"Just a few years ago I realized friendship is not a remedy for loneliness. Loneliness is a part of our experience. And if we're looking for relief from loneliness in friendship, we're only going to frustrate that friendship -- that friendship, camaraderie, intimacy, all those things and loneliness live together in the same experience." Rich Mullins.

  "The man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround himself with people. But the man who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at peace with his own loneliness, and to prefer its reality to the illusion of merely natural companionship, comes to know the invisible companionship of God." Thomas Merton.