“

And even when you’re ready to let go. When you’re ready to break free. When you’re ready to be brand-new. Loneliness is an old friend standing beside you in the mirror, looking you in the eye, challenging you to live your life without it. You can’t find the words to fight yourself, to fight the words screaming that you’re not enough, never enough, never ever enough. Loneliness is a bitter, wretched companion. Sometimes it just won’t let go.

Tahereh Mafi, Unravel Me
“

I would never be a part of anything. I would never really belong anywhere, and I knew it, and all my life would be the same, trying to belong, and failing. Always something would go wrong. I am a stranger and I always will be.

Jean Rhys, Smile Please
“

..I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.

Albert Camus, The Stranger
“

I knew that others did not appear to feel the way that I did and I secretly wished to share my thoughts to know for sure. I remembering watching others and wondering what made them so different from me.

The poetry of healing (via betterthanbones)
“

There is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in the slow movement of
the hands of a clock.

People so tired
mutilated
either by love or no love.

People just are not good to each other
one on one.

The rich are not good to the rich,
the poor are not good to the poor.

We are afraid.

Our educational system tells us
that we can all be
big-ass winners.

It hasn’t told us
about the gutters
or the suicides.

Or the terror of one person
aching in one place
alone

untouched
unspoken to
watering a plant.

Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell. (via ruineshumaines)

(via ruineshumaines)

“

Many people need desperately to receive this message: “I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.

Kurt Vonnegut (via troubled)
“

Poor child, telling everything to a stranger, I wanted to build walls around him, I wanted to separate inside from outside, I wanted to give him an infinitely long blank book and the rest of time. It wasn’t what I wanted, but if it was necessary, it was worth it, anything would have been. I wanted to touch him, to tell him that even if everyone left everyone, I would never leave him. He talked and talked, his words fell through him, trying to find the floor of his sadness.

Jonathan Safran Foer (via troubled)
“

The relationship between loneliness and solitude can be hard to delineate: the former is often seen as cancelling out the legitimacy of the latter, as though a lonely adult or child is simply not entitled to want or need time alone. But the feelings of isolation that accompany loneliness are entirely different from the more sated and creative feelings that accompany solitude, and it’s entirely reasonable to feel lonely and yet still feel as though you need some time to yourself.

Emily White (via moldavia)

(via moldavia)

“

What’s depression like?,”he whispered. “It’s like drowning, except you can see everyone around you breathing.

“

It was sadness, lostness, and the worst thing about it was the way it seemed like a default- like it was there all the time, and all her other expressions were just an array of masks she used to cover it up.

Lani Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bon
“

Now I know what loneliness is, I think. Momentary loneliness, anyway. It comes from a vague core of the self - like a disease of the blood, dispersed throughout the body so that one cannot locate the matrix, the spot of contagion.There is no living being on earth at this moment, except myself. I could walk down the halls, and empty rooms would yawn at me from every side.

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath (via selfinspiration)

(via dulcetdecember-deactivated20130)

“

I am more sensitive than other people. Things that other people would not notice awaken a distinct echo in me, and in such moments of lucidity, when I look at myself, I see that I am alone, all alone, all alone.

Henri Barbusse, Hell (translated by Edward J. O’Brien)