Quotes About Solitude

But sometimes she had found time to be alone, to seek peace, to seek the remnants of herself.

She tried not to think. She tried to allow the quietness and the dusk to soothe her and heal her.

I still miss him. There is a loneliness and an emptiness where he was.

It is a dreary world out there. It makes one thankful after all to be indoors with a fire burning in the hearth.

It is a trial to live in such a retired corner of the country, where one rarely sees anyone worth seeing.

But it was not so much the fresh air that she needed as a few minutes of solitude, a few minutes in which to collect herself. She stood to the side of one open doorway, half hidden by the heavy velvet drapery, and felt a raw ache at the back of her throat. She wanted to cry, she realized. For all the great popularity and success the evening was bringing her she felt a terrible loneliness.

They seemed very much alone together in the room.

He had vaulted into the saddle and ridden down the driveway away from the sea and the cliffs, and away from her, without a backward glance. She had watched him, an ache in her heart, until a line of trees finally hid him from view.

How can you hear your soul if everyone is talking?" He said nothing more that day, but Ha'anala spent hours considering his words. A soul, she decided, was the most real part of a person, and to discover what is real requires privacy.

Sometimes nothing is the scariest thing of all

True education always fosters humility, although mere accumulation of facts fosters pride. All these things are requisite in the cloister. Above all, authentic education fits a person for a life of solitude. A girl who has learned to cultivate the soil of her own intelligence is already conditioned for an interior life. Her education is thus supremely useful to her in the cloister.

Who but a drunk, I wonder looking back, could sit on the porch alone and get in an argument?)

Silence can make somebody bigger, I've come to believe. Grief can, too. A big sad silence emanating from someone can cause you to invest that person with all manner of gravitas.)

in the storm of emotions, we can create a small, peaceful sanctuary within.

I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything - other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world's otherness is antidote to confusion - that standing within this otherness - the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books - can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.

The Old Poets Of China Wherever I am, the world comes after me. It offers me its busyness. It does not believe that I do not want it. Now I understand why the old poets of China went so far and high into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.

EVERY DOG'S STORY I have a bed, my very own. It's just my size. And sometimes I like to sleep alone with dreams inside my eyes. But sometimes dreams are dark and wild and creepy and I wake and am afraid, though I don't know why. But I'm no longer sleepy and too slowly the hours go by. So I climb on the bed where the light of the moon is shining on your face and I know it will be morning soon. Everybody needs a safe place.

Today I'm flying low and I'm not saying a word. I'm letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep. The world goes on as it must, the bees in the garden rumbling a little, the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten. And so forth. But I'm taking the day off. Quiet as a feather. I hardly move though really I'm traveling a terrific distance. Stillness. One of the doors into the temple.

I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.

Far off in the red mangroves an alligator has heaved himself onto a hummock of grass and lies there, studying his poems.

If you're John Muir you want trees to live among. If you're Emily, a garden will do. Try to find the right place for yourself. If you can't find it, at least dream of it. When one is alone and lonely, the body gladly lingers in the wind or the rain, or splashes into the cold river, or pushes through the ice-crusted snow. Anything that touches. God, or the gods, are invisible, quite understandable. But holiness is visible, entirely.

But mostly I just stand in the dark field, in the middle of the world, breathing

When loneliness comes stalking, go into the fields, consider the orderliness of the world.

A Dream of Trees There is a thing in me that dreamed of trees, A quiet house, some green and modest acres A little way from every troubling town, A little way from factories, school, laments. I would have time, I thought, and time to spare, With only streams and birds for company, To build out of my life a few wild stanzas. And then it came to me, that so was death, A little way away from everywhere.