Loneliness and solitude - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

Peter: No one must ever touch me. Wendy: Why? Peter: I don't know.

- J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan (play, 1904)

No human soul should be denied the privilege of solitude, for only in solitude can the mind resolve its intake with its wealth.

- Theodore Sturgeon, ''The Perfect Host'' (1948)

He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable.

- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

He felt the cold silence between worlds, the thrust of rocketships, the harsh, glamorous loneliness.

- Raymond Z. Gallun, ''Prodigal's Aura'' (1951)

You live in your world, I live in my world, a hundred people, a hundred worlds.

- Theodore Sturgeon, ''The Clinic'' (1953)

There is in certain living souls A quality of loneliness unspeakable, So great it must be shared As company is shared by lesser beings. Such a loneliness is mine; so know by this That in immensity, There is one lonelier than you.

- Theodore Sturgeon, ''Saucer of Loneliness'' (1953)

It was as if a light came from her, more light and far less shadow than ever the practical moon could cast. Among the many things it meant was that even to loneliness there is an end, for those who are lonely enough, long enough.

- Theodore Sturgeon, ''Saucer of Loneliness'' (1953)

There are times when you must walk by yourself because it hurts so much to be alone.

- Samuel R. Delany, ''Aye, and Gomorrah'' (1967)

Eternity is a terrible place to endure alone.

- Stephen Goldin, ''The Last Ghost'' (1971)

The distances between the stars seem brief by contrast to the distances between each of us and his fellows.

- Thomas M. Disch, ''Things Lost'' (1972)

Privacy is as necessary as company; you can drive a man crazy by depriving him of either.

- Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love (1973)

Without loneliness and strangeness this world would not be this world at all and maybe not worth having.

- Edgar Pangborn, ''The Children's Crusade'' (1974)

My loneliness was a cancer - a growth that I fed with hate: hate for the planet with its endless cold, endless winds, and endless isolation; hate for the helpless yellow child with its clawing need for care, food, and an affection that I couldn't give; and hate for myself.

- Barry B. Longyear, ''Enemy Mine'' (1979)

The loneliness became an awful panic, a soundless inner groping for someone/ something/somewhere she could grasp and hold, but her fingers always locked on empty air.

- Alan Brennert, ''Queen of the Magic Kingdom'' (1980)

Nor did Lawson miss him terribly. He had grown accustomed to the strange richness of his own company.

- Michael Bishop, ''The Quickening'' (1981)

Even for the most self-sufficient of men, being isolated from the flow of humanity must be the worst form of torture!

- Stephen King, ''The ManWhoWould Not Shake Hands'' (1981)

For the first time I was in the presence of someone who had nothing - even less than the beggars of Rio, for they at least were linked to the material world by their longings for it. Scranton embodied the absolute loneliness of the human being in space and time, a situation which in many ways I shared.

- J. G. Ballard, ''The ManWhoWalked on the Moon'' (1985)

How solitary we are, Verdit thought, each one of us with our layered histories floating in the sea of time.

- Joan Slonczewski, Daughter of Elysium (1993)

It's easier to desire and pursue the attention of tens of millions of total strangers than it is to accept the love and loyalty of the people closest to us.

- William Gibson, Idoru (1996)