Quotes About Solitude

It is a living. It is enough. I am free. The nights are long and quiet, the mornings cool and bright, I live with the sun, the moon, and the stars. The air is fresh where I am, and there is no one to hurry me or to demand this or that of me.

To my way of thinking there was nothing finer than to top out on a lonely ridge and sit in my saddle with the wind bringing the smell of pines up from the valley below and the sun glinting off the snow of distant peaks. There was an urge to drink from all the hidden springs, catch fish in the lonely creeks, and leave my tracks on all that far, beautiful country.

when a man lives out his life under the sun and the stars, half the time riding alone over mountains and desert, then he usually has a religion although it may not be the usual variety.

There are folks who can't abide camp-robber jays, but I take to them. Often enough they've been my only company for days at a time, and they surely do get friendly. They'll steal your grub right from under your nose, but who I am to criticize the lifestyle of a bird? He has his ways, I have mine. Like I say, I take to them.

From Elisha Comes to Red Horse : Now I can't claim to be what you'd call a religious man, yet I've a respect for religion, and when a man lives out his life under the sun and the stars, half the time riding alone over mountains and desert, then he usually has a religion although it may not be the usual variety.

He had no love for sleeping inside and wanted his horse near him. There was something about lying under the stars that was conducive to thought, and he had some thinking to do.

If one has a book, Mr. Boone, One is never alone. They will talk to you when you want to listen, and when you tire of what they are saying, you just close the book. It will be waiting for you when you come back to it.

He knew how she felt. Sometimes a body just had to have somebody to talk to. You saw something and you wanted to turn and say, Isn't that beautiful? And there was nobody there.

exhilarating silence.

when a man was away from women for months he got to feeling it.

off the leaves and straightened my clothes, wishing there was

I was fed a little. I was given water. And I was visited by no one.

One would be a man alone, and alone he must fight and die, or fight and live.

staring out at the sunlit street. It was a whole lot simpler out

When I awakened I was cold, colder than I had ever been before.

thinking of his own. How did a

They did not see me sitting on a rock near the water, but the air was clear and I heard their voices, and I looked into the water and wished my father would live forever.

When one lies awake in the night one thinks of many things, and I thought now.

wealth, but he had been a hunter. Never so much at home as when he was far from home and in the deep woods, the far veldt, the desert, the mountains. THE TABLE HAD been set up

This is a different world, Helen. You knew that, I could see it. Sometimes when there is nothing between you and nature you find out things you wish you didn't know…sometimes when you look at yourself you are smaller in the scheme of things than you thought you were." I shifted

For I say to you in all sadness of conviction, that to think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists. Only when you have worked alone—when you have felt around you a black gulf of solitude more isolating than that which surrounds the dying man, and in hope and in despair have trusted to your own unshaken will—then only will you have achieved.

There was something special about being in a strange place, all alone in a mass of people even if you had just screwed up your life, or perhaps especially if you had just screwed up your life.

Chalkers sat at his desk in the back of the room—last seat, last row. No one sat at the desk next to him or at the one in front of him. He was

Kaira sat on the floor and ate her ice cream right out of the carton.