Quotes About Solitude

Être attentif à une branche prise dans le vent du matin. Observer le mouvement de la brume et des nuages. Vivre les lieux. Respirer les parfums de la nature. Saisir l'instant. Puis s'enfermer dans son atelier. Et reproduire en un trait unique les nuances de la réalité. Travail solitaire. Souffle divin. Comme tous les artistes sur cette terre, changer le monde de façon invisible. Et cependant évidente…

Cherish your wilderness.

If you make friends with yourself you will never be alone.

If you make friends with yourself, you'll never be alone.

I hate small talk with a passionate hatred. Why? I suppose because any meeting with another human being is collision for me now.

I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my real life again at last. That is what is strange - that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here and the house and I resume old conversations.

That is what is strange—that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone…

I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my "real" life again at last. That is what is strange—that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here and "the house and I resume old conversations.

Whatever peace I know rests in the natural world, in feeling myself a part of it, even in a small way.

Solitude itself is a way of waiting for the inaudible and the invisible to make itself felt. And that is why solitude is never static and never hopeless. On the other hand, every friend who comes to stay enriches the solitude forever; presence, if it has been real presence, does not ever leave.

There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge and to maintain balance within it a precarious business. But I must not forget that, for me, being with people or even with one beloved person for any length of time without solitude is even worse. I lose my center. I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces. I must have time alone in which to mull over any encounter, and to extract its juice, its essence, to understand what has really happened to me as a consequence of it. After

Our two solitudes never quite merged, perhaps, but accepted each other gratefully.

When I am alone the flowers are really seen; I can pay attention to them. They are felt as presences. Without them I would die. Why do I say that? Partly because they change before my eyes. They live and die in a few days; they keep me closely in touch with process, with growth, and also with dying. I am floated on their moments.

and Andy, gloomy and self-devouring, sat at his desk and chewed the cud of memory.

What they never understood about her solitary life was that it was a solitude so inhabited by the past, that she was never alone in it, except sometimes in the rich disorder of her work room upstairs.

The delights of the poet as I jotted them down turned out to be light, solitude, the natural world, love, time, creation itself. Suddenly after the months of depression I am fully alive in all these areas, and awake.

Now it threatens to wreck what I care for most—to drive me back into a solitude that has, since I have been in love for a year and a half, ceased to be fruitful, become loneliness instead.

It always comes back to the same necessity: go deep enough and there's a bedrock of truth, however hard. It looks as if I were meant to be alone, and that any hope of happiness is not meant.

I have longed for one person with whom everything could be shared, but I am slowly making my peace with the knowledge that this will never happen.

Not enough has been said of the value of a life lived alone in that it is lived in a house with an open door, with room for the stranger, for the new friend to be taken in and cherished.

I shiver in my isolation, and must face again and try to tame my loneliness.

The value of solitude—one of its values—is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression. So sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands. The reasons for depression are not so interesting as the way one handles it, simply to stay alive.

LAST NIGHT I lay awake for a long time, a really good "think" for a change.

People who have regular jobs can have no idea of just this problem of ordering a day that has no pattern imposed on it from without. The light goes early.