Quotes About Solitude

She loved reading books. While her mom was busy making sandwiches, she would curl up in a corner and read to keep herself company.

There are people in this world, whose lives are nothing but a burden to them. A black veil stands between them and the world. They are utterly alone. They are like shadows in the night, shut off from joy and all gentle human emotions, unable to even give comfort to each other. Their days are full of nothing but darkness, misery and solitude.

He did not feel as if he were inside a Pillar of Darkness in the middle of Yorkshire; he felt more as if the rest of the world had fallen away and he and Strange were left alone upon a solitary island or promontory. The idea distressed him a great deal less than one might have supposed. He had never much cared for the world and he bore its loss philosophically.

The nearest inhabited village is about seven of your English miles to the left.

There is no such sense of solitude as that which we experience upon the silent and vast elevations of great mountains. Lifted high above the level of human sounds and habitations, among the wild expanses and colossal features of Nature, we are thrilled in our loneliness with a strange fear and elation – an ascent above the reach of life's expectations or companionship, and the tremblings of a wild and undefined misgivings.

The snow itself is lonely or, if you prefer, self-sufficient. There is no other time when the whole world seems composed of one thing and one thing only.

Solitude is a good place to visit but a poor place to stay.

Privacy, precisely because it ensures that we are never fully known to others, provides a shelter for imaginative freedom, curiosity and self-reflection.

We are born alone, we live alone, and we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion that for the moment we are not alone." I suppose I was right. Because there I am—most certainly dead and clearly alone. The irony isn't lost on me. I can assure you of that. Yet there is also something else important I want you to take away. I made my living as an actor and film director. My career was built on creating illusions for others and myself.

Surrounded by glistening pine trees, enveloped by rain and fog, for the first time it occurred to Elliot that his extended period of solitude just might be turning into loneliness.

Being alone wasn't nearly as lonely as being with people who didn't love you

In our silence lies our safety.

We all have our methods for coping and they usually happen behind closed doors.

That's something I missed, lying in bed listening to the rain with someone I loved. That's something I missed, having someone I loved.

I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else.

In the fourth century, John Cassian described a condition among his fellow monks that he called "acedia": a "weariness or distress of heart . . . akin to dejection" that took "possession" of unhappy souls and left them lazy, sluggish, restless, and solitary. Later, acedia became widely translated as sloth, one of the seven deadly sins, and blended with melancholy in the popular mind. Both required, at the very least, confession and penitence.

Loneliness is about the scariest thing out there.

Life is both sad and solemn. We are led into a wonderful world, we meet one another here, greet each other---and wander together for a brief moment. Then we lose each other and disappear as suddenly and unreasonably as we arrived.

People go, you know. It's only you that remains. That's the way it will be. That's certain at least. It takes years to learn to be still.

It takes years to learn to be still.

Your silence is a little black garden. You know everything there by heart.

Probably nothing serious or worthwhile can be accomplished without one's willingness to be alone for sustained periods of time, which is not to say that one must live alone, obsessively.

My self is all to me. I don't have any need of you.

If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.