Fear of Solitude Quotes

I live alone, perhaps for no good reason, for the reason that I am an impossible creature, set apart by a temperament I have never learned to use as it could be used, thrown off by a word, a glance, a rainy day, or one drink too many. My need to be alone is balanced against my fear of what will happen when suddenly I enter the huge empty silence if I cannot find support there. I go up to Heaven and down to Hell in an hour, and keep alive only by imposing upon myself inexorable routines. I write too many letters and too few poems.

If you fear loneliness, then don't get married.

I have a pathological fear of being on my own. When I'm with my own thoughts, I start to unravel myself, and I start to think really dark thoughts, self-destructive thoughts.

... be indulgent toward those who ... are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.

To love is to tire of being alone; it is therefore a cowardice, a betrayal of ourselves. (It is exceedingly important that we not love.)

Many people are afraid of Emptiness, however, because it reminds them of Loneliness. Everything has to be filled in, it seems-appointment books, hillsides, vacant lots-but when all the spaces are filled, the Loneliness really begins. Then the Groups are joined, the Classes are signed up for, and the Gift-to-Yourself items are bought. When the Loneliness starts creeping in the door, the Television Set is turned on to make it go away. But it doesn't go away. So some of us do instead, and after discarding the emptiness of the Big Congested Mess, we discover the fullness of Nothing.

Being on my own was liberation, it was liberty, it was freedom, it was responsibility! It was the greatest thing in the world, getting old enough to be on my own. And today we have to deal with the fact that being on your own is so frightening and so scary and makes you feel so vulnerable. I wouldn't be where I am today if I had that attitude, if I had been afraid to be on my own.

and i can't stand the idea of being alone. i can't bear the thought of being free.

She didn't like to be alone. Even more, she didn't like being with people. (148)

It amazes me when I hear any person prefer blindness to deafness. Such a person must have a terrible dread of being alone. Blindness makes one totally dependent on others, and deprives us of every satisfaction that results from light.

He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude.

People who can't be alone have a problem. Loneliness is a luxury for people like me.

Perhaps the profession of doing good may be full, but every body should be kind at least to himself. Take a course of good water and air, and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you. Some have strange, morbid fears as soon as they find themselves with Nature, even in the kindest and wildest of her solitudes, like very sick children afraid of their mother-as if God were dead and the devil were king.

I look around, pretty much 100% of the people driving are texting. And they're killing, everybody's murdering each other with their cars. But people are willing to risk taking a life and ruining their own because they don't want to be alone for a second because it's so hard.

I have a huge, active imagination, and I think I'm really scared of being alone; because if I'm left to my own devices, I'll just turn into a madwoman.

All of society is built to prop up that lie, the whole world a big, noisy puppet show meant to distract us from the fact that at the end, you'll die, and you'll probably be alone.

People are always talking on their phones, or looking at their phones, because they don't want to be alone with their thoughts.

Men fear silence as they fear solitude, because both give them a glimpse of the terror of life's nothingness.

We are so afraid of silence that we chase ourselves from one event to the next in order not to have to spend a moment alone with ourselves, in order not to have to look at ourselves in the mirror.

When I have occasionally set myself to consider the different distractions of men, the pains and perils to which they expose themselves I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.

That's a terrifying prospect for myself, and I'm sure many other people, as well. We leave TVs on in our house. I listen to my record player, constantly, to just hear music. I'm really intrigued by the idea of solitude. I'm excited about that.

It terrified me to consider: What if, as a grown-up, I craved another body beside me as still as this one? What then?

Being alone is scarier than any boogey man and the reason why I don't choose to see Horror movies as a rule.

Loneliness is such an omnipotent and painful threat to many persons that they have little conception of the positive values of solitude and even, at times, are frightened at the prospect of being alone.

All my life I had feared imprisonment, the nun's cell, the hospital bed, the places where one faced the self without distraction, without the crutches of other people.