Quotes About Solitude

I stay away from the telephone if at all possible.

My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I'm so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don't have the guts to take their names out of the book.

I can do without a television or a telephone, I think.

I don't listen to music. I don't watch television, I don't read.

Going for a really long run, a bike ride, or cross-country skiing helps me get away from all the noise. I tell myself, 'The pain you're feeling, just enjoy it because it's going to help you across that finish line first.' If you're having a crap day, go for a run. It makes a big difference.

In 'Dublinesque', Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas inverts the terms of Joyce's 'Ulysses' and tells the story of a man who, after living a hyperkinetic life like those of Odysseus and Leopold Bloom, resolves to never leave his room again and to reduce his mental activity to a minimum.

Cheese is one of the world's great foodstuffs and I speak as someone who would once happily snarf a packet of American-style cheese singles in front of the telly on my own.

Escapism, we are led to believe, is evidence of a deficiency in character, a certain failure of temperament, and like so many -isms, it is to be strenuously avoided. 'How do you expect to get ahead?,' people ask. But the question altogether misses the point. The escapist doesn't want to get ahead. He simply wants to get away.

If I am depressed, I do not like to talk to my parents or friends, instead I go and sit in a church or a temple which relaxes me immediately.

We all need empty hours in our lives or we will have no time to create or dream.

I have always had a sense that we are all pretty much alone in life, particularly in adolescence.

It would be nice to avoid the world, to leave it and all its threats and unhappiness. Not to die or anything like that, but to find a place of solitude and solace.

there was a quality of loneliness to her that comes when your only friend walks away and you don't know why and there's no one else and never will be. A left-behind look.

How can I die alone.Where will I be then who am now alone,what groans so patheticallyin this room where I am alone?

I'll win the way I always do by being gone when they come. When they look, they'll see nothing of me and where I am they'll not know. This, I thought, is my way and right or wrong it's me. Being dead, then, I'll have won completely.

Love comes quietly, finally, drops about me, on me, in the old ways. What did I know thinking myself able to go alone all the way.

For three years Albert would stay huddled in his den during the day and see almost no one, content to be alone with his books. From time to time, unshaved and sloppily dressed, he would appear in the street to take a meal or perform some errand. Then it was back to his room for more study.

I regard longings for twinship or emotional kinship as being reactive to emotional trauma, with its accompanying feelings of singularity, estrangement, and solitude.

HELLO DARKNESS, MY OLD FRIEND

I'm just telling you that if you go and live alone on an island you won't find any answers. You'll just find yourself alone. Don't go to that island.

When I'm at home in Virginia, I become more hermit-like. I like my own home.

Victory is never won by the multitudes.

The desert tells a different story every time one ventures on it.

The eternal silence of the great white desert. Cloudy columns of snow drift advancing from the south, pale yellow wraiths, heralding the coming storm, blotting out one by one the sharp-cut lines of the land.