Quotes About Solitude

It was pleasant to take a hot drink up to her room and have it beside her as she sat in her silent room reading in the empty house in the afternoons. The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.

Back in the cave

Privacy is as necessary as company; you can drive a man crazy by depriving him of either.

There is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized or even cured. The only solution known to science is to provide the patient with an isolation room, where he can endure the acute stages in private and where food can be poked in to him with a stick.

He did not expect reasonable conduct from human beings; he considered most people fit candidates for protective restraint and wet packs. He simply wished heartily that they would leave him alone!—all but the few he chose for playmates. He was firmly convinced that, left to himself, he would have long since achieved nirvana . . . dived into his own belly button and disappeared from view, like those Hindu jokers. Why couldn't they leave a man alone?

I wish we had somebody here who never would be missed. Regrettably we are all friends.

I know where I came from—but where did all you zombies come from? I felt a headache coming on, but a headache powder is one thing I do not take. I did once—and you all went away. So I crawled into bed and whistled out the light. You aren't really there at all. There isn't anybody but me—Jane—here alone in the dark. I miss you dreadfully!

You really aren't here at all. There isn't anybody but me. Jane, here alone in the dark, I miss you dreadfully!

Even with Las Vegas giddy around me I felt as alone as Robinson Crusoe.

It sounds ironic to say that the cure for loneliness is aloneness. I don't mean that you should just make yourself more miserable; I am prescribing instead a form of solitude that is meditative and open to your inner self.

The longer one is alone, the easier to hear the song of the earth.

I ate in the silence and drank my coffee and looked occasionally at Susan's picture on my desk. Let us be true to one another, dear.

It's awful to be alone, Jesse." "If you can't be alone," Jesse said

One must have a mind of winter, I thought, to behold the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. - from The Snow Man, by Wallace Stevens

If you can't be alone," Jesse said, "you can't be with someone.

You hate people. Because, really, you're afraid of them, aren't you? Always have been, ever since you were a little tyke. Rather snuggle up in a chair under the lamp and read. You did it thirty years ago, and you're still doing it now. Hiding away under the covers of a book.

It is the fate of the genius to dwell alone.

The life of a painter demands solitude

Like a god going through his world, there stands One mountain for a moment in the dusk.

Generally thus much we may conclude of melancholy; that it is [2604] most pleasant at first, I say, mentis gratissimus error, [2605] a most delightsome humour, to be alone, dwell alone, walk alone, meditate, lie in bed whole days, dreaming awake as it were, and frame a thousand fantastical imaginations unto themselves.

That's what Archie did - built a house nobody could anticipate a need for, except himself, a house that was invisible to everyone else.

The room seemed to have lost a certain essence that he could not pin down. Then knew suddenly what it was. The room was—lonely. For the first time in his life, he knew what loneliness was like. Until that moment the word had been meaningless to him.

A left-behind look.

When Pike reached home, he stretched in the parking lot to cool, then peeled off his sweatshirt, deactivated the alarms, and let himself in. His condo was austere and functional with little in the way of decoration. Dining room set off the kitchen; couch, chair, and coffee table in the living room; a flat-screen television for sports and news. A black stone meditation fountain burbled in the corner. Pike found peace in the natural sound, as if he were alone in the forest. Pike