wanderlust

Quotes for getting along with your loneliness

Artwork by Nicholas Keays via @nickeays

Sometimes being alone is empowering, but other times, it’s just lonely. These quotes are a guide to navigating solitude.

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I love you– I do– but I am afraid of making that love too important. Because you’re always going to leave me. We can’t deny it. You’re always going to leave.
-David Levithan

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If I did not have this time to be myself, to write here, to be alone, I would somehow, inexplicably, lose a part of my integrity.
-Sylvia Plath

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My alone feels so good, I’ll only have you if you’re sweeter than my solitude.
-Warsan Shire

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I hated him most
for not having the courage
to ruin us grandly.
To break all the dishes
and burn down the house.
Instead he sunk quiet
into new arms, called
her my name, each
devotion repurposed.
Denied me my spilled blood,
my great war.
except his confession.
-Clementine von Radics

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Love is hard. really hard. and sometimes you’re unhappy and sometimes you’re delirious with it and sometimes the person you love is near you but so far away that you don’t even want to touch them incase you break them out of whatever it is that they’re inside of. sometimes that’s not you. sometimes it’s not always you and them, sometimes there’s hundreds of other people pressed against the glass of it, smudging it with their fingers. sometimes they are cold and you are tired and you don’t even want to touch each other because there’s been too much touching and it’s not what they need or want. love is sometimes the shaking cat in the back garden that does not want you but needs you. sometimes it’s every sunrise you’ve ever seen blurred into one. it just depends.
-Azra Tabassum

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I wish someone would teach me how
to let things go.
I bury memories so they become skeletons in a closet,
only now it’s more like a cemetery.
-Tina Tran

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The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.
-Cheryl Strayed

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I came to realise that there were some things in life you would never get over, some transgressions you could not forget or forgive yourself for, some pains that would not pass, some people you would never stop missing.
-Beau Taplin 

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Why do people have to be this lonely? What’s the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?
-Haruki Murakami

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We’ve all loved someone who never really loved us back.
-Makenzie Hipple

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She was waiting, but she didn’t know for what. She was aware only of her solitude, and of the penetrating cold, and of a greater weight in the region of her heart.
-Albert Camus

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I know in a way I never knew before that there is nowhere for me to go, nothing for me to do, and no one for me to know. The voice in my head keeps reciting these old principles of mine. The voice is his voice, and the voice is also my voice. And there are other voices, voices I have never heard before, voices that seem to be either dead or dying in a great moonlit darkness. More than ever, some sort of new arrangement seems in order, some dramatic and unknown arrangement — anything to find release from this heartbreaking sadness I suffer every minute of the day (and night), this killing sadness that feels as if it will never leave me no matter where I go or what I do or whom I may ever know.
-Thomas Ligotti

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