do you have any quotes on loneliness you particularly like?
Oh, boy... I do. Let’s see.
This night is now
half-gone; youth
goes; I am
Sappho, trans. by Mary Barnard in Fragments
We’re each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?
Ursula K. Le Guin, from “Nine Lives”
My brother once showed me a piece of quartz that contained, he said, some trapped water older than all the seas in our world. He held it up to my ear. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘life and no escape.’
Anne Carson, in “The Anthropology of Water”, from Plainwater
Heaven be praised for solitude that has removed the pressure of the eye, the solicitation of the body, and all need of lies and phrases.
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
I could live there all alone, she thought, slowing the car to look down the winding garden path to the small blue front door with, perfectly, a white cat on the step. No one would ever find me there, either, behind all those roses, and just to make sure I would plant oleanders by the road. I will light a fire in the cool evenings and toast apples at my own hearth. I will raise white cats and sew white curtains for the windows and sometimes come out of my door to go to the store to buy cinnamon and tea and thread.
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
And no one else remembers
Except the moon and I.
Roland Leighton, in “Clair de Lune”, quoted in Testament of Youth
I have come home in love with loneliness.
L. M. Montgomery, in Anne of Avonlea
and I was downstairs reading the part in Wuthering Heights
where Heathcliff clings at the lattice in the storm sobbing
Come in! Come in! to the ghost of his heart’s darling,
I fell on my knees on the rug and sobbed too.
Anne Carson, from “Three”, in The Glass Essay
Thomas Alexander, Solitude
—the way somebody comes back, but only in a dream.
Mary Oliver, from “We Should Be Well Prepared”, in Red Bird
I lock my door upon myself,
And bar them out; but who shall wall
Self from myself, most loathed of all?
Christina Rossetti, from “Who Shall Deliver Me?”, in Poems and Prose
I know you want me to tell you that hunger and silence can lead you to God, so I will say it, but I awoke. As the nail is parted from the flesh, I awoke and I was alone.
Anne Carson, in “The Anthropology of Water”, from Plainwater
Ce n’est pas par hasard que tu n’as jamais été aimée… Désirer échapper à la solitude est une lâcheté. / It is no coincidence that you have never been loved… Wanting to escape loneliness is cowardice.
Simone Weil, La Pesanteur et la Grâce (Gravity and Grace)
So. What are you seeking? The image you’ve each created of the other? The people you think you love don’t exist. Not really. And that’s a very lonely place to be.
Jonathan Sims, in The Magnus Archives [MAG 159]
aber immer wieder weggedreht,
wenn du meinst, sie endlich zu erfassen. /
over and over always turning away
just as you think you have grasped it at last.
Rainer Maria Rilke, excerpt of “Sonnet 23 (Part II)”, trans. by Martyn Crucefix in Sonnets to Orpheus
Think of this—that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and that they were alone with each other.
Child of our time—
haven’t you found the right shell for your soul?
Edith Södergran, excerpt of “Hope”, trans. by Herbert Lomas in Contemporary Finnish Poetry
When they made love
Geryon liked to touch in slow succession each of the bones on Herakles’ back
as it arched away from him into
who knows what dark dream of its own—
Anne Carson, excerpt of Autobiography of Red
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