Quotes About Solitude

A room in Holmhurst was the last thing she'd come to - better to lie down in the wood under the beech leaces and the bracken and wait quietly for death.

Prudence's flat was in the kind of block where Jane imagined people might be found dead, though she had never said this to Prudence herself; it seemed rather a macabre fancy and not one to be confided to an unmarried woman living alone.

Four people on the verge of retirement, each one of us living alone, and without any close relative near – that's us.

Do you cook for yourself then?' 'I live alone, you know. Since my wife died…' 'Yes, of course, Miss Morrow told me.' 'Really? What did she say?' 'Oh, how sad it was and all that sort of thing,' said Jane rapidly with her eyes on the ground.

Even the most powerful woman needs a place to unwind.

Without me, without me, Everyday's misery. But with me - am I wrong? No night is too long!

Mark Twain had written somewhere: We are all mad at night.

Isolation might be more hazardous than splendor.

I lie alone under the mocking sky. The midnight hours indifferently walk by.

savoring the sense of loneliness and freedom that comes only from solitary sojourns in strange lands...

Hell is being alone.

Jazz closed his eyes.

That night, after dark, before the rain, I sneak out of the house. I've mastered this particular skill over the course of many dead nights, when the silence is too loud and the solitude too confining. [...] the truth is, I could simply leave.

When I'm with other people, I usually don't think about it. Sometimes, it catches me off-guard, but I usually don't. When I'm alone, it's all I can think about.

I really love peace and quiet.

Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong: and a boy deprived of a father's care often develops, if he escapes the perils of youth, an independence and a vigour of thought which may restore in after life the heavy loss of early days.

It seems to be that loneliness is a small price to pay for peace and quiet.

The best hours of my life have been spent in a quiet corner or under a tree or on the beach with a book in my hands. I've been told on more than one occasion that I should stop reading so much and actually have a life, but do you know what I've figured out? People in books are much more interesting than the people who've told me that.

He who withdraws himself from his fellow men lessens his service and impoverishes his life, no matter what work of art may come out of his solitude.

It would do the world good if every man in it would compel himself occasionally to be absolutely alone. Away from people, who blunt the edges of his personality: away from books and magazines, which give him his thinking pre-digested: away on a long walk, where he could face the world with a naked mind and compel himself to think some things through by himself. Most of the world's progress has come out of periods of such loneliness.

In olden days, when towns were more scattered, distances greater, and life less complex, men were accustomed to be alone for hours and even days, and could stand it. The modern man must be talking, or he must be reading, or he must be playing: anything lest by accident he be left alone for a little time and compelled to think.

Kareeda ni Karasu no tomarikeri Aki no kure trans: On a bare branch A crow is perched - Autumn evening

Twilight whippoorwill... Whistle on, sweet deepener Of dark loneliness

on this mountain sorrow...tell me about it digger of wild yams