Quotes About Solitude

Way too late in life, Els learned that the time to concentrate yourself was right before sunrise.

For the first time, she realizes that being alone is a contradiction in terms. Even in a body's most private moments, something else joins in.

The solitary act of sitting over the page and waiting for her hand to move may be as close as she'll ever get to the enlightenment of plants.

She has lived far from commerce for decades, and yet her name is a hot commodity, bought and sold endlessly as she sits in her cabin reading Thoreau. She hopes the buyers aren't paying much. No: she hopes they're being extorted.

You're the last bearable thing left to me, aside from death.

They used to be everywhere, Dad. Before we got to them. We took over everything! We deserve to be alone.

For the first time, she realizes that being alone is a contradiction in terms.

There's a whole lot of comfort in saying nothing.

What else is there to say, to a bear? "Apologize! I tell him, people very stupid. They forget everything—where they come from, where they go. I say: Don't worry. Human being leaving this world, very soon. Then the bear get top bunk to himself again.

Blue moon ... You saw me standing alone

In solitude, at last, we're able to let God define us the way we are always supposed to be defined—by relationship: the I-thou relationship, in relation to a Presence that demands nothing of us but presence itself. Not performance but presence

I began to develop a firm conviction that most efforts to teach people things were wasted. All they needed was to go off some place quiet and read.

At three in the morning Main Street was so quiet that Dallas could hear the street light change from red to green a block away. There was nothing sadder and lonelier in the world, he decided, especially when you were all alone when it happened.

I began to develop a firm conviction that most efforts to teach people things were wasted. All they needed was to go off some place quiet and read. Around

most people are trapped in a solitary existence, a life circumscribed by want and failures of imagination, limitations from which readers are exempt.

Everyone needs a place. It shouldn't be inside of someone else.

In all my life— though surrounded by many people— I had not had a single satisfying, sustained relationship with another human being and, not having had any, I did not miss it. I made no demands whatever upon others.

Wasn't I right? Isn't it nice here?" Miranda thought fast. "Well…there's atmosphere, that's for sure." "I could never come here all by myself. But when Roo's mad or sad or worried about something, this is where she always runs away to." "Yeah." Parker sighed. "Too bad she always runs back home again.

he lay down in the middle of the field in the sun on his back and closed his eyes, and felt wind, sun, the ground below him...The sun confused him, with its warmth, the brightness. He dozed throughout the rest of the afternoon. His life meant something. he was his own man, belonged to no one.

Which man among us is not, most of the time, possessed of the desire to curl himself into a foetal ball?

He had been lonely even in his wife's arms, lonely in crowds, lonely at meetings, lonely throwing tennis balls for his dog, lonely playing Operation with his kids. He had been lonely during commuter conversations, lonely during late-night heart-to-hearts with old fraternity brothers. His dad, living alone up in New Hampshire, made Hood lonely. The severe landscapes of November made him lonely.

He (Nixon) needed someone with him so he could be alone.

I want some time without you organic life forms.

you… even in the midst of thousands, you. Are. Still. Alone.