Quotes About Solitude

The room was empty. It was full of silence and the memory of a nice perfume.

Permanecí sentado, muy quieto, escuchando cómo iba aquietándose la tarde por las ventanas abiertas. Y, muy lentamente, fui aquietándome con ella.

This was the time to leave, to go far away. So I pushed the door open and stepped quietly in.

Wherever I went, whatever I did, this was what I would come back to. A blank wall in a meaningless room in a meaningless house.

I went back to my car again and sat and sat. The top dripped on my knees and my stomach burned from the whiskey. No more cars came up the hill. No lights went on in the house before which I was parked. It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.

I sat very still and listened to the evening grow quiet outside the open windows. And very slowly I grew quiet with it.

I filled and lit my pipe and sat there smoking. Nobody came in, nobody called, nothing happened, nobody cared whether I died or went to El Paso.

she fills a dark and cold place within me as no one else has." "If it is still dark and cold when she is not with you, it is not truly filled.

One view is that privacy consists of 'limited accessibility' – a cluster of three related but independent components: secrecy: information known about an individual; anonymity: attention paid to an individual; and solitude: physical access to an individual.

leave me. And it was a great sense of relief. The

Solitude in the city is about the lack of other people or rather their distance beyond a door or wall, but in remote places it isn't an absence but the presence of something else, a kind of humming silence in which solitude seems as natural to your species as to any other, words strange rocks you may or may not turn over.

I grew up with landscape as a recourse, with the possibility of exiting the horizontal realm of social relations for a vertical alignment with earth and sky, matter and spirit. Vast open spaces speak best to this craving, the spaces I myself first found in the desert and then in the western grasslands.

In the bare room under the old library on the hill in the town at the tip of the small peninsula on the cold island so far from everything else, I lived among strangers and birds.

This is the strange life of books that you enter along as a writer, mapping an unknown territory that arises as you travel. If you succeed in the voyage, others enter after, one at a time, also alone, but in communion with your imagination, traversing your route. Books are solitudes where we meet.

I disappeared into books when I was very young, disappeared into them like someone running into the woods.

Drifting across the vast space, silent except for wind and footsteps, I felt uncluttered and unhurried for the first time in a while, already on desert time.

Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.

We were subject to the wonders and frustrations of unpredictability and better able to withstand them because time moved at what would only later seem a gentle flow, like a river across a prairie before the waterfall of acceleration we would all tumble over. We were prepared for encounters with strangers in ways that the digital age would buffer a lot of us from later. It was an era of both more unpredictable contact and more profound solitude.

It was a place as blank as a sheet of paper. It was the place I had always been looking for... Flat expanses would call to me... These are the places where the desert is most itself: stark, open, free, an invitation to wander, a laboratory of perception, scale, light, a place where loneliness has a luxurious flavor...

Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts

Alone in the car with my social life all before and behind me, I was suspended in the beautiful solitude of the open road, in a kind of introspection that only outdoor space generates, for inside and outside are more intertwined than the usual distinctions allow. The emotion stirred by the landscape is piercing, a joy close to pain when the blue is deepest on the horizon or the clouds are doing those spectacular fleeting things so much easier to recall than to describe.

A lone walker is both present and detached from the world around, more than an audience but less than a participant.

I think of that lost world, the way we lived before these new networking technologies, as having two poles: solitude and communion. The new chatter puts us somewhere in between, assuaging fears of being alone without risking real connection. It is a shallow between two deeper zones, a safe spot between the dangers of contact with ourselves, with others.

Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writer are writers they are readers, living books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the head of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.