Category: LONELINESS & SOLITUDE

  • Aymeric had married within his circle, that’s what happens most often in the end, and it’s what gives the best results in principle, well, that’s what I’d heard anyway, but my problem is that I had no circle, no precise circle.

    Serotonin: A Novel
    Michel Houellebecq

  • My reality had become untenable, no human being could survive in such strict solitude;

    Serotonin: A Novel
    Michel Houellebecq

  • there was just the fact that I was alone, literally alone, and drew no pleasure from solitude or from the free working of my mind;

    Serotonin: A Novel
    Michel Houellebecq

  • Now it was clear not only that Camille lived alone, that she had no lovers, but also that she didn’t have many friends either; over those three weeks she didn’t have a single visitor. How had she ended up like that? How had we both ended up like that?

    Serotonin: A Novel
    Michel Houellebecq

  • My need for social relationships (if by that we mean relationships other than romantic relationships), which started very weak, had declined to nothing over the years. Was that normal? It’s true that humanity’s unpalatable ancestors lived in tribes of a few dozen individuals, about the size of a hamlet, and that that formula pertained for a long time–both among hunter-gatherers and among the first farming populations. But time had moved on since then; there had been the invention of the city and its natural corollary–loneliness.

    Serotonin: A Novel
    Michel Houellebecq

  • Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.

    —Jodi Picoult

  • “It is better to suffer from loneliness than to suffer from sin.” 

    —H.E. Metropolitan Youssef

  • “He [Walter Benjamin] both craved solitude and complained of loneliness; he often sought community, sometimes working to create it himself, but was just as often loath to commit himself to any group…………

    He renounced comfort, security, and honors in order to maintain intellectual freedom and the time and space to read, think and write.”

    ― Howard Eiland, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life

  • Solitude appeared to me as the only fit state of man.

    ―Walter Benjamin

  • Unlike solitude, loneliness is not merely the experience of aloneness. It is a feeling of a gap between oneself and others, the perception of an active, living, aching separation that the lonely person wishes were otherwise.

    Struth’s unpeopled photos evoke the loneliness of urban life