Category: LONELINESS & SOLITUDE

  • “I couldn’t be with people and I didn’t want to be alone.”

    — Marian Keyes, Anybody Out There

  • I want to reflect on this lonely place in our lives.  Somewhere we know that without a lonely place our lives are in danger.  Somewhere we know that without silence words lose their meaning, that without listening speaking no longer heals, that without distance closeness cannot cure.  Somewhere we know that without a lonely place our actions quickly become empty gestures.

    —Henri Nouwen, Out of Solitude: Three Meditations on the Christian Life

  • Why is it that we do not join the lonely eater in the dining hall but look for those we know so well?

    —Henri Nouwen, Out of Solitude: Three Meditations on the Christian Life

  • One of my very favorite songs is a rather obscure Beatles song called Things We Said Today. It is a dark and brooding, quite out of place at a time when the Beatles albums were still almost entirely saccharine teenage love songs.

    It tells the story of a couple who are constantly too busy to make dedicated, quality time for each other. In a moment of clarity, the narrator realizes that one day he will look upon the mundane, everyday conversations the two shared as the priceless moments they really were.

    Someday when I’m lonely,

    Wishing you weren’t so far away,

    Then I will remember

    Things we said today

    Things We Said Today

  • “If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.”

    — Jean-Paul Sartre

  • “My solitude doesn’t depend on the presence or absence of people; on the contrary, I hate who steals my solitude without, in exchange, offering me true company.”

    —Friedrich Nietzsche

  • “People who think no one cares about them care too much about themselves.”

    —Darius Foroux, To Everyone Who Feels Behind: Your Work Matters

  • “I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

    —Henry David Thoreau, Walden

  • “The greatest men are the most alone.”

    —Charles Bukowski

  • “Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life’s cruelest irony.”

    —Douglas Coupland