Singlehood Quotes

“I'm happy as I am, and love my liberty too well to be in a hurry to give it up for any mortal man.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Good Wives

“By trying to grab fulfillment everywhere, we find it nowhere.”
― Elisabeth Elliot, Passion and Purity

“Being single isn't a terminal disease."
"Try telling that to my mother.”
― Alexandra Potter, Do You Come Here Often?

“You should have married a nice girl in her twenties so you can have dozens of babies,'Jane Louise said. 'Instead of the president of the Withered Crone Society.”
― Laurie Colwin, A Big Storm Knocked It Over

“Being unmarried in a man’s world was such a hassle that anything had to be better. Marriage was better. But not much. Damned clever, I thought, how men had made life so intolerable for single women that most would gladly embrace even bad marriages instead.”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Flying

“Many are busy looking for a life partner and they lose touch of their life's purpose.”
― Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

“The permanence of my impermanence. I stand in possession of it. I stand before him at the entrance to a subway station, in possession of nothing but myself. Myself is everything, I want to tell him. But to him it is nothing, because that's how he feels about himself right now. He is alone, and so he is nothing. How do I explain to him that what applies to him does not apply to me? His context is not my context. How do you blow up the bus you've been forced to ride your entire life? It wasn't your fault there were no other means of transportation available.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“Girl, where you at," he texts me whenever he likes. And sometimes I am at work and sometimes I am walking out of yoga class and sometimes I am on a date and sometimes I am at a museum feeling nostalgic for my failed past as an artist and sometimes I am with a friend eating a big, delicious, expensive dinner and sometimes I am walking on the waterfront ducking European tourists asking directions and sometimes I am sitting on a park bench in the sunshine reading the paper and sometimes I am at home and it is a Sunday night and I am drinking a bottle of wine by myself, alone but not lonely, but definitely alone. And wherever I am, I text him back right away. Because I want him to know. Where I am at.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“I did not choose solitude. Who would? It came on me like a kind of vocation, demanding an effort that married women can’t picture. Sometimes, even now, I look on the married girls the way a wild dog might look through the window at tame ones, envying the regularity of their lives but also despising the low pleasure they get from the master’s touch.”
― Louise Erdrich

“Look at her,” he said to himself. “Holding hands! She’s probably already camped in the woods with him! Exchanged supernatural stories. Dinner dates. Shared food! Sex in the car! Concerts! I can never reach a woman like that. She’s too experienced. What new could we do? Even if we were right for each other, I’d always feel small.” Once lonely, it seemed the evolution of lonely was getting lonelier, as if sad heads boarded a lifeboat in an ocean that naturally pulled one farther and farther apart from the coast of love.

Andrei still hoped though. For that coast. That was the thing with this sailor—nothing was waiting for him, but maybe there was. Every time he met someone, his eyes were slightly far away, as if asking in his head: “It’s nice to meet you, but are you there? Did you suffer and reach that place yet? You know that place. Those in that place know that place. After Tolstoy? After a thousand movies? Will you say an honest sentence?” Oh, did he beg, secretly, for strangers to meet him on that lonely floor of life—where life, still hard, was earned, and true, and golden. The place, he cried, we recognize in media, binging in our beds, but don’t dare reach on sidewalks.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, A Happy Ghost