I feel like I'm standing in the middle of a crowded room, screaming at the top of my lungs, and no one even looks up.
It's far better to be unhappy alone than unhappy with someone — so far.
I'm rightly tired of the pain I hear and feel, boss. I'm tired of bein on the road, lonely as a robin in the rain. Not never havin no buddy to go on with or tell me where we's comin from or goin to or why. I'm tired of people bein ugly to each other. It feels like pieces of glass in my head. I'm tired of all the times I've wanted to help and couldn't. I'm tired of bein in the dark. Mostly it's the pain. There's too much. If I could end it, I would.
The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.
Being alone in body and spirit begets loneliness, and loneliness begets more loneliness.
Yes, life is a journey, one that is much better travelled with a companion by our side. Of course, that companion can be just about anyone... a neighbor on the other side of the street... or the man on the other side of the bed. The companion can be a mother with good intentions... or a child who's up to no good. Still, despite our best intentions, some of us will lose our companions along the way. And then the journey becomes unbearable. You see, human beings are designed for many things, but loneliness isn't one of them.
For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story.
But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.
...fate for not having married when the best chance was at hand. I started traveling. My luggage was snowed under blizzards of travel stickers. I have been alone in Paris, alone in Vienna, alone in London, and all in all, it is very much like being alone in Green Town, Illinois. It is, in essence, being alone.
"Yes, I want money more than anything else in the world."
"Then you've made the only choice. But there's a penalty attached, as there is to most things you want. It's loneliness."
He risked what could have been a relentlessly lonely path, but found company in the characters of the books he loved.