“Real loneliness is not necessarily limited to when you are alone.”

“When we are most alone is when we embrace another's loneliness.”

“Loneliness, the uninvited dilemma. You are born alone and you will die alone.”

“What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real.”

“I learned the strange art of loneliness, the weathered yearning that swells and passes, and swells and passes, when you walk a trail alone.”

“I don’t think that loneliness is necessarily a bad or unconstructive condition. My own skill at jamming time may actually be dependent on some fluid mixture of emotions, among them curiosity, sexual desire, and love, all suspended in a solvent medium of loneliness. I like the heroes or heroines of books I read to be living alone, and feeling lonely, because reading is itself a state of artificially enhanced loneliness. Loneliness makes you consider other people’s lives, makes you more polite to those you deal with in passing, dampens irony and cynicism. The interior of the Fold is, of course, the place of ultimate loneliness, and I like it there. But there are times when the wish for others’ voices, for friendliness returned, reaches unpleasant levels, and becomes a kind of immobilizing pain. That was how it felt as I finished packing up the box of sex machines.”