#lone

But there's not enough time in life to go sit at a party, have a drink, and make idle conversation. There's too many important things to do. Just being together with my husband, spending time alone, which I have very little of. ↗

— Pia Zadora

#being #conversation #drink #enough #go

People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other. (pg. 61, "Racism and the Economy") ↗

— Wendell Berry

#drugs #health #loneliness #art

All we had was her room, her stories, and the quiet that settled in as we tried in vain to spread ourselves out and fill the space she'd left behind. ↗

— Sarah Dessen

#emptiness #loneliness #beauty

It seems perverse that we can be more social than anyone would have thought possible when we are at our most anti-social, locked away from the world and silently staring at a computer screen, but that, as psychologists will tell you is the way we operate. When we are at the maximum of our disconnect we also are ready to connect and feel the need for interaction. ↗

— David Amerland

#loneliness #social #social-instinct #social-networks #business

Looming visage noble American colonel. Courageous, renown of history, Colonel Sanders, image forever accompanied odor of sacrificial meat. Eternal flame offering wind savory perfume roasted flesh. ↗

— Chuck Palahniuk

#courage

A subject to which few intellectuals ever give a thought is the right to be a vagrant, the freedom to wander. Yet vagrancy is a deliverance, and life on the open road is the essence of freedom. To have the courage to smash the chains with which modern life has weighted us (under the pretext that it was offering us more liberty), then to take up the symbolic stick and bundle and get out. ↗

— Isabelle Eberhardt

#traveling-alone #courage

I'm a lion in a strange land. ↗

— Criss Jami

#awkwardness #beast #courage #different #earth

If you learn to really sit with loneliness and embrace it for the gift that it is…an opportunity to get to know YOU, to learn how strong you really are, to depend on no one but YOU for your happiness…you will realize that a little loneliness goes a LONG way in creating a richer, deeper, more vibrant and colorful YOU. ↗

— Mandy Hale

#aloneness #being-yourself #courage #embracing-who-you-are #faith-in-yourself

There are times when you don't belong and you think you're going to kill yourself. Once I went to a hotel. Later that night I made a plan. The plan was I would leave my family when my second child was born. And that's what I did. I got up one morning, made breakfast, went to the bus stop, got on a bus. I'd left a note. I got a job in a library in Canada. It would be wonderful to say you regretted it. It would be easy. But what does it mean? What does it mean to regret when you have no choice? It's what you can bear. There it is. No-one's going to forgive me. It was death. I chose life." -Laura Brown- ↗

— Michael Cunningham

#hopelessness #life #loneliness #spirit #death

The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her. ↗

— Simone de Beauvoir

#death #existentialism #death