36 Absolutely Heartbreaking Quotes About Loneliness

“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.”

By Lorenzo Jensen III

Updated 4 years ago, March 1, 2021

1.

The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald

2.

The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It’s the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.

—Lois Lowry

3.

We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness.

—Albert Schweitzer

4.

The eternal quest of the individual human being is to shatter his loneliness.

—Norman Cousins

5.

Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.

—Arthur C. Clarke

6.

Loneliness is the ultimate poverty.

—Pauline Phillips

7.

Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.

—Germaine Greer

8.

Keep in mind that to avoid loneliness, many people need both a social circle and
an intimate attachment. Having just one of two may still leave you feeling lonely.

—Gretchen Rubin

9.

The trouble is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely.

—Charlotte Brontë

10.

There is no loneliness like that of a failed marriage.

—Alexander Theroux

11.

Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.

—Edna St. Vincent Millay

12.

I’m lonely. And I’m lonely in some horribly deep way and for a flash of an instant, I can see just how lonely, and how deep this feeling runs. And it scares the shit out of me to be this lonely because it seems catastrophic.

—Augusten Burroughs

13.

This world that I live in is empty and cold/the loneliness cuts me and tortures my soul.

—Waylon Jennings

14.

Loneliness is my least favorite thing about life. The thing that I’m most worried about is just being alone without anybody to care for or someone who will care for me.

—Anne Hathaway

15.

Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.

—Dag Hammarskjold

16.

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

17.

Who knows what true loneliness is—not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.

—Joseph Conrad

18.

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

—Douglas Coupland

19.

My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication—it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness—it is all that I have—and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well.

—Franz Kafka

20.

Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering—and it’s all over much too soon.

—Woody Allen

21.

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.

—Maya Angelou

22.

Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.

—Bertrand Russell

23.

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

—Kurt Vonnegut

24.

I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness.

—Anaïs Nin

25.

All great and precious things are lonely.

—John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

26.

The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.

—Tom Wolfe

27.

The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved.

—Mother Teresa

28.

Loneliness is about the scariest thing out there.

—Joss Whedon

29.

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

—Jean-Paul Sartre

30.

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

—Thomas Wolfe

31.

Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship—but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.

—Sylvia Plath

32.

Hollywood is loneliness beside the swimming pool.

—Liv Ullmann

33.

But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o’clock in the morning.

—Haruki Murakami

34.

Loneliness is a long, unbearable pain….There was never a place for me in the scheme of things….I had become a living fantasy on a theme in dark, endless dirges….I made another world, and real men would enter it and they would never really get hurt at all in the vivid, unreal laws of the dream. I caused dreams which caused death. This is my crime.

—Dennis Nilsen