Quotes About Solitude

Many such things will strike him, things not credible to the many, but which come to him alone who is truly familiar with the works of Nature and near to her own heart.

It is to this effect: If a man should ascend alone into heaven and behold clearly the structure of the universe and the beauty of the stars, there would be no pleasure for him in the awe-inspiring sight, which would have filled him with delight if he had had someone to whom he could describe what he had seen. Thus nature, loving nothing solitary, always strives for some sort of support, and man's best support is a very dear friend.

A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.

You can forget who you are if you're alone too much.

The night is mine, my own time, to do with it as I will, as long as I am quiet. As long as I don't move. As long as I lie still. The difference between lie and lay . Lay is always passive.

Come away with me, he said, we will live on a desert island. I said, I am a desert island. It was not what he had in mind.

This afternoon held that special quality of mournful emptiness I've connected with late Sunday afternoons ever since childhood: the feeling of having nothing to do.

Those who live alone slide into the habit of vertical eating: why bother with the niceties when there's no one to share or censure? But laxity in one area may lead to derangement in all.

The threshold of a new house is a lonely place.

There's time to spare. This is one of the things I wasn't prepared for - the amount of unfilled time, the long parentheses of nothing. Time as white sound.

Gain ten pounds and they put you in Solitary.

She stood for a long time, breathing in and breathing in, the scent of the trees and dogs and night flowers and water, because this was the best thing, it was what she wanted, to be outside in the night by herself. She wasn't sick any longer.

The night is mine, my own time, to do with it as I will, as long as I am quiet. As long as I don't move. As long as I lie still.

There's nothing more for me to see. The bridge is only a bridge, the river a river, the sky is a sky. This landscape is empty now, a place for Sunday runners. Or not empty: filled with whatever it is by itself, when I'm not looking.

Buttered, I lie on my single bed, flat, like a piece of toast. I

Waiting is also a place: it is wherever you wait. For me it's this room. I am a blank, here, between parentheses. Between other people

I am like a room where things once happened and now nothing does, except

I say, leave me alone, this is my winter, I will stay here if I choose

It's possible to go so far in, so far down and back, they could never get you out.

I could just sit here, peacefully. I could withdraw. It's possible to go so far in, so far down and back, they could never get you out.

I'm not going to have a husband anyway, said Laura. I'm going to live by myself in the garage.

She rents herself a large, empty apartment on the top floor of a house. She has no long-term plans. At night she listens to the radio and cooks subsistence meals, and cries onto her plate.

Outside we see a shrivelling, but from within, as felt by heart and breath and inner skin, how different, how vast how calm how part of everything how starry dark. Last breath. Divine perhaps. Perhaps relief. The lovers caught and sealed inside a cavern, voices raised in one last hovering duet, until the small wax light goes out. Well anyway I held your hand and maybe you held mine as the stone or universe closed in around you. Though not me. I'm still outside.

When I start feeling shaky I lie down, expecting nothing, and it arrives, washing over me in a wave of black vacancy