Somehow, through pain and fear and long loneliness, they had found their way home.

Was it the steaming jungle of the Carboniferous, the bleak shoreline over which the first amphibians must crawl to conquer the land-or, earlier still, the long loneliness before the coming of life?

Love ends their long loneliness.

It was a moment's break in a long loneliness.

But I fear the cold, and the wolf, and the long loneliness.

Was that all that was driving him on, his long sexual loneliness?

We need their love to survive, or we become empty air and die, as we slept in long terrible loneliness before they came.

His long loneliness cried out against this self-betrayal.

Life is a long loneliness in Sebastian Barry's "Boss Grady's Boys," but the speech of the lonely is lyrical and often amusing.

She knew that he read her soul as she had read his, felt the long loneliness, and the resignation deeper than despair and just as sorrowful.