Quotes About Solitude

She preferred those occupations that require no companion. She walked alone, rad alone, sat alone in the sittingroom or in the ray of faint sunshine which sometimes penetrated the little courtyard ab about one o'clock. She was less open-hearted and confiding than before; it was as if someone -- not necessarily Jonathan Strange -- had disappointed her and she was determined to be more independent in future.

If I leave, then the House will have no Inhabitant and how will I bear the thought of it Empty? Yet the simple fact is that if I remain in these Halls I will be alone.

all I get the sense that she is alone, perhaps by choice or perhaps because no one else was courageous enough to follow her into the darkness.

And where were you?' he asks. 'While you were gone?' 'I was in a house with many rooms. The sea sweeps through the house. Sometimes it swept over me, but always I was saved.

It's one of the reasons I became a writer, to be able to smoke in peace.

And in the end, I lost him. I did it on purpose, the way Garance lost Baptiste in the crowd. I needed to be alone, I felt. I wanted to be going on alone to my future.

Emptiness and boredom: what a complete understatement. What I felt was complete desolation. Desolation, despair and boredom.

This was what was wonderful, standing alone in the big, soft night rewriting the past to make myself miss what had never been. Now that it was over, I could turn the past into anything I wanted.

I needed to be alone, I felt. I wanted to be going on alone to my future.

3 years, 1 month, 1 week, and 6 days since I'd seen daylight.

you're only yourself when no ones watching!

On nights like this, when he rode out from the dark, silent house to the dark, deserted park, he could forget. He could be nothing but a solitary rider on a fast horse, wind in his face and the world open around him. No walls, no bars, no quiet weeping or screams or death. None of that could catch him. On a night like this, none of it could find him.

Such silence has an actual sound, the sound of disappearance.

Niki just wanted to be left alone to think about Tom. He

Perhaps... these days of less sunlight are opportunities for more contemplative time, more looking deeply to see what can only be seen in the dark.

Gideon was a man who'd lived an entirely solitary life, and yet he'd accepted me into it so completely that he could envision a future I was afraid to imagine. I was so scared I'd only be setting myself up for a heartbreak I couldn't survive.

Today she would like to be alone in the sea: at ease in the water, letting herself go, without anyone calling her from the shore, without spectacular rescues. Simply in the water, with the violent sea she misses because she needs it more and more. Schedules disappeared during those vacations or were so radically modified that the rhythm they marked was almost her own. Lunch was not at one but at three; dinner not at nine but at eleven.

How we need another soul to cling to.

I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted to lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. How free it is, you have no idea how free.

There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.

I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come.

I am too pure for you or anyone. From the poem Fever 103°, 20 October 1962

Now I know what loneliness is, I think. Momentary loneliness, anyway. It comes from a vague core of the self - - like a disease of the blood, dispersed throughout the body so that one cannot locate the matrix, the spot of contagion.

I had been alone more than I could have been had I gone by myself.