Margaret Atwood Quotes

He who does not fill his world with phantoms remains alone.

I'm so secluded. Very alone.

Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.

Don't go away. I don't want to be alone. I can't stand being alone.

There is nothing else to do in my life... I have no family, relationships - this is the only thing that I do.

Here, beside this great black surface that is my desk, I feel as though I am on a desert island.

My life used to be full of everything. Now if you aren't with me I haven't a thing in the world.

What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipwrecked and stranded in the limitless wastes of a boundless and indifferent ocean.

You can pretend for a long time, but one day it all falls away and you are alone. We are alone in the most beautiful place in the world.

For hours, for days, for years, she had wandered endlessly within herself but never met anybody, nobody.

It's the silence I imagine in the rest of the world, the silence of an endless ocean and uninhabitable island, a silence that can be seen from space.

One can experience loneliness in two ways: by feeling lonely in the world or by feeling the loneliness of the world.

Usually there's no specific reason for loneliness - it's a broad feeling.

These are frightening times...when she feels herself annointed by loneliness.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

THE ABANDONED VALLEY Can you understand being alone so long you would go out in the middle of the night and put a bucket into the well so you could feel something down there tug at the other end of the rope?

How does it feel when you're alone and you're cold inside

A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.

When I think about sex it makes me realise how alone I feel.

Reality was utterly coolheaded and utterly lonely.

... we are all terribly alone no matter what people say.

I wanted to talk to someone. But who? It’s moments like this, when you need someone the most, that your world seems smallest.

For one who is indifferent, life itself is a prison. Any sense of community is external or, even worse, nonexistent. Thus, indifference means solitude. Those who are indifferent do not see others. They feel nothing for others and are unconcerned with what might happen to them. They are surrounded by a great emptiness. Filled by it, in fact. They are devoid of all hope as well as imagination. In other words, devoid of any future.

This loneliness won't leave me alone.