Loneliness is that sense of being unmoored and unanchored. It’s really that sense that you won’t be seen or found by the world in the way you want to be found, or by another person. 

—Julia Bainbridge

A lively disposition, accustomed to active exertion, soon languishes in solitude and inaction. For a great number of years you have been necessarily much distracted by external activity, and it was this circumstance that made me fear the effect of the life of abandonment upon you. You were at first in the fervor of your beginnings, when no difficulties appear formidable.

—François Fénelon, Spiritual Progress

Do not suffer yourself to get excited by what is said about you. Let the world talk; do you strive to do the will of God; as for that of men, you could never succeed in doing it to their satisfaction, and it is not worth the pains. A moment of silence, of peace, and of union to God, will amply recompense you for every calumny that shall be uttered against you. We must love our fellows, without expecting friendship from them; they leave us and return, they go and come; let them do as they will; it is but a feather, the sport of the wind. See God only in them; it is He that afflicts or consoles us, by means of them, according as we have need.

—François Fénelon, Spiritual Progress

I understood loneliness from the perspective of a whimsical, wandering seeker; one who had never been quite in sync with the people around her. I longed for deeper, enduring connections than the ones I knew. I had always felt different and isolated; other people were mysterious and hard to understand.

…

I didn’t see that this life I imagined still entailed absorption in work and an obsession with my own reputation. I couldn’t see that this was not the solution to my loneliness.

…

“It is a loneliness I can live with because it is not an end in itself; it is merely a reminder of our true, great end.”

The Solution to the Long Loneliness? Love.

“And she did not weep for herself, but for him: the hour after his birth she had looked in his dark eyes and had seen something that would brood there eternally, she knew, unfathomable wells of remote and intangible loneliness: she knew that in her dark and sorrowful womb a stranger had come to life, fed by the lost communications of eternity, his own ghost, haunter of his own house, lonely to himself and to the world. O lost.”

―Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel

“Loneliness is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man.”

―Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again

“The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence. When we examine the moments, acts, and statements of all kinds of people — not only the grief and ecstasy of the greatest poets, but also the huge unhappiness of the average soul…we find, I think, that they are all suffering from the same thing. The final cause of their complaint is loneliness.”

—Thomas Wolfe, God’s Lonely Man

Introvert here, speaking to all other introverts:

Stop hiding behind being an introvert. 

Yeah, you need your alone time, but there are people in your life that benefit from your presence and people you’ve never met with whom God is calling you to share yourself.

Fr. Stephen Vrazel

@KeytarCatholic