“It is sad to love and be unloved, but sadder still to be unable to love.”
― Maurice Maeterlinck, Maurice Maeterlinck - Wisdom and Destiny, & The Wrack of the Storm

“But the lucidity of her old age allowed her to see, and she said so many times, that the cries of children in their mothers' wombs are not announcements of ventriloquism or a faculty for prophecy but an unmistakable sign of an incapacity for love.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez , One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Molly wanted to hug the young girl close, stroke her black hair and tell her that loneliness, while unpleasant, was endurable. Not once, though, did she consider telling the girl that she was wrong for that reassurance would be a lie, wouldn’t it be? She was, after all, her, and in the intervening four decades, the girl’s prescience had been proven right. Loneliness had indeed been the condition—would always be the condition—of Molly’s life, of being misunderstood and neglected by others, even amidst a crowd and friends and, for a few years, a husband.”
― Ray Smith, The Magnolia That Bloomed Unseen