Octavia E. Butler Quotes

I was separated from my wife at the time. A lot of people think I wrote it about prison.

It is loneliness that makes the loudest noise. This is true of men as of dogs.

It was funny, she thought, but her smile turned wistful because she had nobody to tell.

I have these wonderful homes, and no one to share them with.

They are all gone into the world of light, and I alone sit lingering here.

Separation penetrates the disappearing person like a pigment and steeps him in gentle radiance.

I'm so secluded. Very alone.

When even the most strictly logical mind looks round and investigates the phenomena attending its own existence, perhaps the first fact to attract attention by its strongly marked prominence is the remarkable loneliness of man. He stands alone.

Sometimes, only one person is missing, and the whole world seems depopulated.

You can be around 100 people and be completely alone. People don't realize what it's really like.

Music I heard with you was more than music, and bread I broke with you was more than bread. Now that I am without you, all is desolate; all that was once so beautiful is dead.

When everyone goes home, you're stuck with yourself.

When the people you love are gone, you're alone.

But in the end, in the end one is alone. We are all of us alone. I mean I'm told these days we have to consider ourselves as being in society... but in the end one knows one is alone, that one lives at the heart of a solitude.

I would say, 'I'm alone, but I'm not lonely.' But I was just kidding myself.

Being away from the game took a toll on my heart.

I have already spent Christmas Eve and Christmas morning alone, missing my children, and crying because I have no family nearby.

Those reflective moments for me usually come from loneliness and separation from people.

I think everyone is lonely whether you are in a good marriage or a bad marriage somewhere down the line you become lonely, and to get rid of that loneliness you have to try really hard.

But to Sam the evening deepened to darkness as he stood at the Haven; and as he looked at the grey sea he saw only a shadow in the waters that was soon lost in the West. There he stood far into the night, hearing only the sigh and murmur of the waves on the shores of Middle-Earth, and the sound of them sank deep into his heart.

Loneliness surrounds me without your arms around me.

Loneliness has little to do with what we do or where we do it, whether we're married or unmarried, optimists or pessimists, heterosexual or homosexual. Loneliness has to do with the sudden clefts we experience in every human relation, the gaps that open up with such stomach-turning unexpectedness. In a brief moment, I and my brother or sister have moved away into different worlds, and there is no language we can share.... It is in the middle of intimacy that the reality of loneliness most dramatically appears.

Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

If you are never alone you cannot know yourself. And if you do not know yourself, you will begin to fear the void.

Everything you do makes my body scream with loneliness.