- "A hallmark of loneliness is shame: since childhood, there are few things more humiliating than being left out. Loneliness implies a flaw in us like no other longing or sadness does. 'I'm lonely' translates to 'I'm unlovable' or 'nobody likes me.' It says that you're a loser."
- "Loneliness isn't necessarily tied to whether you have a partner or a best friend or an aspirationally active social life in which you're laughing all the time. It's a variance that rests in the space between the relationships you have and the relationships you want."
- "I lived alone then, and loved the ritual of an independent space, the pride of opening cabinets and finding inside things that belonged only to me. But this solitude carried with it a performance, too - I imagined an audience even when no one was there."
- "Loneliness feels to me like being underwater, fumbling against a muted world in which the sound of your own body is loud against the quiet of everything else. The simple gestures you enacted so easily on the ground become laborious, pushing against a weight no body is built to move through."
- "When we crave closeness, I'm not sure if what we want is something we used to have, or a hazy image of what we never will, and I don't have an answer for what we do when we've lost the ability to do anything bu tread water."
- "Almost all of his actions are laced with disinterest in others, but this is the important part: it implies superiority, and only when a man is superior to others is his loneliness meaningful instead of pathetic."
- "Once someone enters a prolonged period of loneliness, they may move into a state called hypervigilance, in which they become especially attuned to rejection, anticipating or imagining it even when no rejection occurs."
aug 26 2023 ∞
aug 26 2023 +
