@pro-solitude

He drank, for the same reason he wrote second-rate science fiction. Not to forget but to remember, to open the past and find himself there again. He opened each bottle, began each story with the secret conviction that here was the magic drought that would restore him. But magic, like wine, needs the right conditions in order to work.
Joanne Harris

For the first time in years the tears were streaming down his face. But they were for himself now. He did not care about mouth and eyes and moving hands. He wanted to care, and he could not care. For he had gone away and he could never go back any more. The gates were closed, the sun was gone down, and there was no beauty but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of illusion, of youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished. “Long ago,” he said, “long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more
F. Scott Fitzgerald

I wish I could explain it so someone could understand it. I’m afraid it’s something I can’t put into words. There’s just this heavy, overwhelming despair - dreading everything. Dreading life. Empty inside, to the point of numbness. It’s like there’s something already dead inside. My whole being has been pulling back into that void for months.
Kay Redfield Jamison

God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of “parties” with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness, is horrible and overpowering.
Sylvia Plath

She stood, in a room of crumbling plaster, pressed to the window-pane, looking up at the unattainable form of everything she loved. She did not know the nature of her loneliness. The only words that named it were: This is not the world I expected.
Ayn Rand

Talk to me about sadness. I talk about it too much in my own head but I never mind others talking about it either; I occasionally feel like I tremendously need others to talk about it as well.
Anne Sexton, “Self-Portrait In Letters“

Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties — all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name’s Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion — these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.
David Foster Wallace

A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words.
Orhan Pamuk

He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life running its course in secret. And through some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him, everything in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people.
Anton Chekhov

She was more lonely than the caravan crossing the desert; she was infinitely more mysterious, moving by her own power and sustained by her own resources. The sea might give her death or some unexampled joy, and none would know of it.
Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out  (via sexpansion)

She was deep within herself […]
Deep within herself. Being dead
filled her beyond fulfillment. Like a fruit
suffused with its own mystery and sweetness,
she was filled with her vast death, which was so new,
she could not understand that it had happened.
Rainer Maria Rilke, from Selected Poems
(via violentwavesofemotion)

My desires can no longer deal with this mixture of life and death in which eternity daily rots. Weary of the future, I have traversed its days, and yet I am tormented by the intemperance of unknown thirsts. Like a frenzied sage, dead to the world and frantic against it, I invalidate my illusions only to irritate them more. This exasperation in an unforeseeable universe—where nonetheless everything repeats itself—will it never come to an end? How long must I keep telling myself: ‘I loathe this life I idolize?’
Emil Cioran

My writings are daily affirmations of death. I am painting myself into a corner until there is only one inevitable act left. I am killing every belief and breaking down every value that upholds my very life until what is left is nothing. An experiment in nihilism, I am destroying all values that uphold life until I am left with nowhere to stand.
Mitchell Heisman

Why are we worn out? Why do we, who start out so passionate, brave, noble, believing, become totally bankrupt by the age of thirty or thirty-five? Why is it that one is extinguished by consumption, another puts a bullet in his head, a third seeks oblivion in vodka, cards, a fourth, in order to stifle fear and anguish, cynically tramples underfoot the portrait of his pure, beautiful youth? Why is it that, once fallen, we do not try to rise, and, having lost one thing, we do not seek another? Why?
Anton Chekhov

I could feel myself begin to recede, to tip and lose balance, slide toward the deeper darkness that had crept in from outside. It happened so quickly and took me by surprise; sometimes I just turned around and found it there -ah, camarade- unaware it had been waiting for me for days.

Bryan Mealer

What can I expect from myself? My sensation in all their horrible acuity, and a profound awareness of feeling. A sharp mind that only destroys me, and an unusual capacity for dreaming to keep me entertained. A dead will and a reflection that cradles it, like a living child.
Fernando Pessoa

I believe in whatever gets you through the night. Night is the hardest time to be alive. For me, anyway. It lasts so long, and 4 AM knows all my secrets. 4 AM is when my dreams die.

Poppy Z. Brite

He spoke of human solitude, about the intrinsic loneliness of a sophisticated mind, one that is capable of reason and poetry but which grasps at straws when it comes to understanding another, a mind aware of the impossibility of absolute understanding. The difficulty of having a mind that understands that it will always be misunderstood.
Nicole Krauss, Man Walks Into a Room

I feel a fatigue of the tongue seeking to utter impossible things until it twists itself into a knot and chokes me. I feel a fatigue at this mass of nerves seeking to uphold a world that is falling apart. I feel a fatigue at feeling, at the fervor of my dreams, the fever of my thought, the intensity of my hallucinations. A fatigue at the sufferings of others and my own. I feel my own blood thundering inside of me, I feel the horror of falling into abysms. But you and I would always fall together and I would not be afraid. We would fall into abysms, but you would carry your phosphorescences to the very bottom of the abysms. We could fall together and ascend together, far into space. I was always exhausted by my dreams, not because of the dreams, but because of the fear of not being able to return. I do not need to return. I will find you everywhere. You alone can go wherever I go, into the same mysterious regions. You too know the language of the nerves. You will always know what I am saying even if I do not.
Anais Nin, Under A Glass Bell

A great fire burns within me, but no one stops to warm themselves at it, and passers-by only see a wisp of smoke.
Vincent van Gogh

I cannot expose my absurd and violent passion to his sympathetic understanding. It too would make a “story”. I need someone whose mind falls like a chopper on a block; to whom the pitch of absurdity is sublime, and a shoe-string adorable. To whom I can expose the urgency of my own passion? Louis is too cold, too universal. There is nobody here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organized to prevent feeling alone.
Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Her entire existence is trying to figure out what her life is supposed to be while her heart breaks a little bit everyday over the tragedy of being alive
Arlaina Tibensky

The tumult of the present seems like a elegy for past youth and past summers, and there rose in her mind a curious sadness, as if time and eternity showed through skirts and waistcoats, and she saw people passing tragically to destruction.
Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room

I am tormenting you by my existence, my very existence.
Franz Kafka, from Letters To Felice (via violentwavesofemotion)

write when you are aching
when everything you say
sounds like a car crashing
write when you can’t breathe
when your foot is asleep
and you wish you were, too
write when your soul has
shin splints
write until your hands are black
and everything you touch
looks like it has been kissed
by night
write when you miss them
write when you don’t
write when you want to leave
write until you want to stay
write when you can’t feel anything
and write when a handshake
is enough to break your bones
find the time
find the strength
write it all down in big angry
letters, even if you can’t understand them
you are full of magic
it is pouring out of your fingertips and it is yelling
“I WILL NOT GO QUIETLY
I WILL NOT GO SOFTLY
THIS PAIN WILL NOT
EAT ME ALIVE”
When to Write | Caitlyn Siehl (via alonesomes)

For the first time in years the tears were streaming down his face. But they were for himself now. He did not care about mouth and eyes and moving hands. He wanted to care, and he could not care. For he had gone away and he could never go back any more. The gates were closed, the sun was gone down, and there was no beauty but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of illusion, of youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished.

“Long ago,” he said, “long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Winter Dreams

Her entire existence is trying to figure out what her life is supposed to be while her heart breaks a little bit everyday over the tragedy of being alive.
Arlaina Tibensky, And Then Things Fall Apart

the-last-mermaid:

I’m in love with this apartment.

“When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to pull off the wigs of a few revered idols.”

Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

He cannot grow old, for he has never been young; he cannot become young, for he has already grown old; in a sense he cannot die, for indeed he has not lived; in a sense he cannot live, for indeed he is already dead.
Søren Kierkegaard, The Unhappiest One