“I feel unspeakably lonely. And I feel - drained. It is a blank state of mind and soul I cannot describe to you as I think it would not make any difference. Also it is a very private feeling I have - that of melting into a perpetual nervous breakdown. I am often questioning myself what I further want to do, who I further wish to be; which parts of me, exactly, are still functioning properly. No answers, darling. At all.”
Source: Anne Sexton: A Self-portrait in Letters
“Beh reaches up and touches my cheek.
“Love,” she whispers.
“Luffs!” I respond, and her smile brightens even more.
Without a doubt, I will do anything for her.”
Source: Transcendence
“When the silence and the aloneness press down and around me, crushing me, carving through me like ice, I need to speak aloud sometimes, if only for proof of life.”
Source: Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
“Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness , dear, my happiness will remain,in the moist reflection of a street lamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal's black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness.”
Source: Selected Letters, 1940-1977
“I decided that maybe we left each other alone too much. Leaving each other alone was killing us.”
Source: Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
“The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature (or the ‘tonic of wildness’ as Thoreau called it) solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself.”
Source: The Midnight Library
“I spent the rest of the day in someone else's story. The rare moments that I put the book down, my own pain returned in burning stabs.”
Source: Die for Me
“At bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise or even help another, a lot must happen, a lot must go well, a whole constellation of things must come right in order once to succeed.”
Source: Letters to a Young Poet
“Feelings had transpired without permission, conspired without his brain, working with what was left of his heart.”
Source: We Hunt the Flame
“I can't deceive myself that out of the bare stark realization that no matter how enthusiastic you are, no matter how sure that character is fate, nothing is real, past or future, when you are alone in your room with the clock ticking loudly into the false cheerful brilliance of the electric light. And if you have no past or future which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath