“But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”

“I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness.”

“We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”

“If loneliness was a choice, what was the other option? To settle for second-best and try to be happy with that? And was that fair to the person you settled for?”

“People Die…Beauty Fades…Love Changes…And You Will Always Be Alone”

“The strength of a love is always misjudged if we evaluate it by its immediate cause and not the stress that went before it, the dark and hollow space full of disappointment and loneliness that precedes all the great events in the heart’s history.”

“How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you’d be doomed. You’d be as ruined as God. You’d be a stone. You’d never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You’d never love anyone, ever again. You’d never dare to.”

“People accuse me of falling in love easily. It just means that I’m able to see the beauty in most of the people who cross paths with me and I appreciate it for what it is and also for what it isn’t. Love is imperfect. Falling for someone’s flaws is just as necessary as falling for their strengths. And people like myself, who fall into love easily, are sometimes the loneliest souls around at the end of the day.”

“Sometimes I get real lonely sleeping with you.”

“She had become accustomed to being lonely. She was used to walking alone and to being considered ‘different.’ She did not suffer too much.”

“That’s love: Two lonely persons keep each other safe and touch each other and talk to each other.”

“والقهوة يجب أن يقدّمها لك شخصٌ ما. القهوةُ كالوَرْد، فالورد يقدّمه لك سِواك، ولا أحدَ يقدّم ورداً لنفسه. وإن أعددتها لنفسك فأنت لحظتها في عزلة حرة بلا عاشق أو عزيز، غريبٌ في مكانك. وإن كان هذا اختياراً فأنت تدفع ثمن حريتك، وإن كان اضطراراً فأنت في حاجةٍ إلى جرس الباب.”

“For someone like myself in whom the ability to trust others is so cracked and broken that I am wretchedly timid and am forever trying to read the expression on people’s faces.”

“I am never alone wherever I am. The air itself supplies me with a century of love. When I breathe in, I am breathing in the laughter, tears, victories, passions, thoughts, memories, existence, joys, moments, and the hues of the sunlight on many tones of skin; I am breathing in the same air that was exhaled by many before me. The air that bore them life. And so how can I ever say that I am alone?”

“It is beautiful, it is endless, it is full and yet seems empty. It hurts us.”