I had a very lonely New Year's this year. I had to watch my own balls drop.

She said that whenever she feels the old insidious chill of loneliness beginning to creep back into her life, she picks up the phone and calls someone who may be lonelier than she is.

Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.

She had come long ago to understand that loneliness was the curse of those who were free, even of all those who rose a little above the level of ordinary humanity.

There's a loneliness that only exists in one's mind. The loneliest moment in someone's life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart and all they can do is stare blankly.

There’s a loneliness that only exists in one’s mind. The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is blink.

I felt lonely and content at the same time. I believe that is a rare kind of happiness.

No matter how elaborate its charade, she recognized loneliness when she saw it.

At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon. She did not know what this chance would be, what wind would bring it her, towards what shore it would drive her, if it would be a shallop or a three-decker, laden with anguish or full of bliss to the portholes. But each morning, as she awoke, she hoped it would come that day; she listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered that it did not come; then at sunset, always more saddened, she longed for the morrow.

It was lonely, not even knowing yourself.

She could detect other people’s sadnesses the way one animal could smell another of its kind a mile away.

It should be one of the tests,” the old woman said. “Humans are almost always lonely.

Among the many things it meant was that even to loneliness there is an end, for those who are lonely enough, long enough.

Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.