″‘I was in the hotel,’ he said finally. ‘I followed your footprints in the snow.’ There were tears on his face.
‘Okay,’ someone said, ‘but why are you crying?’
‘I’d thought I was the only one,’ he said.”
“Jean Louise, I’ve had to scratch since I was a kid for the things you and Jem took for granted. I’ve never had some of the things you take for granted and I never will. All I have to fall back on is myself.”
“‘Because every now and then, I’d meet a guy and think that we were getting along great, and suddenly I’d stop hearing from him. Not only did he stop calling, but if I happened to bump into him sometime later, he always acted like I had the plague. I didn’t understand it. I still don’t. And it bothered me. It hurt me. With time, it got harder and harder to keep blaming the guys, and I eventually came to the conclusion that there was something wrong with me. That maybe I was simply meant to live my life alone.’”
“You are not alone. No one who calls on Him can call in vain. Whatever troubles you, be certain that He has the answer, and will gladly give it to you, if you simply turn to Him and ask it of Him.”
“God, who can hold you? To yourself alone
belonging, by no owner’s hand disturbed,
you are like unripened wine that unperturbed
grows ever sweeter and is all alone.”
“The world was so silent. There was a barrier between me and the world, and I thought for a moment that the world had never wanted me and now it was taking the opportunity to get rid of me.”
“The man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround himself with people. But the man who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at peace with his own loneliness, and to prefer its reality to the illusion of merely natural companionship, comes to know the invisible companionship of God.”
“So, are you lost or not?” The dog hesitated, then nodded and gave a pathetic whimper.
“You poor thing,” said Lotta with a sigh. “I know what it’s like when you’re lost. There you are, all alone, afraid, cold, hungry. And at night when it gets dark in the woods you start to cry. That’s when the ghosts come out screaming and rustling and rattling and haunting.” “How do you know all that?” asked the dog. “That’s what the carrier pigeon told me last year,” replied Lotta. “She got lost and forgot where she belonged. Getting lost is just like getting lost.” The dog nodded.
Heart’s Delight opens with a 16-year-old boy poised over a desk. He is alone in the room, going through the left over items of a relationship with his ex-girlfriend, Ann-Kathrin. As he systematically destroys each object, he replays a scene from their relationship that relates to it.
“On the fateful day Old Tom arrives at Angela Throgmorton’s doorstep, Angela knows that things will never be the same. She lovingly raises the little feline monster as her own, but all he does is drive her crazy.′
“Kaseem, Parvana replied, giving him her boy-name. She didn’t think any more about whether to trust someone with the truth about herself. The truth could get her arrested, or killed. It was easier and safer not to trust anyone.”
Annie lives with her elderly parents in a remote cottage. She is used to being alone. Every day she walks by the lonely marsh to school. Only in winter, when the wind howls in the trees, is Annie ever afraid.
Alone! he was alone again! again condemned to silence—again face to face with nothingness! Alone!—never again to see the face, never again to hear the voice of the only human being who united him to earth!