The mood I’ve been living with for a long time. The mood that many may deny having it, but they do have it. The feeling that seems to be everlasting…

John Cheever (1912-82) :
A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey’s gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind.

Mother Teresa (1910-97) :
When Christ said: ‘I was hungry and you fed me,’ he didn’t mean only the hunger for bread and for food; he also meant the hunger to be loved.  Jesus himself experienced this loneliness.  He came amongst his own and his own received him not, and it hurt him then and it has kept on hurting him.  The same hunger, the same loneliness, the same having no one to be accepted by and to be loved and wanted by.  Every human being in that case resembles Christ in his loneliness; and that is the hardest part, that’s real hunger.