Category: Loneliness
“People think being alone makes you lonely, but I don’t think that’s true. Being surrounded by the wrong people is the loneliest thing in the world.” -Kim Culbertson, The Liberation of Max McTrue
“Night is beautiful when you are happy–comforting when you are in grief–terrible when you are lonely and unhappy.” -L.M. Montgomery, Emily’s Quest
“Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on. I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you.” – Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“We have all known the long loneliness, and we have found that the answer is community.” -Dorothy Day
“Everyone, at some point in their lives, wakes up in the middle of the night with the feeling that they are all alone in the world, and that nobody loves them now and that nobody will ever love them, and that they will never have a decent night’s sleep again and will spend their lives wandering blearily around a loveless landscape, hoping desperately that their circumstances will improve, but suspecting, in their heart of hearts, that they will remain unloved forever. The best thing to do in these circumstances is to wake somebody else up, so they can feel this way, too.” – Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can’t Avoid
Toska – noun /ˈtō-skə/ – Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness.
“No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”
-Vladimir Nabokov, cited in A Field Guide to Melancholy, by Jacky Bowring
“There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smooths and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind–wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own feet going seem to come form a far-off place.” -Toni Morrison, Beloved
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