Quotes About Solitude

What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.

Zander was always sneaking off to the library to get more books ... Guy would read anything. Said books were more interesting than people.

That's the worst part, really, when you think about it. Try as you might, nobody will ever truly know who you are. You're just somebody alone in a house with your thoughts and nothing else.

Grief was a place, Sara understood, where a person went alone. It was like a room without doors, and what happened in that room, all the anger and the pain you felt, was meant to stay there, nobody's business but yours.

How strange it was..., one minute you were all alone with your thoughts, the next somebody came along who seemed to know the deepest part of you, who could open you like a book.

Grief was a place, Sara understood, where a person went alone.

When evening fell he dragged a chair out to the porch, where he sat through the night, a shotgun on his lap, staring into the dark.

Try as you might, nobody will ever truly know who you are. You're just somebody alone in a house with your thoughts and nothing else.

but his mind, free to go wherever it wished, chose to move over the past, hovering atop it like a bird over some immense body of water, no shoreline in sight, only the distant reflection of himself in its shining surface for company.

man sat in a concrete box long enough, thinking about his own death, and he boiled down to milky dust like water in a teapot forgotten on a stove;

But probably they were all sleeping, too. It was only she, Arnette, who was sentenced to a night of pacing the halls of her mind. Because

Sara waited a respectful time, knowing there was nothing she could do to ease the woman's pain. Grief was a place, Sara understood, where a person went alone. It was like a room without doors, and what happened in that room, all the anger and the pain you felt, was meant to stay there, nobody's business but yours.

What were words, when all I'd had were mountains for company?

One hour of work in peace and quiet is worth two hours in the office when other people are there, meetings are happening, and you're distracted.

The best part about being alone is that you really don't have to answer to anybody. You do what you want.

Silence, too, can be torture.

There is real comfort in being quiet.

But such was her fortitude that she stayed at Les Naÿssès until the age of ninety, living there alone after Hervé's death in September 1989. She died on 17 June 2008, having continued to work in her garden almost until the

Life is so impermanent that it's not about somebody else or things around me, it's about knowing you are completely alone in this world and being content inside.

The idea is to make the space around you into a zone where nothing mortal can survive.

Being free always involves being lonely.

I felt in need of a great pilgrimage, so I sat still for three days…

Silence is not a lack of words. Silence is presence itself. (p. 26)

Let there be spaces in your togetherness.