This Is For When You Feel Alone

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 had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else.”

— Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World

Tagged: Companionship, Solitude, Alone, Friends, Books, self

“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, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

Tagged: Alone, self, minds, heart, Happiness

“I think it's good for a person to spend time alone. It gives them an opportunity to discover who they are and to figure out why they are always alone.”

— Amy Sedaris, I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence

Tagged: Alone, Discover, self

“'I feel too much. That's what's going on.'

'Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel in the wrong ways?'

'My insides don't match up with my outsides.'

'Do anyone's insides and outsides match up?'

'I don't know. I'm only me.'

'Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and outside.'

'But it's worse for me.'

'I wonder if everyone thinks it's worse for him.'

'Probably. But it really is worse for me.'”

— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close

Tagged: Alone, Only Me, Worse

“Have you ever heard the wonderful silence just before the dawn? Or the quiet and calm just as a storm ends? Or perhaps you know the silence when you haven't the answer to a question you've been asked, or the hush of a country road at night, or the expectant pause of a room full of people when someone is just about to speak, or, most beautiful of all, the moment after the door closes and you're alone in the whole house? Each one is different, you know, and all very beautiful if you listen carefully.”

— Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

Tagged: Silence, Alone, beauty, Moments, Listen, Hush

“If you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.”

— Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

Tagged: Alone, honest, True

“Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.”

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Tagged: Alone, Nothing

“I am lost without you. I am soulless, a drifter without a home, a solitary bird in a flight to nowhere. I am all these things, and I am nothing at all. This, my darling, is my life without you. I long for you to show me how to live again.”

— Nicholas Sparks, Message in a Bottle

Tagged: lost, Alone, Soulless, Life

“There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge and to maintain balance within it a precarious business. But I must not forget that, for me, being with people or even with one beloved person for any length of time without solitude is even worse. I lose my center. I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces. I must have time alone in which to mull over my encounter, and to extract its juice, its essence, to understand what has really happened to me as a consequence of it.”

— May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

Tagged: Solitude, Alone, Challenge

“I wondered why it was that places are so much lovelier when one is alone. How commonplace and stupid it would be if I had a friend now, sitting beside me, someone I had known at school, who would say: ‘By-the-way, I saw old Hilda the other day. You remember her, the one who was so good at tennis. She’s married, with two children.’ And the bluebells beside us unnoticed, and the pigeons overhead unheard. I did not want anyone with me. Not even Maxim. If Maxim had been there I should not be lying as I was now, chewing a piece of grass, my eyes shut. I should have been watching him, watching his eyes, his expression. Wondering if he liked it, if he was bored. Wondering what he was thinking. Now I could relax, none of these things mattered. Maxim was in London. How lovely it was to be alone again.”

— Daphne du Maurier, Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

Tagged: Alone, little things, Boredom, Solitude, relax

“You do not have to be alone. The world never inflicts loneliness upon us. That is something we choose or reject by ourselves.”

— Darren Shan, Birth of a Killer

Tagged: Alone, Loneliness, Choices

“I had been alone more than I could have been had I gone by myself.”

— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath

Tagged: Alone, Lonely

“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, Where She Went

Tagged: normalcy, normal, Alone

“If we are alone, we become more alone. Life is strange.”

— Paulo Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept: A Novel of Forgiveness

Tagged: Alone, Life, Strangeness

“The thing about living alone is that it gives you a lot of time to think. You don't necessarily reach any conclusions, because wisdom is largely a function of intelligence and self-awareness, not time on your hands. But you do become very good at thinking yourself into endless loops of desperation in half the time it would take a normal person.”

— Jonathan Tropper, One Last Thing Before I Go

Tagged: Alone, Thinking, Time, Self-awareness

“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, Lisey's Story

Tagged: Lonely, Alone

“as a child
i suppose
i was not quite
normal.

my happiest times were
when
i was left alone in
the house on a
saturday.”

— Charles Bukowski, Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way: New Poems

Tagged: Alone, Happiness, Lonely