Quotes About Solitude

Wherever you go in the next catastrophé Be it sickroom, or prison, or cemet'ry Do not fear that your stay will be solit'ry Countless souls share your fate, you'll have company!

All that I desire in life are three... A wilderness: A beach on the sun-drenched sea, A puff of opium, And thee.

she was free in her wildness; that she was a wanderess, a drop of free water. She belonged to no man and to no city.

I have developed a very strong partiality for the dead: they don't talk back, they don't sue, and they don't have angry relatives.

Jesse rounded forward under the towel and cozied his feet in the bath water. It was as if no one else were around and Jesse was once again alone and at ease with his meditations. He said, "I can't figure it out: do you want to be like me, or do you want to be me?

When you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

Silence is sometimes the only way to share the unsharable.

It's a very New England thing, this being alone even though you don't want to be. It proves, I guess, that you're above being lonely and can take or leave friendship. So, then, I was a loner who wished not to be alone.

Spend a long time alone, especially if you're someone who's never been that social to begin with, and you find yourself craving solitude.

There once was a man who said, "GodMust think it exceedingly oddIf he finds that this treeContinues to beWhen there's no one about in the Quad."

Sade never got into the habit of concerning himself with what other people were thinking and feeling. As with Genet, the soil in which perversion grew was habitual solitude and constant frustration of the need to feel loved.

Some people just need to read and think, to spend time alone sorting through the stories in their heads

My feet beat out a steady muffled rhythm. My thoughts participated in each step, never getting ahead of me.

Wherever I am, in wood or field, By dawn or evening light, Without cease my heart feels The pain of one who is not here...

I want to do something absolutely different, or perhaps nothing at all: just stay where I am, in my home, and absorb each hour, each day, and be alone; and read and think; and walk about the garden in the night; and wait, wait...

Alone. She realized how much she had missed the luxury of solitude, and knew that its occasional comfort would always be essential to her. The pleasure of being on one's own was not so much spiritual as sensuous, like wearing silk, or swimming without a bathing suit, or walking along a totally empty beach with the sun on your back. One was restored by solitude. Refreshed.

Time had lost its importance. That was one of the good things about getting old: you weren't perpetually in a hurry. All her life, Penelope had looked after other people, but now she had no one to think about but herself. There was time to stop and look, and, looking, to remember. Visions widened, like views seen from the slopes of a painfully climbed mountain, and having come so far, it seemed ridiculous not to pause and enjoy them.

She turned to the window although it was dark now and the glass held only a tired ghost.

Her loneliness sometimes seemed a thing not of this world, but a loneliness only that mysterious being, solitary and unique, could understand.

the reflective isolation of this year

Books. Why? So I can talk to other humans without having to meet them. Fear of boredom. So what I will never be alone.

Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson

She has decided to appear to nobody but the feckless.

Romeo keeps talking after Father Travis walks through the door. Keeps on talking to the empty coffeepot and waiting chairs, to the walls, to the sun shafts through basement window, to the food smells, to the hands, the knees, the air. Keeps on talking because once he finishes he does not know what will happen next, what awaits him anywhere in his won life, and because he cannot leave with these embarrassing sheets of snot and tears still running down his face.