Martha Beck Quotes

Mothers and daughters can stay very connected during teenage years. In the middle of your life, you can become very alone. Even though you're connected deeply to other family members, lovers, husbands, friends.

Times may have changed, but there are some things that are always with us - loneliness is one of them.

I have days where the only words I say are to the person making my sandwich at the grocery store.

When you feel bad, find a person to talk to and cry with, to tell of your anger and other helpless feelings.

Never once, during any of my bouts of depression, had I been inclined or able to pick up a telephone and ask a friend for help. It wasn't in me.

People in the world can never imagine the length of days to those in asylums. They seemed never ending, and we welcomed any event that might give us something to think about as well as talk of.

People are lonely. They want company and your book can provide them company and a little bit of hope. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Isolation is a dream killer.

I was very independent growing up, but there were things that were bothering me that I never told anybody. I would talk to our animals at home.

I'm perpetually lonely.

There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to.

As far as this business of solitary confinement goes, the most important thing for survival is communication with someone, even if it's only a wave or a wink, a tap on the wall, or to have a guy put his thumb up. It makes all the difference.

Share shame so you are not left alone with it. If you can't find another person, get a journal. I didn't say make a video on Snapchat. It's for you, not anyone else.

I've actually read that isolation is the enemy, so why do that to myself?

I think people are isolated and really lonely.

Part of the reason people don't talk about their loneliness is that they feel they will be judged for it.

Myself, I suffer from loneliness. And I think we all feel alone. I'm looking for stories that help people deal with loneliness and help them if they are monsters: they don't have to undertake monstrous actions. And maybe they're not monsters.

I don't think it's healthy to have 68-year-old men, 70-year-old men thinking regularly about a traumatic experience that happened to them and thinking that they cannot talk about it with anybody, and no one wants to listen.

It is dreadful when something weighs on your mind, not to have a soul to unburden yourself to. You know what I mean. I tell my piano the things I used to tell you.

I don't know how much longer I can keep going without a friend. I used to be able to do it very easily, but that was before I knew what having a friend was like.

Shame works like the zoom lens on a camera. When we are feeling shame, the camera is zoomed in tight and all we see is our flawed selves, alone and struggling.(page 68)

May he die with no joy at his end, The man who won't be troubled To unlock the keys of his heart and make a friend.

A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody.

No one can endure his own solitude.

There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematician that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one.