Quotes About Solitude

Self-reliant loners, who think they can do everything on their own, often make fatal mistakes and decisions.

I come from a very, very small town. There were no other actors around. I never met any actors. A lot of those times when I'd be out in the sheds with my dad, I'd step outside, and there's just nothing out there but thousands of acres, forty thousand sheep, and miles of nothing. And so my mind would just wonder about what else was out there.

Turkey Hollow is a small country town in Sullivan County, a remote region of the Catskill Mountains. Surrounded by forests, it counts 10 full-time residents, has no mail service, and no cell phone reception. However, what it lacks in amenities, it compensates for in sheer natural wonder.

July 2. A beautiful day for Labrador. Went ashore and killed nothing, but was pleased with what I saw. The country is so grandly wild and desolate that I am charmed by its wonderful dreariness.

I believe in empty spaces; they're the most wonderful thing.

I can stand in a crystal stream without another human around me and cast all day long, and if I never catch a single fish, I can come home and still feel like I had a wonderful time. It's the being there that's important.

In January 1921, I found myself wonderfully alone in an empty carriage in a rocking train in the night between Waterloo and Sherborne. Stars on each side of me; I ran from side to side of the carriage, checking the constellations.

I think I was kind of melancholy as a kid. I spent a lot of time inside my own head, a lot of time sort of staring into space wondering the hell was going on.

Census figures be damned: If you choose to be alone, you're destined to spend a certain amount of time wondering why.

Tell me not of joy: there's none Now my little sparrow's gone; He, just as you, Would toy and woo, He would chirp and flatter me, He would hang the wing awhile, Till at length he saw me smile, Lord! how sullen he would be!

One of the places where we lived when I was growing up had this big wood out the back. And starting when I was about 8, I used to enjoy just walking alone through the wood late. Eleven p.m. Midnight. Later.

We were so far back in the woods, they almost had to pipe in sunlight.

You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters.

I remember when I was a child... walking into the woods by myself and feeling the solitude around me build like electricity and pass through my body with a jolt that made my hair prickle.

Do you know what I love about hunting? That I am no one in the woods, no one at all. I thought the animals might recognize me, but they didn't. They did not even ask me for any autographs.

I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods.

There's a reason I live in the Maine woods, where nobody knows what I do for a living. I think you can be better if someone who's coming to see you perform has no idea who you really are.

My favorite thing is just walking in the woods. I can do it for days on end without tiring of it.

There have always been hermits: people who want to get away from other humans. Literally, some of the first extant books and poems found in Mesopotamia and China mention people living alone in the woods. It's this primal fascination that exists across all cultures and all times.

I might live in the woods, but I am a lazy actor.

I like writing in total isolation like out in the woods somewhere.

My childhood was basically divided between fishing and roaming the woods and hiding out in my bedroom. Maybe things would've turned out differently if I'd had a TV in there; who knows.

I describe myself as an environmentalist not because I'm marching in the street with placards but because I like to be in the woods by myself.

I spent a lot of time growing up in Oregon after I left California. Spent a lot of time in the woods.