Quotes About Solitude

For the most part, I hang out in my back yard with my dog, but there's no paparazzi trying to check that out.

I was not a popular little girl. I played Robinson Crusoe in a small wooden fort that my parents built for me in the back yard. In the fort, I was neither ostracized nor ill at ease - I was self-reliant, brave, ingeniously surviving, if lost.

Like most writers, I read constantly. I used to hide in remote parts of the yard and house so I could read in peace.

I like solitude. I'm very good at being disconnected. I do a lot of disappearing. People who know me go, 'Oh yeah, Mailman, she's gone into her cave again.' I'm like that, a bit of a hibernating bear. Like that crocodile that just sits there in the water and doesn't do much. I was always a bit of a dreamer as a kid, so that hasn't changed.

My favorite hobby is being alone. I like to be alone. I also like dancing, fishing, playing poker sometimes and vegetable gardening - corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, I have a big garden every year.

When all the routines and details and the human bores get on our nerves, we just yearn to go away from here to somewhere else. To go fishing is a sound, a valid, and an accepted reason for an escape. It requires no explanation.

Whenever I'm out, I have a bit of a yearning to be in my house, to be able to shut the door on the world.

I reflected much on that vain desire, which had pursued me for so many years, of being in solitude in order to be a Christian. I have now, thought I, solitude enough; but am I therefore the nearer being a Christian? Not if Jesus Christ be the model of Christianity.

Michael died five years ago this January, and the first thing that really struck me about the script was the part about her peeling off from the funeral and just getting into a rowboat and having a real kind of cry where nobody was.

All of our great traditions, religious, contemplative and artistic, say that you must a learn how to be alone - and have a relationship with silence. It is difficult, but it can start with just the tiniest quiet moment.

I stay home. It's the best place to be alone. There is hardly any walk-through traffic.

I've always felt strongly that a writer shouldn't be engaged with other writers, or with people who make books, or even with people who read them. I think the farther away you get from the literary traffic, the closer you are to sources. I mean, a writer doesn't really live; he observes.

I dealt with the tragedies to Gerald McClellan and Michael Watson. I only had peace when I was away training.

I'm happy that I worked alone on 'Tragedy,' but it's obvious that I was trying to create something much bigger than I could do on my own.

We were now arrived at the close of our solitary journeyings along the St. Joseph's trail.

I'm a somewhat isolated person in my own way, or I move along a little trail, I go this place, I go that place. It's not like I'm varying my exposure.

First stop when I'm on set is my trailer. I like to set my stuff down and lock the door. Be in my own space for a few minutes.

When I go train hopping and I look up into the sky, there are always so many more stars than I remember there were.

No other teammates can help you when you're on the ice by yourself against the clock. So I decided that if I'm going to race on my own, I'm going to train on my own.

I drank because I enjoyed it. I was happy sitting at the end of the bar on my own, reading the paper. I've always enjoyed my own company, and that stems from riding alone. I never trained with anyone - and I still don't. I've always been happy with my own thoughts, and that sums me up as an individual-pursuit rider.

Team sports aren't my thing. I find it easier to pick something up if I can do it at my own speed. And you don't need a partner to go running, you don't need a particular place, like in tennis, just a pair of trainers.

In my early 20s, there was a period when all I owned was about a dozen CDs and a crappy Discman. I'd listen to 'The Man Who Sold The World' album endlessly as I sat on off-peak trains jerking around the Sussex countryside to and from the asylum I worked in.

Although I've made notes for things and even written synopses sitting in trains or on park benches, for the complete composition of things I need absolute solitude, preferably an empty house.

Imagination, the traitor of the mind, has taken my solitude and slain it.