“A cold winter night. I’m warm enough, yet I’m alone. And I realize that I’ll have to get used to existing quite naturally within this solitude, functioning there, working there, accompanied by, fastened to the ‘presence of absence.'”
Roland Barthes
more infosource: entry dated November 28, 1977, in Mourning Diary, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 69.
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category: absence, alone, grief, loneliness, mourning, nothing, solitude
medium: diary
notes: On index cards, Roland Barthes starting keeping a mourning diary the day after his mother died in October 1977.
“I’m not lonely, and I think that has a lot to do with what’s on my bedside table rather than what’s in my bed.”
Michelle Williams
more infosource: “Michelle Williams: My Week with Michelle,” by Adam Green, Vogue, September 13, 2011.
category: book, loneliness, love, reading
medium: Magazine profile
“Everyone is ‘extremely nice’—and yet I feel entirely alone. (‘Abandonitis’).”
Roland Barthes
more infosource: entry dated January 8, 1978, in Mourning Diary, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 86.
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category: alone, grief, loneliness, mourning, nice
medium: diary
notes: On index cards, Roland Barthes starting keeping a mourning diary the day after his mother died in October 1977.
“The dead don’t need anything. The rest of us could use some company.”
Elizabeth McCracken
more infosource: An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008), 138.
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category: company, death, living, loneliness, need
medium: memoir
“Solitude = having no one at home to whom you can say: I’ll be back at a specific time or who you can call to say (or to whom you can just say): voilà, I’m home now.”
Roland Barthes
more infosource: entry dated November 11, 1977, in Mourning Diary, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 44.
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category: grief, loneliness, mourning, solitude
medium: diary
notes: On index cards, Roland Barthes starting keeping a mourning diary the day after his mother died in October 1977.
“It is lonely without the birds to-day, for it rains badly, and the little poets have no umbrellas.”
Emily Dickinson
more infosource: The Letters of Emily Dickinson vol 2 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1955), 471.
category: bird, loneliness, nature, poet, rain, umbrella
medium: letter
notes: letter to Louise Norcross, Dickinson's first cousin, May 1870?
“You could never feel as lonely as you did spending the night at someone else’s house, Lorna thought, hearing the sounds of people sleeping around you and the house opening around you fold by fold as if there were no end to it, like an origami flower coming undone. Every now and then there’d be a thump, but never where there were thumps in your own house, plus the Crocketts’ house had central air-conditioning, which made you feel like a droid held in suspended animation, waiting to be granted the gift of human life.”
Kathryn Davis
more infosource: The Thin Place (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2006), 212.
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category: childhood, homesick, loneliness, sleepover
medium: fiction
via: The Bronze Medal“When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.”
Elizabeth Bishop
more infosource: letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, dated August 15, 1957, in Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 225.
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category: death, epitaph, loneliness
medium: letter
notes: source info is a little confusing: Lowell quotes these words of Bishop's in his letter to her
“Books are the greatest companions, confessors, confidantes, tutors, a source of pleasure, a cure for loneliness, and to find one, in the middle of an island in Tahiti, in the heart of the Moroccan desert, or at an airport where one is stranded for a night, is to find the friend who reminds us we are not alone.”
Anaïs Nin
more infosource: The Diary of Anaïs Nin (Vol 7, 1966–1974) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 104.
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category: airport, book, comfort, companionship, loneliness, reading, travel
medium: diary
notes: Fall, 1969 entry in Nin's diary
“The telephone conversation is, by its very nature, reactive, not reflective. Immediacy is its prime virtue. The immediacy delivers quick company, instant stimulation; the stimulation is cathartic; catharsis pushes back anxiety; into open space flows the kind of thought generated by electric return. The letter, written in absorbed solitude, is an act of faith: it assumes the presence of humanity: world and self are generated from within: loneliness is courted, not feared.”
Vivian Gornick
more infosource: “Letters are Acts of Faith; Telephone Calls Are a Reflex,” The New York Times, July 31, 1994.
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category: communication, letter, loneliness, solitude, technology, telephone
medium: newspaper article
loneliness