Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes

I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it? What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming?

Thus each of us had to be content to live only for the day, alone under the vast indifference of the sky.

We are all in this together, by ourselves.

There's a small balcony here, the door is open and I can see the lights of the cars on the Harbor Freeway south, they never stop, that roll of lights, on and on. All those people. What are they doing? What are they thinking? We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't.

I am Manuel. I have lived in the loneliness which is common to all men, but the difference is that I have known it. Now it is necessary for me, as it is necessary for all men, to die in this same loneliness, and I know that there is no help for it.

Let's learn to live, for we must die alone.

It's pointless to cry. One is born and dies alone.

Like many people, I have no religion, and I am just sitting in a small boat drifting with the tide. I live in the doubts of my duty.... I think there is dignity in this, just to go on working.... Today we stand naked, defenseless, and more alone than at any time in history. We are waiting for something, perhaps another miracle, perhaps the Martians. Who knows?

She cried for herself, she cried because she was afraid that she herself might die in the night, because she was alone in the world, because her desperate and empty life was not an overture but an ending, and through it all she could see was the rough, brutal shape of a coffin.

I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone.

I started to see human beings as little lonesome, water based, pink meat, life forms pushing air through themselves and making noises that the other little pieces of meat seemed to understand. I was thinking to myself, 'There's five billion people here but we've never been more isolated.' The only result of the aggressive individualism we pursue is that you lose sight of your compassion and we go to bed at night thinking, 'Is this all there is?' because we don't feel fulfilled.

Vaguely at first, then more distinctly, I realized that man is an eternal stranger on this planet.

We are all born and someday we'll all die. Most likely to some degree alone. Our aloneness in this world is, maybe not anymore, a thing to mourn.

This life of being a transient human being has gotten to a point when it's very hard to bear.

Life is the desert, life the solitude, death joins us to the great majority.

We enter the world alone, we leave the world alone.

I have no history but the length of my bones.

Life's an awfully lonesome affair. You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming.

For each one of us stands alone in the midst of a universe.

I looked below and saw my people there, and all were well and happy except one, and he was lying like the dead - and that one was myself.

It was either Voltaire or Charlie Sheen who said, 'We are born alone. We live alone. We die alone. And anything in between that can give us the illusion that we're not, we cling to.'

You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

Loneliness is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man.