Quotes About Solitude

I don't approve of open fires. You can't think, or talk or even make love in front of a fireplace. All you can do is stare at it.

To love ourselves is to act respectfully toward ourselves, to enjoy our own company when in solitude, to honor our limits and speak our truths.

I love that quiet time when nobody's up and the animals are all happy to see me.

Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.

The reveries of two solitary souls prepare the sweetness of loving.

Six thousand feet above men and time ...

I'm very shy really. I spend a lot of time in my room alone reading or writing or watching television.

The love of retirement has in all ages adhered closely to those minds which have been most enlarged by knowledge, or elevated by genius. Those who enjoyed everything generally supposed to confer happiness have been forced to seek it is the shades of privacy.

This is what people don't see, wrapped up in their cities, with the noise and the smoke, and their tiny boxes for houses. Up there you can breathe. You can't hear the town talking and talking. No eyes on you, 'cept God's. It's just you and the trees and the birds and the river and the sky and freedom . . . Out there, it's good for the soul.

Around me a million people are living, breathing, eating, arguing. A million lives completely divorced from mine. It is a strange sort of peace.

I always think this is the kind of place that people come back to. When they've become tired of everything else. Or when they don't have enough imagination to go anywhere else.

I closed my eyes and lay my head against the headrest, and we sat there together for a while longer, two people lost in remembered music, half hidden in the shadow of a castle on a moonlit hill.

You're having another unnervingly quiet day. What happened to 'chatty to the point of vaguely irritating'?

To be the recipient of such hate, without the prospect of a word of comfort from those who loved you. The way Margery had isolated herself made Alice want to weep. It was like an animal that deliberately takes itself off somewhere solitary before it dies.

I wondered how it would feel to be out there, on your own, in the middle of nowhere.

Sometimes you need time away to sort things out in your head. It makes everything clearer.

distance, through the clatter of the

I took my place on the bench and we sat in companionable silence for a while.

So Lily's mouth would open and nothing would come out, then Louisa would start rattling on about meeting her grandmother or whether she had eaten something and she had realized she was on her own.

wondering how she could be in a house full of people and also in the loneliest place on earth.

I always think this is the kind of place that people come back to. When they've got tired of everything else. Or when they don't have enough imagination to go anywhere else.

I mean, I'm not one of those people who has a massive circle of friends. I was with my last boyfriend for ages and we... we didn't really go out much. And then there was... Bill. We just used to talk all the time.

Oh, but it was such a relief to have someone to talk to. I was so unused to people who actually listened—as opposed to those, at the bar, who only wanted to hear the sound of their own voices—that talking to Sam was a revelation. He didn't interrupt, or tell me what he thought, or what I should do. He listened, and nodded.

I don't think I had ever felt lonelier in my life.