Quotes About Solitude

That was a place a person had to travel through alone. I met there a cold indifferent truth: that every person -- even a loved person, and I was not loved -- was alone. On the whole globe, there was no one but myself, and I was shaken and torn down to the merest speck of being.

There was an almost frightening breadth and depth and height to the place, alive with openness and the wild energy of breeze and trees and the crying gulls and the brilliant water. Alone, a speck of human in a place big enough to swallow me, I looked about with eyes that seemed open for the first time.

It's just me.

They let the silence stand then . . . not uneasily, just taking a moment to breathe in time, to listen to the noises around them. How pleasant, Jane thought, to be silent for a few moments. Normally noise overtook her life—normally she sought it, finding silence solitary and confining—suffocating. But how pleasant to be silent with someone.

Sometimes Emily was so lonely that it was like being invisible.

A person needs at intervals to separate himself from family and companions and go to new places. He must go without his familiars in order to be open to influences, to change.

Heaven to be the first one up and to eat breakfast all alone.

Oh, she missed herself. It felt like she used to miss Abe, when he was at Harvard and then after they broke up. No, deeper than that: the way she sometimes missed her parents when she was a child and had slept over at a friend's. She was homesick for herself, a longing so deep and unanswerable that for a moment it took her breath away.

I want to lie in the dust,

She was like a large white flower bathed in light, magnificent in her isolation.

Misery loves company, but today . . . today misery wanted to be alone.

I do believe you would be perfectly happy shut up in your study with your rolls of manuscript all your life, without seeing another human being save a servant to bring you in bread and fruit and water twice a day.

Beyond naming you in my prayers, Thekyn, there is but little that a hermit can do for any man.

J'étais si heureux de sentir mon cœur capable d'un amour nouveau !... J'empruntais, dans cet enthousiasme factice, les formules mêmes qui, si peu de temps auparavant, m'avaient servi pour peindre un amour véritable et longtemps éprouvé. La lettre partie, j'aurais voulu la retenir, et j'allais rêver dans la solitude à ce qui me semblait une profanation de mes souvenirs.

Je suis le ténébreux, — le veuf, — l'inconsolé, Le prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie : Ma seule étoile est morte, — et mon luth constellé Porte le Soleil noir de la Mélancolie." "I am the Dark One, – the Widower, – the Unconsoled The Aquitaine Prince whose Tower is destroyed: My only star is dead,- and my constellated lute Bears the black Sun of Melancholia.

People cannot win against their loneliness because loneliness is this world's worst kind of pain.

It was either Voltaire or Charlie Sheen who said, 'We are born alone. We live alone. We die alone. And anything in between that can give us the illusion that we're not, we cling to.'

If there was one last place in which it was possible to escape the riff-raff of humanity, it was Heaven.

It was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forevermore, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.

As for his friends, he no longer had any. One after another they had all dropped away, as though friendship had become a burden which he had at first made every effort to shoulder and then had gradually realised that there was no need for and let go, and it had gone.

Everyone left and we have remained on a path that goes on without us.

The night itself is riddled with her, wide with her, and alive with her. It seems that it has no word or other traveler, no other secret sign.

Vivo in una solitudine selvaggia e raffinata, misera e opulenta, dove le passioni ardono s'inceneriscono riardono incessantemente.

Of all things that can happen to us, triumph is the most difficult to endure when we are alone. Deprived of witnesses, it shrinks at once.