loneliness

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock. "Now they are all on their knees," An elder said as we sat in a flock By the embers in hearth-side ease. We pictured the meek mild creatures where They dwelt in their strawy pen, Nor did it occur to one of us there To doubt they were kneeling then. So fair a fancy few would weave In these years! yet, I feel If someone said on Christmas Eve, "Come; see the oxen kneel, In the lonely barton by yonder coomb Our childhood used to know," I should go with him in the gloom, Hoping it might be so.

So lonely 't was, that God himself Scarce seemed there to be.

In misery's darkest cavern known, His useful care was ever nigh Where hopeless anguish pour'd his groan, And lonely want retir'd to die.

"I fly from pleasure," said the prince, "because pleasure has ceased to please; I am lonely because I am miserable, and am unwilling to cloud with my presence the happiness of others."

She used to love jokes, painful ones. She loved hurting people. She thought it would lessen the hurt and loneliness she felt, but it never did.

I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.

Beauty is ever to the lonely mind A shadow fleeting; she is never plain. She is a visitor who leaves behind The gift of grief, the souvenir of pain.

The more you stay in this kind of job, the more you realize that a public figure, a major public figure, is a lonely man.

Respect for sovereignity, for privacy, for total independence. Gentle alliances against loneliness, they were, cool rational love-affairs without the love.

The writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated loneliness, and a sense of local and global distress.