Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow.

Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment.

The best you’ll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.

—Janet Fitch

All people feel alone at some time or another, even when they’re with other people, until they become free of the things of this world. At that point, God comes and comforts them.

—Elder Tadej Vitovničk

“Enduring loneliness is almost invariably better than suffering the compromises of false community. Loneliness is simply a price we may have to pay for holding on to a sincere, ambitious view of what companionship must and could be.”

Why We’re Fated to Be Lonely (But That’s OK)

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“Once we accept loneliness, we can get creative: we can start to send out messages in a bottle: we can sing, write poetry, produce books and blogs, activities stemming from the realisation that people around us won’t ever fully get us but that others – separated across time and space – might just.”

Why We’re Fated to Be Lonely (But That’s OK)

“Most people look forward to the weekend, but for me, it’s the other way around – I look forward to Monday so I can speak to people at work. I feel really down on Fridays, because I start thinking about how I’m going to spend another weekend alone.”

— Mario*, 27, from Italy, Works for an Architecture Company, What It’s Like to Be Young and Extremely Lonely in a Big City

“A guy needs somebody―to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody. Don’t make no difference who the guy is, long’s he’s with you. I tell ya, I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an’ he gets sick.”

—John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

It is the most basic human loneliness that threatens us and is so hard to face. Too often we will do everything possible to avoid the confrontation with the experience of being alone, and sometimes we are able to create the most ingenious devices to prevent ourselves from being reminded of this condition. Our culture has become most sophisticated in the avoidance of pain, not only our physical pain but our emotional and mental pain as well. We not only bury our dead as if they were still alive, but we also bury our pains as if they were not really there. We have become so used to this state of anesthesia that we panic when there is nothing or nobody left to distract us. When we have no project to finish, no friend to visit, no book to read, no television to watch, or no record to play, and when we are left all alone by ourselves, we are brought so close to the revelation of our basic human aloneness and are so afraid of experiencing an all-pervasive sense of loneliness that we will do anything to get busy again and continue the game that makes us believe that everything is fine after all.

—Henri Nouwen

“And you love being isolated but you’re afraid to stay alone.”

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I love your letter a lot because you describe, in vivid detail, half of a full life: You have the intellectual and social side of things covered. You know how to reach out to people and connect with them intellectually. You realize it takes a lot of initiative to make things happen. You stick your neck out, and you’re self-aware about the fact that even though it sometimes feels like you’re doing all of the work, people do reach out to you, too.

Aspiratinal Loner