Category: LONELINESS & SOLITUDE

  • 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

  • “As you approach the truth, your solitude will increase.”

    —Michel Houellebecq, TO STAY ALIVE

  • 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

  • “Seeing a group of people eating ice cream is fine, but seeing one person alone eating soft serve is the sweetest thing in the world.”

    @oliviacraighead

  • The Holy Spirit is a true companion. We have fellowship with the Holy Spirit, and when we have fellowship with the Holy Spirit, we have fellowship with the Lord Jesus Christ. You can not say you are alone—you have the holy spirit with you. The one who lives with the Holy Spirit can never be lonely.

    –Fr. David Hanna

  • The most obvious one was a monastery; during those long days commemorating the birth of the Saviour, many people want to reflect–at least that was what I read in a special edition of Pilgrim magazine–and in that case solitude isn’t just normal, it’s even recommended; yes, it was the best solution,

    Serotonin: A Novel
    Michel Houellebecq

  • confessing to absolute loneliness isn’t that easy, even today–and I started thinking of different destinations.

    Serotonin: A Novel
    Michel Houellebecq