Maybe love was superstition, a prayer we said to keep the truth of loneliness at bay.
I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others — poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner — young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.
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.
There is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock.
Loneliness will sit over our roofs with brooding wings.
Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.
I am alone, and miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me.
For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of – to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone.
A man shut up between four walls soon loses the power to associate words and ideas together.[Qui s’enferme entre quatre murs finit par perdre la faculté d’associer les idées et les mots. ]
Why do people have to be this lonely? What’s the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?
What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
What is the worst of woes that wait on age? What stamps the wrinkle deeper on the brow? To view each loved one blotted from life’s page, and be alone on earth, as I am now.
