Quotes About Solitude

These Days I mainly just talk to Plants and Dogs

Great loss is felt by no one

He is at home with his solitude as the note reverberating inside a bell.

He heard a loon call, piercing and forlorn, and it poured into his spirit like cool water. It was a sad cry and he realized as he listened how barren the river had felt in the days without it. Why was a wail that seemed so lost and lonely so…what? Essential and lovely.

I'd say it was a relief to have at last nothing, nothing, but I was too hollow to register relief, too empty to carry it.

Jasper's weight on my leg an aching absence.

Also I wonder how Bangley is built inside and everyone like him. He is at home with his solitude as the note reverberating inside a bell. Prefers it. Will protect it to the death. Lives for protecting it the way a peregrine lives for killing other birds midflight. Does not want to communicate what the death and the beauty do to each other inside him.

Missing what most of the time? The babbling faceless agora, the fame, the parties, the pop of flash bulbs? The lovers, the gaiety, the champagne? The solitude carved out of celebrity, poring over charts by a single lamp on a wide desk in a venerable hotel? Room service, coffee before dawn? The company of one friend, two? The choice: All of it or not? Some or none? Now, not now, maybe later?

he thought he could sit on this deck and watch that stream for the rest of his life.

A fire was good company.

I lift my head from the pillow I see the frost the moon. Lowering my head I think of home.

Then it sits with you, the Pain puts its arm over your shoulders. It is your closest friend. Steadfast. And at night you can't bear to hear your own breath unaccompanied by another and underneath the big stillness like a score is the roaring of the cataract of everything being and being torn away. Then. The Pain is lying beside your side, close. Does not bother you with the sound even of breathing.

This is how I healed. Or didn't. One evening I took her down to the river. We turned off the highway and rattled slowly up the gravel road and into the heart of the canyon. The walls closed in above us, the high blue of the sky deeper, deep and dark like a river is deep. The highest rock at the rim was a strip of fire, holding the last long sun. The old gorge was a vessel and it was filling with shadow, slowly and with wind.

I would be moving in the cold of the settling evening, the few stars in the chasm overhead, the only way I could still myself at all: move.

There is a pain you can't think your way out of. You can't talk it away. If there were someone to talk to. You can walk. One foot the other foot. Breathe in breathe out. Drink from the stream. Piss. Eat the venison strips. Leave his venison in the trail for the coyotes the jays. And. You can't metabolize the loss. It is in the cells of your face, your chest, behind the eyes, in the twists of your gut. Muscle sinew bone. It is all of you.

The American appetite for loneliness impressed me, and there was something about this solitude that freed conversation. One night at a bar, I met a man, and within five minutes he explained that he had just been released from prison. Another drinker told me that his wife had passed away, and he had recently suffered a heart attack, and now he hoped that he would die within the year. I learned that there's no reliable small talk in America; at any moment a conversation can become personal.

I feel the same way about solitude as some people feel about the blessing of the church. It's the light of grace for me. I never close my door behind me without awareness that I'm carrying out an act of mercy toward myself.

One who wants fellowship without solitude plunges into the void of words and feelings, and one who seeks solitude without fellowship perishes in the abyss of vanity, self-infatuation, and despair."4

apart from the grey smudge of a tanker or freighter on the horizon, the sea was empty.

of isolation.

On reaching a certain place, he spent the night there because the sun had set. And taking one of the stones from that place, he put it under his head and lay down to sleep.

So Jacob was left all alone, and there a man wrestled with him until daybreak.

During that time, the prophet Ahijah the Shilonite met Jeroboam on the road as he was going out of Jerusalem. Now Ahijah had wrapped himself in a new cloak, and the two of them were alone in the open field.

And he looked around, and there by his head was a cake of bread baked over hot coals, and a jar of water. So he ate and drank and lay down again.