Quotes About Solitude

In the two-room flat where I live in Japan, I try to take time every day to step away from the bombardment of e-mails and opportunities and papers around my desk, for an hour, and just sit on our 30-inch terrace in the sun, reading something sustaining, whether 'The Age of Innocence' or the latest by Colm Toibin.

There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy.

There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.

I was a bit of a loner as a teenager. I never went to a single social event, because they terrified me.

The thought of being on my own really terrified me. But then I realized being alone is really a cleansing thing.

As people, right now, we're so over-stimulated in this world that I don't know what I'd do in Wyoming. I really don't know what I'd do. I would probably have a heart attack because I'd be so lonely, and I'd actually have to listen to myself think. That's a terrifying prospect for myself, and I'm sure many other people as well.

If you ever find yourself on a boat in the middle of the ocean, you look around in every direction and don't see anything. That's a terrifying experience.

I recall feeling an almost delicious terror when one day I found myself alone in the midst of tall June grasses that grew high as my head. But here the secret working of self consciousness is almost too entangled with the things of the past for me to explain it.

I remember as a little kid, I would always feel comfortable if the light in the crack of my parents' door was on at night. When it went off, that meant they were asleep. Then that terror and the fear of being by myself started to creep in.

Lincoln had no such person that he could talk with. Often, as a result, he debated with himself, and he would draw up a kind of list of the pros and cons of an argument, and carefully figure them out, and he might test them in public.

Testing oneself is best when done alone.

Oh! now to be alone, on some grand height, Where heaven's black curtains shadow all the sight, And watch the swollen clouds their bosom clash, While fleet and far the living lightnings flash... And see the fiery arrows fall and rise, In dizzy chase along the rattling skies,— How stirs the spirit while the echoes roll, And God, in thunder, rocks from pole to pole!

if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars")

All still lifes are actually paintings of the world on the sixth day of creation, when God and the world were alone together, without man!

The feeling of not being understood and of not understanding the world is no mere accompaniment of first passion, but its sole non-accidental cause. And the passion itself is a panic-stricken flight in which being together with the other means only a doubled solitude.

I stayed there until the fire died. So it would not have to die alone.

When you re the only one to do something it always gets done.

There were absences in my life which were a comfort, then were was a presence that ruined me.

Symmetry suggests one myth, or significance: the drinking of writers coming from too much concentration, in solitude, upon feelings expressed for or even about possibly indifferent people, people who are absent or perhaps dead, or unborn; the suicide of psychiatrists coming from too much attention, in most intimate contact, concentrated upon the feelings of people toward whom one may feel indifferent, people who are certain, sooner or later, to die...

I like the idea of being alone. I like the idea of often being alone in all aspects of my life. I like to feel lonely. I like to need things.

Alone I'm nothing.

The forests were foris, 'outside.' In them lived the outcasts, the mad, the lovers, brigands, hermits, saints, lepers, the paquis, fugitives, misfits, the persecuted, wild men. Where else could they go? Outside of the law and human society one was in the forest. But the forest's asylum was unspeakable. One could not remain human in the forest; one could only rise above or sink below the human level.

you pinned me right down to it," the Old Man said, "I don't like nothing very much but a hot fire and a warm bed and a quiet woman to fetch me my food. I can generally manage the first two, but I been looking constantly for the basic ingredient of the third. Quiet, I mean.

Quienes somos importa más que lo que hacen nuestros cuerpos. El ermitaño que se sienta solo en la cima de una montaña emitiendo una vibración de paz hace más para traer armonía al mundo que el furioso activista por la paz, cuya frecuencia sirve sólo para crear precisamente aquello contra lo que grita vehementemente.