Quotes About Solitude

The passion for being for ever with one's fellows, and the fear of being left for a few hours alone, is to me wholly incomprehensible. I can entertain myself quite well for weeks together, hardly aware, except for the pervading peace, that I have been alone at all.

How passionately she longed to be important to somebody again - not important on platforms, not important as an asset in an organisation, but privately important, just to one other person, quite privately, nobody else to know or notice. It didn't seem much to ask in a world so crowded with people, just to have one of them, only one out of all the millions to oneself. Somebody who needed one, who thought of one, who was eager to come to one - oh, oh how dreadfully one wanted to be precious.

When I got to the library I came to a standstill, - ah, the dear room, what happy times I have spent in it rummaging amongst the books, making plans for my garden, building castles in the air, writing, dreaming, doing nothing.

On wet days I will go into the thickest parts of the forest, where the pine needles are everlastingly dry, and when the sun shines I'll lie on the heath and see how the broom flares against the clouds. I shall be perpetually happy, because there will be no one to worry me.

Sometimes callers from a distance invade my solitude, and it is on these occasions that I realize how absolutely alone each individual is, and how far away from his neighbour; and while they talk (generally about babies, past, present, and to come), I fall to wondering at the vast and impassable distance that separates one's own soul from the soul of the person sitting in the next chair.

In bed by herself: adorable condition.

It had never occurred to me that simply being with a fellow prisoner would make me feel like I was still in prison.

Looking up at the stars and smoking in silence.

Joy of Backpacking,

In the meantime, I could withdraw to my room, could hide and sleep as if I were dead

Sometimes, I get so consumed by depression that it is hard to believe that the whole world doesn't stop and suffer with me.

Benj had once said, "A man must have a care to what he puts in his mind, for when he's alone on a hillside and draws it out he'll want treasures to be his company, not regrets.

Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone; For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth, But has trouble enough of its own.

laugh and the world laughs with you. weep and weep alone

Loneliness. There is no worse loneliness than the loneliness of a dog who never was anything but lonely, because the loneliness is normal, like a heartbeat. Do you think it's easy to go to the place inside a dog where the loneliness is, when you can't even do it with yourself?

Wilderness remained a place of evil and spiritual catharsis. Any place in which a person feels stripped, lost, or perplexed, might be called a wilderness.

lost all of those things and you had to live in a cave all

Preserve, within a wild sanctuary, an inaccessible valley of reveries.

There is no support so strong as the strength that enables one to stand alone.

Just words, words. I sometimes wish we had never learned how to talk.

When you live alone, you can be sure that the person who squeezed the toothpaste tube in the middle wasn't committing a hostile act.

Distressed by the increasing wickedness of the ungodly, and fearing that their infidelity might lessen his reverence for God, Enoch avoided constant association with them, and spent much time in solitude, giving himself to meditation and prayer. Thus he waited for the Lord, seeking a clearer knowledge of His will, that he might perform it.

i don't want to hate the president i don't want to go to harvard i don't want to win the pulitzer prize i just want to sit in my bathtub and think about relationships i will never have with people i will never meet and then go lay in my bed with a magnifying glass and count all the stiches in my sheets until i fall asleep and wake up to repeat again.

Its beauty stirs the imagination, and I wonder if the last refuge of all that is truly wild lies not on earth but in light.