Quotes About Solitude

I would like to spend the rest of my days in a place so silent—and working at a pace so slow—that I would be able to hear myself living.

Take me someplace where we can be silent together." ? Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

So sadness is a place? Sometimes people live there for years

I climbed the stairs to my apartment, lay down in my new bed and turned off the light. I waited to start crying or worrying

Once I got the hang of it, I found that eating alone by the window in a quiet restaurant is one of life's greatest secret pleasures.

my fourth day in Rome, my shadow has still not darkened the door way of a church or a museum..

I do not know of any creative soul who does not dream of calm, cool, grass-growing days in which to work without interruption

Able to exist without regular doses of romance or flattery from my solitary farmer of a father. Able to cheerfully plant gardens of daisies among the inexplicable stone walls of silence that my dad sometimes builds up around himself.

Even if you have only fifteen minutes a day in a stairwell alone with your creativity, take it. Go hide in that stairwell and make out with your art! (You can get a lot of making out done in fifteen minutes, as any furtive teenager can tell you.)

I love my friends and family, but I also love it when they can't find me and I can spend all day reading or walking alone, in silence, eight thousand miles away from everyone. All alone and unreachable in a foreign country is one of my favorite possible things to be.

I am alone, I am all alone, I am completely alone. Grasping this reality, I let go of my bag, drop to my knees and press my forehead against the floor. There, I offer up to the universe a fervent prayer of thanks.

as a friend's grandfather once put it, "Sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone.

So be lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience.

I would like never to travel again. I would like to spend the rest of my days in a place so silent—and working at a pace so slow—that I would be able to hear myself living.

It was during the war, too, that I learned how to be comfortable sitting alone in a bar or restaurant. For many women, this is a strangely difficult thing to do, but eventually I mastered it. (The trick is to bring a book or newspaper, to ask for the best table nearest to the window, and to order your drink just as soon as you sit down.) Once I got the hang of it, I found that eating alone by the window in a quiet restaurant is one of life's greatest secret pleasures.

Alma sat down and waited. She thought of the story the Reverend Welles had told her of Taroa, the original god of the Tahitians. Taroa, the creator. Taroa, born in a seashell. Taroa lay silently for countless ages as the only thing living in the universe. The world was so empty that when he called out across the darkness, there was not even an echo. He nearly died of loneliness. Out of that inestimable solitude and emptiness, Taroa brought forth our world.

The very old and the very young have something in common that makes it right that they should be left alone together. Dawn and sunset see stars shining in a blue sky; but morning and midday and afternoon do not, poor things.

this blessing of loneliness was not really loneliness. Real loneliness was something unendurable. What one wanted when exhausted by the noise and impact of physical bodies was not no people but disembodied people; all those denizens of beloved books who could be taken to one's heart and put away again, in silence, and with no hurt feelings.

how much he loved being alone except when he didn't, except when it got to be too much?

I have no particular plan in life - and that's something I rather like. Most things that people do seem to me to be rather dull and silly. In my ideal life I'd be left alone to read

I would not allow anyone into the center of myself; I would make myself a place to go, deep inside, no matter what happened.

He was simply gone, and he took all our peace with him.

I preferred solitude anyway; it was the medium in which I had been raised, in which I swam comfortably.

Bucolic peace is not my ambience