Quotes About Solitude

I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleepwalkers. That's an illusion, of course. When you walk through a crowd of strangers it's next door to impossible not to imagine that they're all waxworks, but probably they're thinking just the same about you.

He was alone with seven thousand books...mostly aged and unsaleable.

To write books you need not only comfort and solitude—and solitude is never easy to attain in a working-class home—you also need piece of mind. You can't settle in to anything, you can't command the spirit of hope in which anything has got to be created, with that dull evil cloud of unemployment hanging over you.

He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable. What certainty had he that a single human creature now living was on his side?

In principle a Party member had no spare time, and was never alone except in bed. It was assumed that when he was not working, eating, or sleeping he would be taking part in some kind of communal recreations; to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity.

But even that was a memorable event in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.

So often like this, in lonely places in the forest, he would come upon something--bird, flower, tree--beautiful beyond all words, if there had been a soul with whom to share it. Beauty is meaningless until it is shared.

What mattered was that the room over the junk-shop should exist. To know that it was there, inviolate, was almost the same as being in it. The room was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk.

He seemed to have lost the power of intellectual effort, now that the stimulus of pain had been removed. He was not bored, he had no desire for conversation or distraction. Merely to be alone, not to be beaten or questioned, to have enough to eat, and to be clean all over, was completely satisfying. By degrees he came to spend less time in sleep, but he still felt no impulse to get off the bed.

Only child life is real life.

Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad.

From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of double- think- Greetings!

All he wanted was to get home quickly, and then sit down and be quiet.

Privacy, he said, was a very valuable thing. Everyone wanted a place where they could be alone occasionally.

Like all man who have lived much alone, he adjusted himself better to ideas than to people.

Winston woke up with the word Shakespeare on his lips.

It returned to-night, for just a little while-just as long as it takes to smoke two cigarettes. With smoke tickling his lungs, he abstracted himself from the mean and actual world. He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written.

I have had a long life, I have had much time for thought as I lay alone in my stall, and I think I may say that I understand the nature of life on this earth as well as any animal now living.

To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone — to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!

Crusoe's religious preoccupations seemed boring and rather silly.

He thought of nothing he could say.

We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.

I have grown comfortable having these Dead for company, and find them agreeable companions, over there in their Soil & cold stone Houses. In "Wartime Washington: The Civil War Letters of Isabelle Perkins," compiled and edited by Nash Perkins III, entry of February 25, 1862.

For every runner who tours the world running marathons, there are thousands who run to hear the leaves and listen to the rain, and look to the day when it is suddenly as easy as a bird in flight.