OF: Loneliness

"Loneliness is the greatest poverty." -Mother Theresa

"An artist is always alone--if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness." -Henry Miller

"If you are afraid of loneliness, do not marry." -Anton Chekhov

"Music was invented to confirm human loneliness." -Lawrence Durrell

"Man's loneliness is but his fear of life." -Eugene O'Neill

"Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate." -Germaine Greer

"Moon! Moon! I am prone before you. Pity me, and drench me in loneliness." -Amy Lowell

The Wisdom of Others

I've always been a quote junkie.

As a teenager my diary was filled with them. As an English teacher, I'd put a new quote on the board every week that correlated with my lessons. As a dork, I list a quote of the week on my outgoing voicemail. As a poet so many of the things I write begin as a response to a quote I read, or a singular line that comes to me somewhere from the ether.

Here are a few favorites that I've gathered over the years:

"The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which makes you lonely."
--Lorraine Hansberry

"The meeting of two personalities is like the meeting of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed."
--Carl Jung

"You do not have a soul. You ARE a soul. You have a body."
--C.S. Lewis

"There are years that question, and there are years that answer."
--Zora Neale Hurston

"The true genius shutters at incompleteness, and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be."
--Edgar Allen Poe

"The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death."
--Oscar Wilde

"Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
-Leo Tolstoy

What are your favorites?