Merle Shain Quotes

I have a tendency to go through my life at full speed and as a one-man band, and so I don't generally stop and take in other people enough to develop many relationships. I'm starting to regret that a bit. I want to change it.

Keep in mind that to avoid loneliness, many people need both a social circle and an intimate attachment. Having just one of two may still leave you feeling lonely.

Friendships are among the most fundamental of human needs.

I was in my early 30s, and I longed for real friendships and real relationships, and I started asking myself why I didn't have that. I had a couple of male friends, but every time I would hang out with them, it felt like there was something keeping us apart.

I've been an important star and lived a full life, yet I only hve three close friends. I guess that's all anyone can expect.

Friendship is the source of the greatest pleasures, and without friends even the most agreeable pursuits become tedious.

I really only have a few friends.

I'm not the kind of guy who has best friends.

If you can't be with yourself, you'll never learn to be with anyone else.

The building of friendship, family, community and love is complicated. We are so isolated in this country, no longer supported by tribes and villages.

No one would choose a friendless existence on condition of having all the other things in the world.

Friends and relatives might be surprised that I think of myself as lonely. I'm married to a man I not only love but like, and we spend a lot of time together. If I feel like socializing, I can usually find someone to meet for coffee or a drink.

A lot of what I've been learning in the last two years is due to therapy - about my sexuality, why things go wrong, why relationships haven't worked. It isn't anything to do with anybody else; it's to do with me.

I think people are isolated because of the nature of human consciousness, and they like it when they feel the connection between themselves and someone else.

I wonder what kind of lives they will have built for themselves when they turn 45 and can't really have any connection with people because they are so used to fleeting sexual.

Friendships are the family we make - not the one we inherit. I've always been someone to whom friendship, elective affinities, is as important as family.

Friends are very important to me, and I have always had many of them. There are probably many reasons why this is so, but two seem to me more valid than any of the others I am a naturally friendly person, and I hate to be alone.

You know, I don't understand how a man goes through life without any friends.

I think it's important to cultivate as many people as you can to see which ones you jive with. And it makes you happy. If one dies, you have another one. So living is a process that you have to do by yourself, and if you can learn a few little goodies along the way that might make it easier for you, so much the better.

The more specific you are about a very general feeling of loneliness is actually how you connect with people.

I would tell my 23-year-old self to be friends with more comics.

I had a lot of friends, but none of them I felt super close with. Now that I'm older, I can look back on my teenage self and kind of see the things I did wrong and the things I did right, what affect they had on me, and what affect they had on other people. I can look at it in a much more conducive way to storytelling.

She existed in her friends; there she was. All the parts of herself she'd forgotten. She knew herself best when she was with them.

A life without a lonely place, that is, a life without a quiet center, easily becomes destructive. When we cling to the results of our actions as our only way of self-identifiction, then we become possessive and defensive and tend to look at our fellow human beings more as enemies to be kept at a distance than as friends with whom we share the gifts of life.

People always get tired of one another. I grow tired of myself whenever I am left alone for ten minutes, and I am certain that I am fonder of myself than anyone can be of another person.