Quotes About Solitude

What kind of life am i supposed to have without you?You were the one good thing,the only good thing i ever found.

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and ThouBeside me singing in the Wilderness—Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

Now the New Year reviving old Desires,The thoughtful Soul to Solitude retires.

We tell our triumphs to the crowds, but our own hearts are the sole confidants of our sorrows.

I was never less alone than when by myself.

Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.

The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness

Read poems to yourself in the middle of the night. Turn on a single lamp and read them while you're alone in an otherwise dark room or while someone else sleeps next to you. Read them when you're wide awake in the early morning, fully alert. Say them over to yourself in a place where silence reigns and the din of the culture — the constant buzzing noise that surrounds us — has momentarily stopped. These poems have come from a great distance to find you.

True solitude is a din of birdsong, seething leaves, whirling colors, or a clamor of tracks in the snow

We have in America "The Big Two-Hearted River" tradition: taking your wounds to the wilderness for a cure, a conversation, a rest, whatever. And as is in the Hemingway story, if your wounds aren't too bad, it works. But this isn't Michigan (or Faulkner's Big Woods in Mississippi for that matter). This is Alaska.

A mountain with a wolf on it stands a little taller.

He who would be serene and pure needs but one thing—detachment. —MEISTER ECKHART

He had gone to several universities . . . and had found only curves and credits. He had become drunk on the idea of God and found only theology. He had risen several times on the subtle and powerful wings of lust, expectant of magnificence, achieving only discharge. A few times he had extended friendship with palpitating hope, only to find that no one quite knew what he had in mind. His solitude now was the result of his metabolism, that constant breathing in of joy and exhalation of sadness.

Outside, in the pungency of the worn air, he sighed with premonitory tiredness. He locked the door, went up the steps, and headed for the subway that would take him to the upper West Side of town. He walked lightly and his face showed no awareness of all the thousands of people around him because he traveled in an eggshell through which came only subdued light and muffled sound.

In that still and settled place There's nobody but you You're where I breathe my oxygen You're where I see my view And when the world feels full of noise My heart knows what to do It finds that still and settled place And dances there with you

They travel long distances to stroll along the seashore, for reasons they can't put into words.

the human condition is a singularity

A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy.

A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it.

Nobody can find me here, he thought. And then he thought, what if nobody can find me here?

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me Remembering again that I shall die And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks For washing me cleaner than I have been...

The simple lack of her is more to me than others' presence.

Life is the desert, life the solitude, death joins us to the great majority.

By all means use some time to be alone.