourself lucky you've known something worth missing.” - Emma Donoghue
64. “...and my loneliness, always my loneliness - that airless bubble of despair that is slowing stifling me.” - Tabitha Suzuma
65. “Weight Watchers holds as a descriptive axiom the transparently true fact that for each of us the universe is deeply and sharply and completely divided into for example in my case, me, on one side, and everything else, on the other. This for each of us exhaustively defines the whole universe... And then they hold by a prescriptive axiom the undoubtedly equally true and inarguable fact that we each ought to desire our own universe to be as full as possible, that the Great Horror consists in an empty, rattling personal universe, one where one finds oneself with Self, on one hand, and vastly empty lonely spaces before Others begin to enter the picture at all, on the other. A non-full universe... The emptier one’s universe is, the worse it is... Weight Watchers perceives the problem as one involving the need to have as much Other around as possible, so that the relation is one of minimum Self to maximum Other... We each need a full universe. Weight Watchers and their allies would have us systematically decrease the Self-component of the universe, so that the great Other-set will be physically attracted to the now more physically attractive Self, and rush in to fill the void caused by that diminution of Self. Certainly not incorrect, but just as certainly only half of the range of valid solutions to the full-universe problem... Is my drift getting palpable? Just as in genetic engineering... There is always more than one solution... An autonomously full universe... Rather than diminishing Self to entice Other to fill our universe, we may also of course obviously choose to fill the universe with Self... Yes. I plan to grow to infinite size... There will of course eventually cease to be room for anyone else in the universe at all.” - David Foster Wallace
66. “It's all right. I'm not upset. After all, they were just things. When you've lost your mother and your father, you can't care so much about things, can you?” - Kazuo Ishiguro
67. “The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald
68. “I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.” - Franz Kafka
69. “When we learn to speak, we learn to translate.” - Octavio Paz
70. “There are lots of different ways grown-ups disappear. It's lonely being the one left behind.” - Julia Green
71. “It would be too easy to say that I feel invisible. Instead, I feel painfully visible, and entirely ignored.” - David Levithan
72. “I can't shove the dark out of my way.” - Jandy Nelson
73. “The abundance of small things, it'll bury you.” - Alden Bell
74. “At times I feel like a socket that remembers its tooth.” - Saul Bellow
75. “She almost never said his name. Because it made the dreams too real. Because it made the loneliness too tangible when she woke up.” - Dianna Hardy
76. “People accuse me of falling in love easily. It just means that I'm able to see the beauty in most of the people who cross paths with me and I appreciate it for what it is and also for what it isn't. Love is imperfect. Falling for someone's flaws is just as necessary as falling for their strengths. And people like myself, who fall into love easily, are sometimes the loneliest souls around at the end of the day.” - Ashly Lorenzana
77. “I'm thinking that it will be autumn soon," she said, lifting her gaze to his. "Autumn is my absolute favorite season. Spring is overrated. It's soggy and the trees are still bare from winter. Winter drags on and on, and summer is nice, but it's all the same. Autumn is different. I mean, is there any perfume in the world that can compare with the smell of burning leaves?" she asked with an engaging smile. Matt thought she smelled a hell of a lot better than burning leaves, but he let her continue. "Autumn —is thexincgitsinagrechanging. It's like dusk." "Dusk?""Dusk is my favorite time of day, for the same reason. When I was young, I used to walk down our driveway at dusk in the summer and stand at the fence, watching all the cars going by with their headlights on. Everyone had a place to go, something to do. The night was just beginning ..." She trailed off in embarrassment. "That must sound incredibly silly.""It sounds incredibly lonely.” - Judith McNaught
78. “To the extent that one is responsible for one's life, one is alone.” - Irvin D. Yalom
79. “I am jealous of anyone who can make other people care so much.” - David Levithan
