Quotes About Solitude

The clouds were building up now for the trade wind and he looked ahead and saw a flight of wild ducks etching themselves against the sky over the water, then blurring, then etching again and he knew no man was ever alone on the sea.

Let's not talk about how I am. It's a subject I know too much about to want to think about anymore.

Every one needs to talk to some one, the woman said. Before we had religion and other nonsense. Now for every one there should be some one to whom one can speak frankly, for all the valor that one could have one becomes very alone.

Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing.... For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

He looked across the sea and knew how alone he was now. But he could see the prisms in the deep dark water and the line stretching ahead and the strange undulation of the calm. The clouds were building up now for the trade wind and he looked ahead and saw a flight of wild ducks etching themselves against the sky over the water, then blurring, then etching again and he knew no man was ever alone on the sea.

A bottle of wine was good company.

He thought that he would lie down and think about nothing. Sometimes he could do this. Sometimes he could think about the stars without wondering about them and the ocean without problems and the sunrise without what it would bring.

The more I'm let alone and not worried the better I can function.

I drank a bottle of wine for company. It was a Château Margaux. It was pleasant to be drinking slowly and to be tasting the wine and to be drinking alone. A bottle of wine was good company.

The setting of the sun is a difficult time for all fish.

It would be better alone, anything is better alone but I don't think I can handle it alone.

There was a trout.

It was dark now as it becomes dark quickly after the sun sets in September. He lay against the worn wood of the bow and rested all that he could. The first stars were out. He did not know the name of Rigel but he saw it and knew soon they would all be out and he would have all his distant friends. 'The fish is my friend too,' he said aloud. 'I have never seen or heard of such a fish. But I must kill him. I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars.

With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night.

The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.

After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.

He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees. The mountainside sloped gently where he lay; but below it was steep and he could see the dark of the oiled road winding through the pass. There was a stream alongside the road and water of the dam, white in the summer sunlight.

If the others heard me talking out loud they would think that I am crazy, he said aloud.

But now he said his thoughts aloud many times since there was no one that they could annoy.

No one should be alone in their old age, he thought. But it is unavoidable.

Su decisión habia sido permanecer en aguas profundas y tenebrosas, lejos de todas las trampas y cebos y traiciones. Mi decisión fué ir allá a buscarlo, mas allá de toda gente. Mas allá de toda gente en el mundo. Ahora estamos solos uno para el otro y así ha sido desde mediodía. Y nadie que venga a valernos, ni a él ni a mí.

The old man knew he was going far out and he left the smell of the land behind and rowed out into the clean early morning smell of the ocean.

You cannot imagine how one can tire of pine trees.

Leave me with my memories. With my true, beautiful memories.