Quotes About Solitude

Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.

These days I must take the world in small and carefully measured doses. It is a sort of homeopathic cure I am undergoing, though I am not certain what this cure is meant to mend. Perhaps I am learning to live amongst the living again. Practising, I mean. But no, that is not it. Being here is just a way of not being anywhere.

being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left

In Genesis, it says that it is not good for a man to be alone but sometimes it is a great relief.

Don't you feel cut off?" I asked. "Cut off from what?" she replied. "No, on the whole I'd say we rather enjoy our separateness.

Savannah was invariably gracious to strangers, but it was immune to their charms. It wanted nothing so much as to be left alone. Time

No place for illusions here. The beat doesn't stop solitude, it doesn't cure pain, you can't telephone it - it's simply a reminder that you belong to a shared story.

Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.

Theodore became a hermit, lived for two years in a cave, and then for a time inhabited an iron cage. (This sort of flamboyant asceticism was common in the Christian East.)

It's very quiet but I'm aware that life is going on outside.

For each one of us stands alone in the midst of a universe.

You are forever alone.

All you have to do is choose the right day, the right weather, and you come upon a hidden place in the morning light where time stopped long before you were born

And I wake, in the cage of my bones, on the same cold ground.

Today, however, she didn't go looking for urchins or broken shells. She simply walked to the end of the earth and stood a while.

More often than not, the demons of our nature love a recluse; nobody is more vulnerable to himself than the solitary. To imagine that one can simply withdraw, and somehow achieve peace, or wisdom, or detachment, is a mistake. It is also, in most cases, inappropriate, selfish, and even cowardly.

[T]he cold warms me—after a different fashion from that of the kitchen stove.

I have loved the feel of the grass under my feet, and the sound of the running streams by my side. The hum of the wind in the tree-tops has always been good music to me, and the face of the fields has often comforted me more than the faces of men.

When you start working, everybody is in your studio- the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas- all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave.

He who neglects to pray alone and in private, however assiduously he frequents public meetings, there gives his prayers to the wind.

I'm smiled out, talked out, quipped out, socialized so far from any being, I need the weight of mortal silences to get realized back into myself.

Lover of swampsThe quagmire overgrownWith hassock tufts of sedge—where fear encampsAround thy home aloneThe trembling grassQuakes from the human footNor bears the weight of man to let him passWhere he alone and muteSitteth at rest

I am—yet what I am none cares or knows; My friends forsake me like a memory lost: I am the self-consumer of my woes— They rise and vanish in oblivious host, Like shadows in love's frenzied stifled throes And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed

Solitude There is a charm in Solitude that cheers A feeling that the world knows nothing of A green delight the wounded mind endears After the hustling world is broken off Whose whole delight was crime at good to scoff Green solitude his prison pleasure yields The bitch fox heeds him not -- birds seem to laugh He lives the Crusoe of his lonely fields Which dark green oaks his noontide leisure shields