Quotes About Solitude

Because they were alone. In fact everyone was alone all the time, but when you got sick you knew it, and that was a lot of what suffering was-knowing.

It was good to be alone. Really alone, without other people around you to let you imagine that your life had mingled with theirs. But that never was true. Even together, people were as solitary as cows in a field chewing their own cud.

And Marty understood that there was never going to be anyone to tell her these things. She had no idea why this should be so; it was just something she knew.

wellness. During her time in Malta, she did not speak

Privacy and loneliness were the traditional luxuries accorded to a skipper.

He was a person whose universe was very small indeed. It held only one person, himself, surrounded by things whose sole function was to be manipulated for his amusement or profit.

Long periods of languor, indolence and staring at the ceiling are needed by any creative person in order to develop ideas.

Doesn't matter where you live. You're always just kind of alone with your shit, you know?

Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense. Alone, the world offers itself freely to us. To be unmasked, it has no choice.

Alone, the world offers itself freely to us. To be unmasked, it has no choice.

You don't need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Don't even listen, simply wait. Don't even wait. Be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you. To be unmasked, it has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet. —Franz Kafka

But having acquired a taste for solitude, each of them spent days separate and alone, Leigh-Cheri in the attic, Bernard in the pantry. Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense. Alone, the world offers itself freely to us. To be unmasked, it has no choice.

I don't think I've ever felt more disoriented and alone. Or more thoroughly, serenely, at home. Every true romantic will know what I mean.

I removed the freeway from its temporal context. Overpasses, cloverleafs, exit ramps took on the personality of Mayan ruins for me. Without destination, without cessation, my run was often silent and empty; there were no increments, no arbitrary graduations reducing time to functional units. I abstracted and purified.

Ice cubes clink against the swizzle stick of your spinal column, and you start to wonder if this would not be the ideal moment to go home, take a hot shower, and curl up with a glass of chardonnay in front of a friendly computer.

He said that when you're locked up, smoking a cigarette is like having a friend.

Pour vivre heureux, vivons cachés, says an old French dictum—to live happily, live hidden.

The more we train ourselves to spend time with God and him alone, the more we will discover that God is with us at all times and in all places. Henri Nouwen

Septimus. When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be all alone, on an empty shore. Thomasina. Then we will dance. Is this a waltz?

The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devices—after a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people's.

James] Joyce... an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized....

Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.

No one gets up after death-there is no applause-there is only silence and some second-hand clothes, and that's death.

For you, freedom means leave me alone. For the masses, it means give me a break.