- "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, The History of Love
- "He wears the love between the lines of his face, and it shines. It really shines." - Inherwar
- "The sea is nothing but a library of all the tears in history." - Anonymous
- "It wasn’t my day. My week. My month. My year. My life. God damn it." Charles Bukowski
- "Why fear death? Be scared of living." Laura Marling, Hope in the Air
- "Sorrow is knowledge, those that know the most must mourn the deepest, the tree of knowledge is not the tree of life." - Lord Byron
- “Sometimes, I feel like I’m not solid. I’m hollow; there’s nothing behind my eyes. I’m a negative of a person - as if I never thought anything, never wrote anything, never felt anything.” - Sylvia Plath
- "Franny was staring at the little blotch of sunshine with a special intensity, as if she were considering lying down in it." - J.D. Salinger, Franny & Zooey
- "This is the seashore. Neither land nor sea. It’s a place that does not exist." - Alessandro Baricco, Open Sea
- "And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." - Sylvia Plath
- "'This is nothing,' cried she: 'I was only going to say that heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy. That will do to explain my secret, as well as the other. I've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn't have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.'" - Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
- "I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion." Jack Kerouac
- “It’s no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You’ve got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they’ve got to come. You can’t force them.” - D.H. Lawrence
- "With a prompter in every cellar window whispering comebacks, shy people would have the last laugh." - Amelie
- “And then I cried a flood of tears as if I really were a mermaid who had absorbed too much sea into herself. The tears spilled like a balm, like a potion, like a charm. In them swam a little girl whose father was dying without ever having seen her. In them swam a girl whose mother’s magic – the only thing the girl envied more than anything else in the world, the thing that had made her invisible, the most precious thing –might be dying too. In them swam a green-haired girl who had never been touched by the boy to whom she was so devoted that she would have lived with him forever in a shack by the sea or a ruined sand castle even if he never made love to her. My tears were for me, but they were also for him. They were to wash away the thing that had frightened him so much so long ago. The wound inside his thigh. My tears poured out of me and he drank them down his throat. He drank them in gulps deep into himself, swallowing sorrow. ‘Someday,’ he said, ‘when we are ready, I will give you back your tears.” - Francesca Lia Block
- "Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. And intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you’ll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way." -- Janet Finch
- "You is kind, you is smart, you is important." - Kathryn Stockett, The Help
- "I have so much of you in my heart." - John Keats to Fanny Brawne
- "It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes makes its way to the surface." - Virginia Woolf
- “I am a cage, in search of a bird.” - Franz Kafka
- “Sometimes I’m terrified of my heart; of its constant hunger for whatever it is it wants. The way it stops and starts.” - Edgar Allen Poe
- “Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it. Perhaps there is a soul hidden in everything and it can always speak, without even making a sound, to another soul.” - Sara Crewe: Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess
- “I lay and cried, and began to feel again, to admit I was human, vulnerable, sensitive. I began to remember how it had been before; how there was that germ of positive creativeness. Character is fate; and damn, I’d better work on my character. I had been withdrawing into a retreat of numbness: it is so much safer to NOT feel, NOT to let the world touch one.” - Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
- "Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness." - Vladmir Nabokov, Lolita
- "Is there no way out of the mind?" - Sylvia Plath
- “We cannot stay home all our lives, we must present ourselves to the world and we must look upon it as an adventure.” - Beatrix Potter
- "I can't cope; all the defences are gone. All the nerves are exposed." - Nick Drake
- “I crawled back into bed and pulled the sheet over my head. But even that didn’t shut out the light, so I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn’t see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.” - Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
- “You know what? Fuck beauty contests. Life is one fucking beauty contest after another. School, then college, then work… Fuck that. And fuck the Air Force Academy. If I want to fly, I’ll find a way to fly. You do what you love, and fuck the rest.” - Dwayne, Little Miss Sunshine
- "At least you'll never be a vegetable — even artichokes have hearts." - Amélie
- “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 its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.” - Sylvia Plath
- "I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams." - D.H. Lawrence
- "Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much - so very much to learn." - Sylvia Plath
- "I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am." - Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
- “I have a hard time writing. Most writers have a hard time writing. I have a harder time than most because I’m lazier than most. […] The other problem I have is fear of writing. The act of writing puts you in confrontation with yourself, which is why I think writers assiduously avoid writing. […] Not writing is more of a psychological problem than a writing problem. All the time I’m not writing I feel like a criminal. […] It’s horrible to feel felonious every second of the day. Especially when it goes on for years. It’s much more relaxing actually to work.” - Fran Lebowitz
- “You know those days when you get the mean reds? The blues are because you’re getting fat and maybe it’s been raining too long. You’re just sad, that’s all. The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you’re afraid and you don’t know what you’re afraid of.” - Holly Golightly, Breakfast At Tiffany's
- “I commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me, whose eyes would reply to mine. You may deem me romantic, my dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of a friend. I have no one near me, gentle yet courageous, possessed of a cultivated as well as of a capacious mind, whose tastes are like my own, to approve or amend my plans.” - Mary Shelley, _Frankenstein_
- "I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal." - Jane Austen (Jane Austen's Letters)
- “So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them.” - Sylvia Plath
- "Nino is late. Amelie can only see two explanations. One - he didn't get the photo. Two - before he could assemble it, a gang of bank robbers took him hostage. The cops gave chase. They got away... but he caused a crash. When he came to, he'd lost his memory. An ex-con picked him up, mistook him for a fugitive, and shipped him to Istanbul. There he met some Afghan raiders who took him to steal some Russian warheads. But their truck hit a mine in Tajikistan. He survived, took to the hills, and became a Mujaheddin....Amelie refuses to get upset for a guy who'll eat borscht all his life in a hat like a tea cozy." - Amélie
- “You don’t meet a lot of people that you really like. I don’t anyway.” - Nick Cave
- “I think that if I ever have kids, and they are upset, I won’t tell them that people are starving in China or anything like that because it wouldn’t change the fact that they were upset. And even if somebody else has it much worse, that doesn’t really change the fact that you have what you have.” - Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being A Wallflower
- “How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn’t they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?” - Don DeLillo
- "I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve." - Jane Austen
- “I believe the nicest and sweetest days are not those on which anything very splendid or wonderful or exciting happens, but just those that bring simple little pleasures, following one another softly, like pearls slipping off a string." - L.M. Montgomery
- "There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of merit or sense." - Jane Austen, Pride & Prejudice
- “Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity……we cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access reassurance.” - A.E. Newton
- “Perhaps we don’t like what we see: our hips, our loss of hair, our shoe size, our dimples, our knuckles too big, our eating habits, our disposition. We have disclosed these things in secret, likes and dislikes, behind doors with locks, our lonely rooms, our messy desks, our empty hearts, our sudden bursts of energy, our sudden bouts of depression. Don’t worry. Put away your mirrors and your beauty magazines and your books on tape. There is someone right here who knows you more than you do, who is making room on the couch, who is fixing a meal, who is putting on your favorite record, who is listening intently to what you have to say, who is standing there with you, face to face, hand to hand, eye to eye, mouth to mouth. There is no space left uncovered. This is where you belong.” - Sufjan Stevens
- “We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- "You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking how'll you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it'll be, but you never do it. You use the future to escape the present." - John Green, Looking For Alaska
- "He'll think of the tiny details that only a poet thinks of." - Carl Barat (about Pete Doherty)
may 21 2012 ∞
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