loneliness Quotes

“Where are the people?” resumed the little prince at last. “It’s a little lonely in the desert…” “It is lonely when you’re among people, too,” said the snake.”

“Everyone, at some point in their lives, wakes up in the middle of the night with the feeling that they are all alone in the world, and that nobody loves them now and that nobody will ever love them, and that they will never have a decent night’s sleep again and will spend their lives wandering blearily around a loveless landscape, hoping desperately that their circumstances will improve, but suspecting, in their heart of hearts, that they will remain unloved forever. The best thing to do in these circumstances is to wake somebody else up, so that they can feel this way, too.”

“I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.”

“I am lonely, sometimes, but I dare say it’s good for me.”

“Leave my loneliness unbroken”

“I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.”

“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”

“It might be lonelier Without the Loneliness”

“People living alone get used to loneliness.”

“I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or wake at night alone, I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again, I am to see to it that I do not lose you.”

″[T]he night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started.”

“No one should be alone in their old age, he thought.”

She stopped and listened to him and somehow his cheerful, friendly little whistle gave her a pleased feeling—even a disagreeable little girl may be lonely, and the big closed house and big bare moor and big bare gardens had made this one feel as if there was no one left in the world but herself.

“They have never known pain, he thought. The realization made him feel desperately lonely.”

“The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It’s the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.”

“Please don’t talk to me about isolation. No one has to tell me how it changes a person. I have lived it. I am isolation.

“If anyone would understand loneliness, the moon would.”

“How much do you trade to defeat loneliness?”

“She knew the years of isolation had altered her behavior until she was different from others, but it wasn’t her fault she’d been alone. Most of what she knew, she’d learned from the wild. Nature had nurtured, tutored, and protected her when no one else would.”

“Loneliness has a compass of its own.”

“She laughed for his sake, something she’d never done. Giving away another piece of herself just to have someone else.”

A philosophical question: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? And if a woman who’s wholly alone occasionally talks to a pot plant, is she certifiable? I think that it is perfectly normal to talk to oneself occasionally. It’s not as though I’m expecting a reply. I’m fully aware that Polly is a houseplant.

When the silence and the aloneness press down and around me, crushing me, carving through me like ice, I need to speak aloud sometimes, if only for proof of life.

These days, loneliness is the new cancer—a shameful, embarrassing thing, brought upon yourself in some obscure way. A fearful, incurable thing, so horrifying that you dare not mention it; other people don’t want to hear the word spoken aloud for fear that they might too be afflicted, or that it might tempt fate into visiting a similar horror upon them.

People don’t like these facts, but I can’t help that. If someone asks you how you are, you are meant to say FINE. You are not meant to say that you cried yourself to sleep last night because you hadn’t spoken to another person for two consecutive days. FINE is what you say.

“She wanted to bottle how safe she felt in this moment, so she could drink of it later when loneliness and fear left her parched.”

“What good did it do to light the world on fire if she had to watch the glow alone?”

“Then he left her there, standing alone, surrounded by word ghosts; things she could have said.”

“He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.”

Of all the needs (there are none imaginary) a lonely child has, the one that must be satisfied, if there is going to be hope and a hope of wholeness, is the unshaking need for an unshakable God. My pretty Black brother was my Kingdom Come.

“For you, in my respect, are all the world. Then how can it be said I am alone When all the world is here to look on me?”

“A guy on a ranch don’t never listen nor he don’t ast no questions.”

“I seen the guys that go around on the ranches alone. That ain’t no good. They don’t have no fun. After a long time they get mean. They get wantin’ to fight all the time.”

“Loneliness will sit over our roofs with brooding wings.”

“His wealth is of no use to him. He don’t do any good with it. . . . I am sorry for him; I couldn’t be angry with him if I tried. Who suffers by his ill whims! Himself, always.”

“I’m afraid that some times you’ll play lonely games too. Games you can’t win ‘cause you’ll play against you.”

“And when you’re alone, there’s a very good chance you’ll meet things that scare you right out of your pants. There are some, down the road between hither and yon, that can scare you so much you won’t want to go on.”

“All Alone! Whether you like it or not, Alone will be something you’ll be quite a lot.”

“When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person’s body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.”

“To-morrow I will not tremble,” thought he; “I will enjoy all my splendor, and I shall hear the story of Humpty Dumpty again, and perhaps Ivede-Avede.” And the tree remained quiet and thoughtful all night. In the morning the servants and the housemaid came in. “Now,” thought the fir, “all my splendor is going to begin again.” But they dragged him out of the room and up stairs to the garret, and threw him on the floor, in a dark corner, where no daylight shone, and there they left him.

So the tree was completely hidden from sight as if it had never existed. “It is winter now,” thought the tree, “the ground is hard and covered with snow, so that people cannot plant me. I shall be sheltered here, I dare say, until spring comes. How thoughtful and kind everybody is to me! Still I wish this place were not so dark, as well as lonely, with not even a little hare to look at. How pleasant it was out in the forest while the snow lay on the ground, when the hare would run by, yes, and jump over me too, although I did not like it then. Oh! it is terrible lonely here.”

“We live as we dream--alone....”

“But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself and, by heavens I tell you, it had gone mad.”

“I couldn’t have felt more of lonely desolation somehow, had I been robbed of a belief or had missed my destiny in life...”

“I felt very lonely when they were all there.”

“It was long past midnight when at last Marguerite retired to rest. As she had feared, sleep sedulously avoided her eyes. Her thoughts were of the blackest during these long, weary hours, whilst that incessant storm raged which was keeping her away from Percy.”

The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends, and guarded him.

“How can I live without thee, how forgoe Thy sweet Converse and Love so dearly joyn’d?”

Solitude is a sad thing, with no heart to which to confide your griefs.

“At night, when I am alone, I call for you, and whenever my ache seems to be the greatest, you still seem to find a way to return to me.”

“And Max, the king of all wild things, was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.”

“I never realized how utterly silent Mars is. It’s a desert world with practically no atmosphere to convey sound. I could hear my own heartbeat.”

“Mars is a barren wasteland and I am completely alone here. I already knew that, of course. But there’s a difference between knowing it and really experiencing it.”

“This was an insane plan and somehow it worked! I’m going to be talking to someone again. I spent three months as the loneliest man in history and it’s finally over.”

“Had I one friend, —or were it my worst enemy! —to whom, when sickened with the praises of all other men, I could daily betake myself, and be known as the vilest of all sinners, methinks my soul might keep itself alive thereby. Even thus much of truth would save me! But now, it is all falsehood! —all emptiness! —all death!”

“I don’t know what the hell I’m workin’ for. Sometimes I sit in my apartment—all alone. And I think of the rent I’m paying. And it’s crazy. But then, it’s what I always wanted. My own apartment, a car, plenty of women, and still, goddamnit, I’m lonely.”

“I knew medicine only by its absence—specifically, the absence of a father growing up, one who went to work before dawn and returned in the dark to a plate of reheated dinner.”

“I’m left with a loneliness so overpowering it threatens to seep from my eyes. I have no one. Unfortunately, that’s not fantasy. That’s all-natural, 100 percent organic, unprocessed, reality.”

“Men subjected to dehumanizing treatment experience profound wretchedness and loneliness and find that hope is almost impossible to retain.”

If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.

“Loneliness is a sign you are in desperate need of yourself.”

“It wasn’t just that she missed her friends; she was starting to wonder if she needed them around to feel like she existed at all.”

“Oh, how hard it is to be the only one who knows the truth!”

“Yet even in the loneliness of the canyon I knew there were others like me who had brothers they did not understand but wanted to help. We are probably those referred to as “our brothers’ keepers,” possessed of one of the oldest and possibly one of the most futile and certainly one of the most haunting of instincts. It will not let us go.”

“And Edmund for the first time in this story felt sorry for someone besides himself. It seemed so pitiful to think of those little stone figures sitting there all the silent days and all the dark nights, year after year, till the moss grew on them and at last even their faces crumbled away.”

“I close my eyes, this is what I’ve been dreading. As we leave the last stop, I am the only person sitting alone.”

“We fall into clans: Jocks, Country Clubbers, Idiot Savants, Cheerleaders, Human Waste, Eurotrash, Future Fascists of America, Big Hair Chix, the Marthas, Suffering Artists, Thespians, Goths, Shredders. I am clanless.”

“You don’t have to teach me to write,” said Zero. “Just to read. I don’t have anybody to write to.” “Sorry,” Stanley said again. His muscles and hands weren’t the only parts of his body that had toughened over the past several weeks. His heart had hardened as well.

“Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!”

“I take it back, Woodrow,” Augustus said. “I have no doubt you’ll miss me. You’ll probably die of boredom this winter and I’ll never get to Clara’s orchard

“I stand in front of the mirror and study my face.…It is the face of a sad, lonely girl something bad has happened to. I wonder if my face will ever look the same again, or if I’ll always see it in my reflection - Finch, Eleanor, loss, heartache, guilt, death.”

“She was scraping at the mud on her bare legs. ‘I just wanted to find you, so you wouldn’t be so lonesome.’ She hung her head. ‘But I got too scared.‘”

“She had tricked him. She had made him leave his old self behind and come into her world, and then before he was really at home in it but too late to go back, she had left him stranded there – like an astronaut wandering about on the moon. Alone.”

“When we narrow our focus, the problem seems everything. We forget when we were lonely, dreaming of a partner. We forget first beholding the beauty of another. We forget the comfort of first being seen and held and heard. When our view shuts down, we’re up in the night annoyed by the way our lover pulls the covers or leaves the dishes in the sink without soaking them first.”

“When we hesitate in being direct, we unknowingly slip something on, some added layer of protection that keeps us from feeling the world, and often that thin covering is the beginning of a loneliness which, if not put down, diminishes our chances of joy.”

“‘If only, if only,‘” the woodpecker sighs, ‘The bark on the tree was just a little bit softer.’ While the wolf waits below, hungry and lonely, he cries to the moo-oo-oon, ‘If only, if only.‘”

“...I realized that I knew less about loneliness than I had thought - and much less than I would know when he went away.”

“With nothing left, she would ... cling to that which had robbed her, as people will. ”

“At last they could pity Miss Emily. Being left alone, and a pauper, she had become humanized. ”

“Yet, in reason, no man should possess him with any appearance of fear, lest he, by showing it, should dishearten his army.”

“She always camouflaged herself as a crowd. I’ve never been lonely, she said, but sometimes it’s hard to think above the noise.”

“It’s a strange thing, becoming an orphan at sixteen. To lose your family long before you’ve had time to create your own to replace it. It’s a very specific sort of loneliness.”

“I thought about Hailsham closing, and how it was like someone coming along with a pair of shears and snipping the balloon strings just where they entwined above the man’s fist. Once that happened, there’d be no real sense in which those balloons belonged with each other any more.”

“The town looked lonely, and it made me sad. Somehow the magic was gone, without her.”

“‘You’re a sad little hermit, and it creeps me out. So get dressed. We’re going bowling.’”

“He looked at Kaz Brekker, a boy whose only cause was himself. Still, he was a survivor, and his own kind of soldier.”

“I know myself . . . but that is all.”

“Look deeply into your disappointments, examine your heartache, interrogate your longing, probe your loneliness, meditate honestly on the elements of love of which you are still ignorant, and you will discover that the void within you is already filled with the desire for fulfillment. Your yearning itself is an internal guidance system that is moving you to become a lover.”

“A raindrop just splashed on my forehead and it was like a tear from heaven. Are the clouds and the skies really weeping over me? Am I really alone in the whole wide gray world?”

“It’s terrible not to have a friend. I’m so lonely and so alone. I think it’s worse on weekends than during the week, but I don’t know. It’s pretty bad all the time.”

“His youth seemed never so vanished as now in the contrast between the utter loneliness of this visit and that riotous, joyful party of four years before.”

“Great marriages cannot be constructed by individuals who are terrified by their basic aloneness, as so commonly is the case, and seek a merging in marriage. Genuine love not only respects the individuality of the other but actually seeks to cultivate it, even at the risk of separation or loss.”

My despair is less despair than boredom and loneliness.

“Each of us is now electronically connected to the globe, and yet we feel utterly alone.”

“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.”

“He suffered ever the same unceasing agonies and in his loneliness pondered always on the same insoluble question: ‘What is this? Can it be that it is Death?’ And the inner voice answered: ‘Yes, it is Death.‘”

“It was that nigh that I discovered that most things that you consider evil or wicked are simply lonely, and lacking in the social niceties.”

“But she wasn’t around, and that’s the thing when your parents die, you feel like instead of going in to every fight with backup, you are going into every fight alone.”

“I shut myself in because I’m lonely. Because I don’t want to face any more loneliness.”

″ ‘Why can’t I have someone to talk to?’ I said. The stars said nothing, but I pretended to ignore the rudeness. ‘The Shaper has people to talk to,’ I said. I wrung my fingers. ‘Hrothgar has people to talk to.’ ”

“Loneliness, far from being a rare and curious circumstance, is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of man.”

“My momma and poppa appeared from the shadows. They flew to me and wrapped their arms around me and cooled my face with their ghost tears.”

“What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?”

“I miss you this morning just as I have missed you every day for the last nine years. I’m tired of being alone.”

“The recovery room turned silent; everyone stared. Bruno groaned and turned toward the wall. That night I put him to bed. Bruno, I said. So sorry, he said. So selfish. I sighed and turned to go. Stay with me! he cried.”

“I left the library. Crossing the street, I was hit head-on by a brutal loneliness. I felt dark and hollow. Abandoned, unnoticed, forgotten. I stood on the sidewalk a nothing, a gathering of dust.”

“In my loneliness it comforts me to think that the world’s doors, however closed, are never truly locked to me.”

“She asked me to make a copy of her key. I was happy for her. That she wouldn’t be alone anymore. It’s not that I felt sorry for myself. And yet. I made two copies. One I gave to her, and one I kept. For a long time I carried it in my pocket. To pretend.”

“Many people suffer because of the false supposition on which they have based their lives. That supposition is that there should be no fear or loneliness, no confusion or doubt. But these sufferings can only be dealt with creatively when they are understood as wounds integral to our human condition. ”

“When someone comes with his loneliness to the minister, he can only expect that his loneliness will be understood and felt, so that he no longer has to run away from it but can accept it as an expression of his basic human condition.”

“I half expected someone to be home. As far as I knew, Isaac had lived by himself. But you never know.”

“Who can listen to a story of loneliness and despair without taking the risk of experiencing similar pains in his own heart and even losing his precious peace of mind?”

“Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.”

“So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale Filled all the desert with inviolable voice And still she cried, and still the world pursues, “Jug Jug” to dirty ears.”

“Back then, in those first days, I was so alone that every day was like eating my own heart.”

“It is hard,--hard to work always--always alone with never a friend you can have in honour, and the love that is offered means the streets, the boulevard--when passion is dead. I know it,--we know it,--we others who have nothing,--have no one, and who give ourselves, unquestioning--heart and soul, knowing the end.”

“I drink out of desperation. Life is too dreary to endure. The misery, loneliness, crampedness - they’re heartbreaking.”

“D is for Substance D. ‘D’ is dumbness, and despair, desertion-desertion of you from your friends, your friends from you, everyone from everyone. Isolation and loneliness... and hating and suspecting each other, ‘D’ is finally death. Slow death from the head down. Well... that’s it.”

“No matter how far you are separated from other people if you have an idea of time why then you are in the same world with them you are part of them but if you lose time the others go ahead of you and you are left alone hanging in air lost to everything forever.”

“He was so cut off from them that even if they were standing beside his bed they would be as distant as if they were ten thousand miles away.”

“Love ends their long loneliness. Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship.”

“If we don’t have each other, we go crazy with loneliness. When we do, we go crazy with togetherness.”

“You sense my loneliness, (...) my bitterness at being shut out of life. My bitterness that I’m evil, that I don’t deserve to be loved and yet I need love hungrily. My horror that I can never reveal myself to mortals.”

“Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow.”

“I came to the mound where my ancestors had sometimes camped in the summer. I thought of them and of the happy times spent in my house on the headland, of my canoe lying unfinished beside the trail. I thought of many things, but stronger was the wish to be where people lived, to hear their voices and their laughter.”

“The thought of being alone on the island while so many suns rose and went slowly back into the sea filled my heart with loneliness. I had not felt so lonely before because I was sure that the ship would return as Matasaip had said it would. Now my hopes were dead. Now I was really alone. I could not eat much, nor could I sleep without dreaming terrible dreams.”

Equating willfulness with being special, the child then confronts other themes of life such as eternity and loneliness. The cat declares that he is immortal. The girl concludes that they are both willful. As the girl identifies with the cat they discuss some of life’s themes. Loneliness is seen in the mailman and dog. The girl attempts to show empathy, but the cat will have none of that. He does not show compassion and is irritated that the girl will not follow his lead in being pitiless.

“All the coldness and darkness and infinite loneliness of the world filled David’s mind until it seemed ready to burst.”

“Even if the world is cruel, even if all I have is loneliness, I’ll still live with everything I’ve got. Even if this emotion is all I have, I’ll keep struggling.”

“There’s a sorrow and pain in everyone’s life, but every now and then there’s a ray of light that melts the loneliness in your heart and brings comfort like hot soup and a soft bed.”

“I’m lonelier and wiser now, and I know it isn’t cruelty or shame that characterizes the human race. It’s forgiveness that makes us what we are.”

“The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!”

“The flickering pine knot in the corner fireplace held blue flames. They had no warmth. There was loneliness and emptiness inside. When Mammy Sally came, the warmth would spark out in the fire, and the shadows would bring sleep.”

″‘A good resistance fighter is lonely,’ he’d once heard his father say. ‘He’s alone with his tasks and his secrets.‘”

“It is exceptionally lonely, being Draco Malfoy. I will always be suspected. There is no escaping the past.”

“Night loneliness was always bad when the younger children had gone to bed, or when the father was not in the cabin. ‘Night loneliness is part fearing,’ the boy’s mother had once said to him.”

“Perhaps she too felt the loneliness that came with the wind as it passed the cabin outside, and the closeness of the world whose farthest border in the night was the place where the lamp light ended, at the edge of the cabin walls.”

Shane is a runaway. A homeless boy living on the streets. One night he finds a kitten and is determined to make it his own and take it home. But will he and Cat be able to make their way safely through the night?

“The boy dreamed of the stalk land covered by the Lords mighty flood. ‘Cabins built on posts would just float like boats, perch and all,’ he assured himself in a whisper. If they floated from the far ends of the land and all came together, that would be a town, and he wouldn’t be lonely anymore...”

“Words are loneliness.”

“An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.”

“It must, thought he, be true that blood is ultimately thicker than water. He guessed that these two stubborn and arrogant people were both more lonely than he could imagine, and at the bottom of their hearts pleased to find themselves with kith and kin, no matter whom.”

“The sunrise brought a wild, free sadness; the sunset, a lonely yet a comforting one. He indulged his agreeable melancholy until the earth under him turned from gray to lavender and then to the color dried corn husks.”

“It got so lonely for poor Jancsi, he would have given ten horses for a brother. He had it all figured out- he would give a donkey even for a sister. Not horses, just a donkey.”

“He had no brothers or sisters, and he was very sad and lonely at home.”

“Lightness, like anything inherited at great cost, was a lonely gift.”

“I wish Pooh were here. It’s so much more friendly with two.”

It rained and it rained and it rained. Piglet told himself that never in all his life, and he was goodness knows how old—three, was it, or four?—never had he seen so much rain. Days and days and days. “If only,” he thought, as he looked out of the window, “I had been in Pooh’s house, or Christopher Robin’s house, or Rabbit’s house when it began to rain, then I should have had Company all this time, instead of being here all alone, with nothing to do except wonder when it will stop.” And he imagined himself with Pooh, saying, “Did you ever see such rain, Pooh?” and Pooh saying, “Isn’t it awful, Piglet?” and Piglet saying, “I wonder how it is over Christopher Robin’s way” and Pooh saying, “I should think poor old Rabbit is about flooded out by this time.” It would have been jolly to talk like this, and really, it wasn’t much good having anything exciting like floods, if you couldn’t share them with somebody.

Jimmy felt obscurely the lack of an audience: the wit was flashing.

He had neither companions nor friends, church nor creed.

Now that she was gone he understood how lonely her life must have been, sitting night after night alone in that room. His life would be lonely too until he, too, died, ceased to exist, became a memory—if anyone remembered him.

“My dear, I’m going to have a pretty lonely walk between this and Kingdom Come. Won’t you give me one kiss? It’ll be something to keep off the darkness now and then.”

“I am lonely to-night without Mark. That’s funny, isn’t it?”

“It was a very lonesome place. I’m sure I could never have lived there if I hadn’t had an imagination.”

Evidently she did not like talking about her experiences in a world that had not wanted her.

Jurgis sat gazing about the room for an hour or two; he was in hopes that some one of the family would come, but in this he was disappointed.

My heart was a habitation large enough for many guests, but lonely and chill, and without a household fire.

“He looked so wistful as he went away, hearing the frolic and evidently having none of his own.”

The links that united her to the rest of human kind—links of flowers, or silk, or gold, or whatever the material—had all been broken. Here was the iron link of mutual crime, which neither he nor she could break.

He needed to bask himself in that smile, he said, in order that the chill of so many lonely hours among his books might be taken off the scholar’s heart.

“I am lonely, and perhaps if Teddy had tried again, I might have said ‘Yes’, not because I love him any more, but because I care more to be loved than when he went away.”

“So kind, so good, so patient with me always, my dear old Fritz. I didn’t value him half enough when I had him, but now how I should love to see him, for everyone seems going away from me, and I’m all alone.”

“An old maid, that’s what I’m to be. A literary spinster, with a pen for a spouse, a family of stories for children, and twenty years hence a morsel of fame, perhaps, when, like poor Johnson, I’m old and can’t enjoy it, solitary, and can’t share it, independent, and don’t need it.”

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!

“It is strange,” I began, in the interval of swallowing one cup of tea and receiving another—“it is strange how custom can mould our tastes and ideas: many could not imagine the existence of happiness in a life of such complete exile from the world as you spend, Mr. Heathcliff; yet, I’ll venture to say, that, surrounded by your family, and with your amiable lady as the presiding genius over your home and heart—”

I drew away from the window, and sat down in my one chair by the bedside, feeling it very sorrowful and strange that this first night of my bright fortunes should be the loneliest I had ever known.

“I’ve fought through a bitter life since I last heard your voice;”

Business had taken Herbert on a journey to Marseilles. I was alone, and had a dull sense of being alone. Dispirited and anxious, long hoping that to-morrow or next week would clear my way, and long disappointed, I sadly missed the cheerful face and ready response of my friend.

As nobody could understand him, nobody, not even his sister, thought that he could understand them, so he had to be content to hear his sister’s sighs and appeals to the saints as she moved about his room. It was only later, when she had become a little more used to everything—there was, of course, no question of her ever becoming fully used to the situation—that Gregor would sometimes catch a friendly comment, or at least a comment that could be construed as friendly. “He’s enjoyed his dinner today”, she might say when he had diligently cleared away all the food left for him, or if he left most of it, which slowly became more and more frequent, she would often say, sadly, “now everything’s just been left there again”.

His mother was not used to the sight of Gregor, he might have made her ill, so Gregor hurried backwards to the far end of the couch.

“How can I ever be anything but sick, at this life?”

“No man’s cub can run with the people of the jungle,”

“I went away, and the gray apes came down from the trees and had pity on me. No one else cared.”

She was the loveliest thing I had ever seen in my life.

“Well, when one has no one, nowhere else one can go! For every man must have somewhere to go. Since there are times when one absolutely must go somewhere!

“No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing.”