Quotes About Solitude

It is no use thinking that writing of poems – the actual writing – can accommodate itself to a social setting, even the most sympathetic social setting of a workshop composed of friends. It cannot. The work improves there and often the will to work gets valuable nourishment and ideas. But, for good reasons, the poem requires of the writer not society or instruction, but a patch of profound and unbroken solitude.

I woke And crept Like a cat On silent feet About my own house- To look At you While you were sleeping, Your hair Sprayed on the pillow, Your eyes Closed, Your body Safe and solitary, And my doors Shut for your safety And your comfort. I did this Thinking I was intruding Yet wanting to see The most beautiful thing That has ever been in my house.

Today 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.

There was only myself and the world, and it was I who was leaving.

I'd seen their hoofprints in the deep needles and knew they ended the long night under the pines... I was thinking: so this is how you swim inward, so this is how you flow outward, so this is how you pray. (from poem, Five A.M. in the Pinewoods)

For me it was important to be alone; solitude was a prerequisite to being openly and joyfully susceptible and responsive to the world of leaves, light, birdsong, flowers, flowing water.

Wherever I am, the world comes after me. It offers me its busyness. It does not believe that I do not want it.

I learned to build bookshelves and brought books to my room, gathering them around me thickly. I read by day and into the night. I thought about perfectibility, and deism, and adjectives, and clouds, and then foxes. I locked my door, from the inside, and leaped from the roof and went to the woods, by day or darkness.

Oh, I would like to live in an empty house, with vines for walls, and a carpet of grass. No planks, no plastic, no fiberglass.

But very little of it can do more than start you on your way to the real, unimaginably difficult goal of writing memorably. That work is done slowly and in solitude, and it is as improbable as carrying water in a sieve.

Only last week I went out among the thorns and said to the wild roses: deny me not, but suffer my devotion. Then, all afternoon, I sat among them.

The Instant Today one small snake lay, looped and solitary in the high grass, it swirled to look, didn't like what it saw and was gone in two pulses forward and with no sound at all, only two taps, in disarray, from that other shy one, my heart.

Every night the owl with his wild monkey-face calls through the black branches, and the mice freeze and the rabbits shiver in the snowy fields— and then there is the long, deep trough of silence when he stops singing, and steps into the air.

Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart—to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.

Inside every mind, there's a hermit's cave full of light.

Miles below in the cold woods, with the mouse and the owl, with the clearness of water sheeted and hidden, with the reason for the wind forever a secret, he descends and sits with me, his voice like the snapping of bones.

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.

But it is sleep as Poe most sought and valued it—not for the sake of rest, but for escape. Sleep, too, is a kind of swooning out of this world.

Fifteen minutes of music with nothing playing.

I have my ways of praying, as you no doubt have yours. Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds, until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing. — Mary Oliver, from "How I Go to the Woods," Swan: Poems and Prose Poems (Beacon Press, 2010)

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.

For hours I wandered over the fields and the only thing that kept me company was a song, it glided along with my delicious dark happiness, my heavy, bristling and aching delight at the world which has been like this forever and forever— the leaves, the birds, the ponds, the loneliness

How often now I just sit, with my elbows on the desk and my hands holding my face bold and upright, and stare into the past.

There was silence.