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.
There is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock.
Maybe love was superstition, a prayer we said to keep the truth of loneliness at bay.
Loneliness will sit over our roofs with brooding wings.
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.
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 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.
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.
Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt in solitude, where we are least alone.
The fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.
Real loneliness is not necessarily limited to when you are alone.
Over time, loneliness gets inside you and doesn’t go away.
