Quotes About Solitude

Every new idea, every great idea, when it first began was in a minority of one.

Charles de Foucauld

No footprints in the sand. Pebbles and bits of weed are strung in scalloped lines. Three outer islands bear low stone forts; a green lantern glows on the tip of a jetty. It feels appropriate somehow, to have reached the edge of the continent, to have only the hammered sea left in front of him.

The star-flooded nights, the dew-soaked dawns, the hushed ambulatories, the enforced asceticism—never has Werner felt part of something so single-minded.

Time slows. The attic disappears. Jutta disappears. Has anyone ever spoken so intimately about the very things Werner is most curious about? Open

Gulls pass, braying like donkeys, and in the distance the guns thud again, and the rattling of the truck fades, and Marie-Laure tries to concentrate on rereading a chapter earlier in the novel: make the raised dots form letters, the letters words, the words a world.

The only sound is the patter of the rain turning Saint-Malo into mud.

vitrine. Upstairs his wife runs a vacuum cleaner; he can

the sound of the sea washes away all other sounds

When they were first married and Albert went away on trips for work, Jutta would wake in the predawn hours and remember those first nights after Werner left for Schulpforta and feel all over again the searing pain of his absence.

Beneath his feet the snail kept on, feeling its way forward, dragging the house of its shell, fitting its body to the sand, to the private unlit horizons that whorled all around it.

she'd left, feeling the emptiness of the big theater

Snowy, milky, chalky. A color that is the absence of color. Every morning he ties his shoes, packs newspaper inside his coat as insulation against the cold, and begins interrogating the world.

Firelit rooms lined with books - these are the places in which important things happen.

He slept there that night, without any of his guards.

Eventually, only one person was left beside the ashes—Julia Augusta, widow and now daughter of the dead princeps.

There's something quite comforting about mess, especially when there's no one else there to complain.

Blakiston was an outcast. He was in exile from himself

It was probably because they sensed her unhappiness. Clarissa was all on her own. She had never married. She seemed to spend half her life in the church. He was always seeing her coming in and out. To be fair to her, she often stopped to have a chat with him but then of course she didn't really have anyone to talk to unless she was on her knees. She looked a bit like her brother, Sir Magnus

fact, I've always had a fondness for seaside towns, particularly out of season when the streets are empty and the sky is grey and drizzling.

To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self.

I can't write a line without music - it provides just the right amount of distraction to keep me focused. Clearly, I still miss the noisy roommates.

My favorite thing is to hang out at my house, be on my beautiful property, prune bushes, take a long walk, build a fire, and read.

When I'm sifting the compost seed or pruning, I argue over issues in my head; I talk to myself.