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"I happen to believe that America is dying of loneliness, that we, as a people, have bought into the false dream of convenience, and turned away from a deep engagement with our internal lives-those fountains of inconvenient feeling-and toward the frantic enticements of what our friends in the Greed Business call the Free Market. We're hurtling through time and space and information faster and faster, seeking that network connection. But at the same time we're falling away from our families and our neighbors and ourselves. We ego-surf and update our status and brush up on which celebrities are ruining themselves, and how. But the cure won't stick."
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"Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings...but there's something dead about it, something deserted."

"He stopped, feeling lonely in his long speech."

"Nico was devastatingly alone. He'd lost his big sister Bianca. He'd pushed away all other demigods who'd tried to get close to him. His experiences at Camp Half-Blood, in the Labyrinth and in Tartarus had left him scarred, afraid to trust anyone."

"Then, left alone, shivering, I happened to glance up. I stood, I froze, blinking up through the drift, the drift, the silent drift of blinding snow. I saw the high hotel windows, the lights, the shadows.What's it like up there? I thought. Are fires lit? Is it warm as breath? Who are all those people? Are they drinking? Are they happy?Do they even know I'm HERE?"

"Durum semolina, golden wheat wafting in Italian fields. Can you imagine how astonished the Italians would be if they knew that what they were exporting in 1971 was really loneliness."

"My characters are quite as real to me as so-called real people, which is one reason why I'm not subject to what is known as loneliness. I have plenty of company."

"I love my loneliness as you do love your virginity."

"It is so easy at times for a lonely individual to begin fantasizing about what the people outside are saying about him and, in result, irrationally and fearfully, and sometimes angrily, fancy himself a villain."

"Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym."

"Lonely, Vaguely Pedophilic Swing Set Seeks the Butts of Children."
Explore more quotes by Cheryl Strayed

"Each night the black sky and the bright stars were my stunning companions; occasionally I'd see their beauty and solemnity so plainly that I'd realize in a piercing way that my mother was right. That someday I would be grateful and that in fact I was grateful now, that I felt something growing in me that was strong and real."

"Saying it's hard is ultimately a justification to do whatever seems like the easiest thing to do - have the affair, stay at that horrible job, end a friendship over a slight, keep loving someone who treats you terribly."

"Real change happens on the level of the gesture. It's one person doing one thing differently than he or she did before."

"It had been so silent in the wake of that commotion, a kind of potent silence that seemed to contain everything. The songs of the birds and the creak of the trees. The dying snow and the unseen gurgling water. The glimmering sun. The certain sky. The gun that didn't have a bullet in its chamber. And the mother. Always the mother. The one who would never come to me."

"The healing power of even the most microscopic exchange with someone who knows in a flash precisely what you're talking about because she experienced that thing too cannot be overestimated."

"One of the things that happens a lot is you get to see how many times things happen, literal things happen and how they are completely metaphors for where you are. It's like a mirror is being held up just about an inch to your face."

"It was really over, I thought. There was no way to go back, to make it stay. There was never that."
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