Quotes About Solitude

I find that when I come out of the library I'm in what I call the library bliss of being totally taken away from the distractions of life." [ Woman's Day magazine, March 12, 2002]

I liked sleeping in the attic. There was no Crucifixion scene hanging at the foot of the bed to trouble me. There were no paintings at all, but the clean scent of linseed oil and the musk of the earth pigments. I liked my view of the New Church, and the quiet. No one came up except him. The girls did not visit me as they sometimes had in the cellar, or secretly search through my things. i felt alone there, perched high above the noisy household, able to see it from a distance.

had come to London for a reason, not to enjoy anonymity and solitude whilst eyeing the wider horizon.

Father always said fishing is about not fishing as much as fishing." Indeed. And about not thinking. We all need to do things that take us out of ourselves.

Loneliness is like sitting in an empty room and being aware of the space around you. It is a condition of separateness. Solitude is becoming one with the space around you. It is a condition of union. Loneliness is small, solitude is large. Loneliness closes in around you; solitude expands toward the infinite. Loneliness has its roots in words, in an internal conversation that nobody answers; solitude has its roots in the great silence of eternity.

It's lonely up in the top

A sort of intimacy is forged when someone reads your book and both you and your reader wind up less alone in the world.

Being alone feels more honest.

My own view is that everyone works too hard and too long and they ought to get out more. There isn't time in their improverished lives to do anything creative, or even to just sit and stare, one of my favourite occupations. And how the wired-in young—never without their music, never out of touch because of mobile phones, constantly sharing everything, even pictures—are going to cope if they ever encounter solitude and silence is another thing.

When one spends a great deal of the formative and imaginative period of his life alone in the woods, the ability to note and track detail becomes highly developed. He becomes attuned to the subtlest changes in his surroundings, and it's easy to imagine that there might be hidden, immaterial processes beneath the surface.

For a long time that had seemed to her to be the key to life: Life--real life--was just a solitude waiting to be transfigured.

his eyes took in the barren slopes and the scattered boulders and the lonley gray road windingits way into the fading hills,and i could feel him thinking to himself this is no place to die

I used to come here on my own sometimes... Id' stay down here for ages." Her voice was barely audible. "It's a good place for sadness...

I wanted to turn everything off, too. Just press a button — click — and shut myself down. Turn off my heart, turn off my mind, turn off my body — just lie there, senseless, like a dormant tree in winter, waiting for the spring to return.

What's wrong with silence? Listen to it, it's beautiful.

toboggan full of winter gear across a frozen lake, where the sense of isolation is so great I feel like the only man on Earth;

What sets a canoeing expedition apart is that it purifies you more rapidly and inescapably than any other. Travel a thousand miles by train and you are a brute; pedal five hundred on a bicycle and you remain basically a bourgeois; paddle a hundred in a canoe and you are already a child of nature.

As she wove in and out of all the people - rushing, talking, eating, laughing; some in clumps, some alone - she realized that no one, no one at all in the airport, or on the entire planet for that matter, knew her thoughts, knew what she was carrying inside her head and heart. And at that very minute, what was inside her head and heart made her feel as though there was no one else in the whole world she would rather be.

From that point on, I guess I sort of realized that my imagination, which made life tolerable, needed to be kept a secret from the rest of the world.

But I was sixteen. I lived inside of myself way more than I lived inside of this town.

At night I count not the stars but the dark.

Your company also includes your mental and psychological company – the ideas you entertain, the ambitions you nurture, the sensitivities and sensibilities you develop and the books you read. All of these represent a form of company because they are your companions in solitude.

Once through this ruined city did I pass I espied a lonely bird on a bough and asked 'What knowest thou of this wilderness?' It replied : 'I can sum it up in two words: 'Alas! Alas

In solitude is bliss.