Quotes About Solitude

This forest silence improves anyone.

I hope later she will see and feel a thing about these prairies I have given up talking to others about; a thing that exists here because everything else does not and can be noticed because other things are absent.

I'm happy to be riding back into this country. It is a kind of nowhere, famous for nothing at all and has an appeal because of just that.

But in the secondary America we've been through, of back roads, and Chinaman's ditches, and Appaloosa horses, and sweeping mountain ranges, and meditative thoughts, and kids with pinecones and bumblebees and open sky above us mile after mile after mile, all through that, what was real, what was around us dominated. And so there wasn't much feeling of loneliness.

Or winters when the sloughs were frozen over and dead and i could walk across the ice and snow between the dead cattails and see nothing but grey skies and dead things and cold

I always feel like I'm in church when I do this…The

The world seems almost physically wider when up to just now the right-hand side was always obscured by the proximity of someone else; and all of a sudden you stand there, astonished, in a wide semi-circle: alone.

That summer we had been absolutely alone, together, even when people were around, the only inhabitants of the kind of floating island or magic carpet which being in love is.

I went back to my own innocent little chores and sat in my office as the fall drew imperceptibly on and the earth leaned on its axis and shouldered the spot I occupied a little out of the direct, billowing, crystalline, consuming blaze of the enormous sun.

Jack Burden could read those words, but how could he be expected to understand them? They could only be words to him, for to him the world then was simply an accumulation of items, odds and ends of things like the broken and misused and dust-shrouded things gathered in a garret. Or it was a flux of things before his eyes (or behind his eyes) and one thing had nothing to do, in the end, with anything else.

They say this is the richest era of human existence; but I think a man can be richer in knowing every atom of a single golden island in a blue sea than by spending his days striding among all the worlds.

my mom felt more and more alone with no one to turn to.

That time alone with myself, having nothing to do, was priceless.

Very few people have the luxury of at least one year to sit and just think and be with yourself.

I don't know, I don't want to talk as much. (...) It's nicer to think dear, pretty thoughts and keep them in one's heart, like treasures. I don't like to have them laughed at or wondered over.

I've come home in love with loneliness

Even when I'm alone I have real good company — dreams and imaginations and pretendings. I like to be alone now and then, just to think over things and taste them. But I love friendships — and nice, jolly little times with people.

The woods are never solitary--they are full of whispering, beckoning, friendly life. But the sea is a mighty soul, forever moaning of some great, unshareable sorrow, which shuts it up into itself for all eternity.

You are the only person who loves me in the world, said Elizabeth. When you talk to me I smell violets.

In daylight I belong to the world . . . in the night to sleep and eternity. But in the dusk I'm free from both and belong only to myself . . . and you

She had dreamed some brilliant dreams during the past winter and now they lay in the dust around her. In her present mood of self-disgust, she could not immediately begin dreaming again. And she discovered that, while solitude with dreams is glorious, solitude without them has few charms.

She had never before minded being alone. Now she dreaded it. When she was alone now she felt so dreadfully alone.

She wanted to be alone - to think things out - to adjust herself, if it were possible, to the new world in which she seemed to have been transplanted with a suddenness and completeness that left her half bewildered to her own identity.

But she had long ago learned that when she wandered into the realm of fancy she must go alone. The way to it was by an enchanted path where not even her dearest might follow her.