Quotes About Solitude

It's awful to think that I shall probably never, as long as I live, see you dancing like that again all by yourself.

He lit his cigar and sat back at peace with the world; I, too, was at peace in another world than his. We both were happy. He talked of Julia and I heard his voice, unintelligible at a great distance, like a dog's barking miles away on a still night.

a sigh fit for the pillow, the sinking firelight, and a bedroom window open to the stars and the whisper of bare trees.

Outside the windows the cars swept past continuously, out of town, into town, lights ablaze, radios at full throttle. "I wither slowly in thine arms," he read. "Here at the quiet limit of the world," and repeated to himself: "Here at the quiet limit of the world. Here at the quiet limit of the world"… as a monk will repeat a simple pregnant text, over and over again in prayer.

The next four weeks of solitary confinement were among the happiest of Paul's life...It was so exhilarating, he found, never to have to make any decision on any subject, to be wholly relieved from the smallest consideration of time, meas, or clothes, to have no anxiety ever about what kind of impression he was making; in fact, to be free.

Now we shall both be alone, and I shall have no way of making you understand.' 'I don't want to make it easier for you,' I said; 'I hope your heart may break; but I do understand.' The avalanche was down, the hillside swept bare behind it; the last echoes died on the white slopes; the new mound glittered and lay still in the silent valley.

I always maintain a certain privacy on the sea. One so easily forms acquaintances which become tedious later.

Contra mundum? Contra mundum.

He did not fail in love, but his lost his joy of it, for I was no longer part of his solitude. As my intimacy with his family grew, I became part of the world which he sought to escape; I became one of the bonds which held him.

Mummy and two attendant poets have three bad colds in the head, so I have come here. It is the feast of S. Nichodemus of Thyatira, who was martyred by having goatskin nailed to his pate, and is accordingly the patron of bald heads. Tell Collins, who I am sure will be bald before us. There are too many people here, but one, praise heaven! has an ear-trumpet, and that keeps me in good humor. And now I must try to catch a fish. It is too far to send it to you so I will keep the backbone…

the room had grown smothery. He wanted to be out in some cool and bitter breeze, miles above the cities, and to live serene and detached back in the corners of his mind

I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.

You will walk differently alone, dear, through a thicker atmosphere, forcing your way through the shadows of chairs, through the dripping smoke of the funnels. You will feel your own reflection sliding along the eyes of those who look at you. You are no longer insulated; but I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.

People living alone get used to loneliness.

I suppose books mean more than people to me anyway

No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.

I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.

smoking had come to be an important punctuation mark in the long sentence of a day on the road.

Oh, it doesn't get me. I'm pretty well cloistered, and I suppose books mean more than people to me anyway.

I love New York on summer afternoons when every one's away. There's something very sensuous about it--overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.

Life rose around my island like a sea, and presently I was swimming.

And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler.

I found myself on Gatsby's side and alone.