Quotes About Solitude

A momentous but until then overlooked fact was making itself apparent: I had inadvertently brought myself with me to the island. It

It seemed an advantage to be travelling alone. Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by whom we are with, we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.

We need long train journeys on which we have no wireless signal

In reading, friendship is suddenly brought back to its original purity. There is no false amiability with books. If we spend the evening with these friends, it is because we genuinely want to.

One of the privileges of being on our own is therefore the sincere impression that we are really quite easy to live with

Being alone spares you from constant reminders of how difficult and strange you are. No one is there to hold a mirror up – record your antics and constantly make you accountable for them. If you're lucky, you will be able to tolerate and even like yourself.

A man can acquire anything in solitude except a character

prayer is when night descends over thought

There is an easy way to measure our inner levels of abjectness and friendliness to ourselves: we should examine how well we response to noise.

A momentus but until then overlooked fact was making its first appearance: that I had inadvertently brought myself with me to the island.

A momentous but until then overlooked fact was making its first appearance: that I had inadvertently brought myself with me to the island.

In another paradox that des Esseintes would have appreciated, it seems we may best be able to inhabit a place when we are not faced with the additional challenge of having to be there.

A few moments in the countryside overlooking a valley could number among the most significant and useful of one's life, and be as worthy of precise remembrance as a birthday or a wedding.

To read is to withdraw. To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it', said Sir Kevin, 'if the pursuit itself were less … selfish.

There are few nicer things than sitting up in bed, drinking strong tea, and reading.

The Hermit of the Commonwealth. That had a solid ring to it. Stoic and aesthetic. There was only one problem with the noble life he had set out for himself. It was a terrible way to meet girls. Whoever

Nobody came to Jakku.

But patience had to be learned alone.

Alone . . . alone . . . It echoed in her mind as she sat there. Under the weight of the loneliness Han's voice seemed to fade, and Maz Kanata's as well, until there was nothing surrounding her but a silence as deep and profound as the distant reaches of space itself.

Home at that moment was a starless night, a steady wind, not a human to be seen.

Outside, beyond where the light from our window fell, there was a deep inner well. The roof in which these rooms were built dropped steeply away, and facing us across the void were other similar dormers, unlit, their windows open into shadowy stillness. Above the roofline the sky was amorously transformed by the pink glare of the London dusk.

I was applying myself to the subtler connoisseurship of the out-of-season, days without warmth and nights without encounters, empty pleasure-grounds and the violence of the tides.

My months in the Scrubs were a kind of desert in time: beyond their strict and ascetic routines they were featureless, and it is hard in retrospect to know what one did on any day or even in any month. I had had, of course, some experience of deserts, even a taste for them, and knew how to fall back, like a camel on its fat, on an inner reserve of fantasy and contemplation.

For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.