Quotes About Solitude

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations — such is a pleasure beyond compare.

I was a leaf that had released its hold on the tree. This was my moment of motion, of flight – my solitary dance through the air, separate from my billion twins. No longer green and faceless on the tree, not yet crushed and decomposing on the forest floor.

Badger hates Society, and invitations, and dinner, and all that sort of thing.

when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.

A VOICE FROM THE CAVE

Oh lonesome's a bad placeTo get crowded into.

Snow is the only one of us that leaves no tracks.

Any who live, stand alone in one place, together.

Here was this man Tom Guthrie in Holt standing at the back window in the kitchen of his house smoking cigarettes and looking out over the back lot where the sun was just coming up.

Or were I in the wildest waste, Sae black and bare, sae black and bare, The desert were a paradise, If thou wert there, if thou wert there.

There is nothing more provocative than minding your own business.

You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary -- it's always imaginary -- world in which I would like to live.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

What no wife of a writer understands is that a writer is working when he's staring out the window.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out the window.

Magnificent desolation.

If, occasionally, my mind gets the sense that the world around me is not doing what I'd like it to do, I may disappear for a day or even a week. That's something I've needed to deal with.

There is a solitide in seeing you, Followed by your company when you are gone. You are like heaven's veins of lightning. I cannot see till afterward How beautiful you are. There is a blindness in seeing you, Followed by the sight of you when you are gone.

Only by remembering you, O east of my west, Can I make my lovers real to me, And only by forgetting you Can I find my truest solitude Strange and unknown to me.

No woman has ever stepped on Little America -- and we have found it to be the most silent and peaceful place in the world.

Solitude is greater than I anticipated. My sense of values is changing, and many things which before were in solution in my mind now seem to be crystallizing. I am better able to tell what in the world is wheat for me and what is chaff. In fact, my definition of success itself is changing.

Solitude is an excellent laboratory in which to observe the extent to which manners and habits are conditioned by others.

Peace doesn't require two people; it requires only one. It has to be you. The problem begins and ends there.

The night Hath been to me a more familiar face Than that of man; and in her starry shade Of dim and solitary loveliness I learned the language of another world.