The very definition of what it means to be alone has changed. To be physically alone is still relatively easy, but many of us struggle daily to turn off e-mail, computers, or cell phones... Our students...find requests not to text during these activities strange, annoying, and downright silly.

So, this is how it's become? This is how I've become? A walking contradiction? I'm surrounded by people and feel alone. I claim to crave a bit of normalcy but now that I have some, it's like I don't know what to do with it, I don't know how to be a normal person anymore.

Never assume you are alone, because you never truly are. Only when your life has surely ended and your loved ones have forgotten you is when you are gone. Gone from this world and the next.Sleep is when you are most vulnerable. It’s a sanctuary and a curse; how you perceive it is up to you.

Ultimately what I like about reading together is that we all make it happen together. Of course even amid shared experience we’re still alone… each reading of each book is unique. But what a comfort it is to share readings and experiences. How lucky we are when we get to be alone together.

Strong introverts crave alone time (I-time) as if it were oxygen in the lungs for survival. I can become short of breath from inadequate alone time. I-time is non-negotiable for a high-functioning introvert. Without I-time, an introvert can suffer from distraction, imbalance, exhaustion, and irritability.

She may have been among them but she could never be one of them. She was without inclusion for-as-much as she was not "one of the girls" and she wasn't "one of the guys." She was an outsider gazing in, endlessly comfortless, while they wished they had what it took to be less like the others and more like her.

Miss Abigail, I want to be an author because writers know when a person is lonely. I mean, when Molly read me some books, those writers reached out and said, Look Gideon, we know about your loneliness and we know you're feeling downtrodden. And they said...I'll stand up for you. You're not lone anymore.

Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment.

I hope you know that you are not alone, and in those hours when you feel that you are, just know there are other people out there — singing the same melodies of wanderlust, climbing over mountains in the dark, and waking in the night to stare at the moon, thinking of this large world and dreaming — just like you

I couldn't imagine what it would be like to be one of so many, to have not just parents and siblings but cousins and aunts and uncles, an entire tribe to claim as your own. Maybe you would feel lost in the crowd. Or sheltered by it. Whatever the case, one things was for sure: like it or not, you'd never be alone.

Her expression almost never changed. Made it hard to tell what she was thinking. But also made her seem separate from the rest of the world. It was like she lived so deep in the ocean even lightcouldn’t reach her. Like a fish that couldn’t see the dark lonely depths, because it was always dreaming about sunlight.

Since we do in reality need one another("it is not good for man to be alone"), then the failure ofthis need to appear as Need-love in consciousness - inother words, the illusory feeling that it is good for us tobe alone - is a Bad spiritual symptom; just as lack ofappetite is a bad medical symptom because men doreally need food.

I had a dream about you. I was lonely and you were lonely, and you suggested that we could be lonely together. But I just scoffed because if we were lonely together, we wouldn’t be lonely. So I wandered off to be by myself. Then I got hit by a truck that had no driver. I hope the coroner gave my shoes away to charity.


Even painfully shy and awkward people are not painfully shy or awkward when they are alone. The way to access this natural, comfortable alone-self when you are with others is by choosing to forbid yourself to wonder what "they" are thinking. Instead, force yourself to exist in the instant, then take it- and give it- as it comes.

There’s nothing like a good murder to remind us all how much love there is in the world. That’s what this guy’s probably thinking, as he stands alone and naked—emotionally, not physically—as he’s obviously wearing clothes made for another man, a man like me, a man not afraid to be nude in public.