Quotes About Solitude

To rise above treeline is to go above thought, and after, the descent back into bird song, bog orchids, willows, and firs is to sink into the preliterate parts of ourselves. Losing myself to it-if I can- I do not fall, or if I do, I'm only another waterfall. Collected in: Sisters of the Earth: Women's Prose and Poetry About Nature by Lorraine Anderson

Islands are emblematic not only of solitude but of refuge and sanctuary, the way a small boat is an island in rough seas.

Solace doesn't arrive on a silver platter

Almost daily I return to the high country. Mountain is shoulder: I rub against it and step forward. The hinge squeals, an arm lifts, a rock wall slides, and for a moment the mountain's inner sanctum is revealed.

Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure / Les jours s'en vont je demeure.

But it's peculiar, as soon as I am in the midst of nature and by myself, everything that is base and trivial vanishes without trace. On such days nothing scares me; and this helps me again and again.

Years passed; and he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart.

Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone.

I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it.

For a long time now my heart has had its shutters closed, its steps deserted, formerly a tumultuous hotel, but now empty and echoing like a great empty tomb.

Having no intercourse with anyone, she lived in the torpid state of a sleep-walker.

He leaned against the writing desk and stayed there till nightfall, lost in sorrowful thoughts. After all, she had loved him.

I am alone on this road strewn with bones and bordered by ruins! Angels have their brothers, and demons have their infernal companions. Yet I have but the sound of my scythe when it harvests, my whistling arrows, my galloping horse. Always the sound of the same wave eating away at the world

What could be better than to sit besides the fire with a book and a glowing lamp while the wind beats outside the windows...

Od svega ovoga što sledi niko ništa nije znao, i oni koji su me svakog dana vi?ali nisu znali ništa više od drugih; bili su, u odnosu na mene, kao postelja u kojoj spavam i koja ne zna moje snove. A usotalom, zar ljudsko srce nije ogromno samovanje u koje niko ne može da prodre?

And indeed, what is better than to sit by one's fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the window and the lamp is burning?

There is a place they call La Pature, on the top of the hill, on the edge of the forest. Sometimes, on Sundays, I go and stay there with a book, watching the sunset.

J'ai toujours tâché de vivre dans une tour d'ivoire; mais une marée de merde en bat les murs

My novel is the rock to which I cling and I know nothing of what is taking place in the world.

She constantly complained of her nerves, her chest, her liver. The noise of footsteps made her ill; when people left her, solitude became odious to her; if they came back, it was doubtless to see her die.

Travel, leave everything, copy the birds. The home is one of civilization's sadnesses.

Contact with the world, with which I have been steadily rubbing shoulders now for fourteen months, makes me feel more and more like returning to my shell. I hate the crowd, the herd. It seems to me always atrociously stupid or vile.

Sometimes, too, she told him of what she had read, such as a passage in a novel, of a new play, or an anecdote of the upper ten that she had seen in a feuilleton; for, after all, Charles was something, an ever-open ear, and ever-ready approbation. She confided many a thing to her greyhound. She would have done so to the logs in the fireplace or to the pendulum of the clock.

When she was taken too bad she went off quite alone to the sea-shore, so that the customs officer, going his rounds, often found her lying flat on her face, crying on the shingle. Then, after her marriage, it went off, they say. But with me, replied Emma, it was after marriage that it began.