Emma McLaughlin Quotes

Beauty set up distance between other people and me. It warped their behavior.

This is my saddest story: In grade school, they would have us open our Valentine's cards and read them out loud. I always sent cards to myself because nobody else did.

I never got picked on, but I never had a lot of friends. When I talked to my parents about it, they said, 'They're just jealous because you're beautiful and talented.' It was probably one of the worst things they could have told me, because I became self-conscious.

Every woman I had ever met who walked through the world appraised and classified by an extraordinary physicality had also received the keys to an unbearable solitude. It was the coefficient of their beauty, the price they had to pay.

A lot of people are lonely. A lot of people are lonely even when they're surrounded by other people.

They were not friends. They didn't know each other. It struck Tom like a horrible truth, true for all time, true for the people he had known in the past and for those he would know in the future: each had stood and would stand before him, and he would know time and time again that he would never know them, and the worst was that there would always be the illusion, for a time, that he did know them, and that he and they were completely in harmony and alike. For an instant the wordless shock of his realization seemed more than he could bear.

I've always felt kind of like an outsider, even when I was very successful back in the old days. Even then. I kind of enjoyed it, really.

Loneliness is the most compelling force in the universe.

When he talked to you, you seemed to fit in, but when someone else was talking, or he would be distracted, you jsut looked lonely over there. At least to me. But whenever I would tell you that, you'd say "I'm fine. I just slip out of it, you know?" And I'd say "I'll catch you," and you would say, "It's not the kind of slipping you can catch.

She understood how a world jammed with phones, email, and faxes could still leave you feeling utterly alone.

Anne was always glad in the happiness of her friends; but it is sometimes a little lonely to be surrounded everywhere by happiness that is not your own.

I feel sad that he's just a voice now.

Nobody ever lies about being lonely.

Linda seemed to recognize loneliness. Possibly she could see it sitting opposite her, sipping lager and trying not to lose its temper. It was an illness, loneliness-it made you weak, gullible, feebleminded.

I basically went out with any guy who asked me because hardly anyone ever asked me out.

Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.

But although she was with family and friends, she'd never felt more alone. She felt as if she'd lost a vital part of herself and she had - her heart.

Loneliness in a crowd of people was the worst kind of loneliness, but she couldn't help it.

In the developed countries there is a poverty of intimacy, a poverty of spirit, of loneliness, of lack of love. There is no greater sickness in the world today than that one.

I don't like plain nails. I get sad.

Wine is a sign of happiness, love and plenty, how many of our adolescents and young people sense that these are no longer found in their homes? How many women, sad and lonely, wonder when love left, when it slipped away from their lives? How many elderly people feel left out of family celebrations, cast aside and longing each day for a little love?

Sunset is the saddest light there is.

Loneliness is just a thing that I'm not personally interested in. So far, it hasn't been on my docket of things to write about.

Maybe the biggest problem with loneliness is that we walk around thinking we're the only ones suffering from it.