Living Alone Quotes

• Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.

  Louise Erdrich

  Love, Life, Strength

  "Louise Erdrich and 'The Painted Drum'". "Weekend Edition Sunday" with Liane Hansen, www.npr.org. October 02, 2005.

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• Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that. And living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on Earth.

  Louise Erdrich

  Love, Life, Strength

  "The Painted Drum". Book by Louise Erdrich, www.npr.org. 2005.

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• Solitude does not consist in living alone; it consists in living with others, with people who take no interest in you.

  Octave Mirbeau

  People, Solitude, Doe

  Octave Mirbeau (1911). “The Experiences of a Ladies' Maid”

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• You know, one of my fears about living alone so long is that you get used to doing everything your own way.

  Terry McMillan

  Long, Way, Used

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• I enjoy the freedom of living alone and not having anyone interfere with my belongings. I mean, I'm quite a selfish human being. I think being in the public eye and growing up, it's made me quite selfish in some respects. I can be extremely generous with friends, but in relationships I can be quite mean in terms of my time and my affections. I take people for granted, and I'm trying not to do that.

  Boy George

  Growing Up, Selfish, Mean

  Source: www.sfgate.com

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• We are born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Everything in-between is a gift.

  Yul Brynner

  Love, Life, Death

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• There is no such thing as living alone, for all living is relationship; but to live without direct relationship demands high intelligence, a swifter and greater awareness for self-discovery.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  Discovery, Self, Solitude

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• I wonder if living alone makes one more alive. No precious energy goes in disagreement or compromise. No need to augment others, there is just yourself, just truth - a morsel - and you.

  Florida Scott-Maxwell

  Solitude, Energy, Needs

  Florida Scott-Maxwell (2013). “Measure of My Days”, p.22, Knopf

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• Living alone makes it harder to find someone to blame.

  Mason Cooley

  Being Alone, Blame, Harder

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• Can anyone understand how it is to have lived in the White House and then, suddenly, to be living alone as the President's widow?

  Jackie Kennedy

  White, House, President

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• If there's anything worse than a woman living alone, it's a woman saying she likes it.

  Thelma Ritter

  Likes, Ifs

  "Fictional character: Alma". "Pillow Talk", www.imdb.com. 1959.

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• I am convinced that living in an enclave shapes the personality, and living alone shapes the personality too.

  Mary Douglas

  Personality, Shapes, Convinced

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• Living alone is good for privacy, bad for full-scale cooking and moving heavy furniture.

  Mason Cooley

  Moving, Cooking, Furniture

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• Living alone, you can do so many fantastic things I've learned. You can like, walk around and have so many conversations with yourself and sing your thoughts. I think I'm the only one that does that.

  Taylor Swift

  Thinking, Doe, I've Learned

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• I realize full well how hard it must be to go on living alone in a place from which someone has left you, but there is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.

  Haruki Murakami

  Goes On, World, Realizing

  FaceBook post by Haruki Murakami from Jun 30, 2011

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• I'm not saying that there's anything better than mated bliss at its best, but I'm saying that living alone is as good in its own way. But we haven't quite given ourselves permission to recognize that.

  Barbara Feldon

  Way, Bliss, Permission

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• The thing about living alone is that it gives you a lot of time to think. You don't necessarily reach any conclusions, because wisdom is largely a function of intelligence and self-awareness, not time on your hands. But you do become very good at thinking yourself into endless loops of desperation in half the time it would take a normal person.

  Jonathan Tropper

  Thinking, Self, Hands

  Jonathan Tropper (2012). “One Last Thing Before I Go: A Novel”, p.42, Penguin

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• You're going to be buying your ticket with your heartache, you're gonna be payin' the man with your dues. You're gonna be living alone when you hear that whistle moan, you're gonna be learnin' to live with the blues.

  Don McLean

  Sadness, Men, Heartache

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• It is an old saying, abundantly justified, that where sciences meet there growth occurs. It is true moreover to say that in scientific borderlands not only are facts gathered that [are] often new in kind, but it is in these regions that wholly new concepts arise. It is my own faith that just as the older biology from its faithful studies of external forms provided a new concept in the doctrine of evolution, so the new biology is yet fated to furnish entirely new fundamental concepts of science, at which physics and chemistry when concerned with the non-living alone could never arrive.

  Frederick Gowland Hopkins

  Science, Faithful, Growth

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• Let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Lying, Men, Support

  Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Anne Applebaum (2007). “The Gulag Archipelago Volume 2: An Experiment in Literary Investigation”, Harper Perennial Modern Classics

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• I'm used to living alone, and I like it that way. You become so selfish living alone...I'd make a terrible husband anyway.

  Paul Lynde

  Husband, Selfish, Way

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Some of my poems indicate that I am writing while living alone after a split with a woman, and I've had many splits with women. I need solitude more often when I'm not writing than when I am.

  Charles Bukowski

  Writing, Solitude, Needs

  Charles Bukowski (2003). “Sunlight Here I Am: Interviews and Encounters, 1963-1993”

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• I love writing. I've always written journals. I loved writing the book on living alone.

  Barbara Feldon

  Book, Writing, Journal

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• If a bell failed to ring, if a stove smoked, if a wheel on a machine stuck, you knew at once where to look and did so with alacrity; you found the defect and knew how to cure it. But the thing within you, the secret mainspring that alone gave meaning to life, the thing within us that alone is living, alone is capable of feeling pleasure and pain, of craving happiness and experiencing it- that was unknown. You knew nothing about that, nothing at all, and if the mainspring failed there was no cure. Wasn't it insane?

  Hermann Hesse

  Pain, Feelings, Secret

  Hermann Hesse (1974). “Kingsor's Last Summer”

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• The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions; the trick to living alone up here, away from all agitating entanglements, allurements, and expectations, apart especially from one's own intensity, is to organize the silence, to think of its mountaintop plenitude as capital, silence as wealth exponentially increasing. The encircling silence as your chosen source of advantage and your only intimate.

  Philip Roth

  Pain, Thinking, People

  Philip Roth (2000). “The Human Stain: A Novel”, p.44, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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