Quotes About Solitude

Sleep is good," he said. "And books are better.

I am a creature of grief and dust and utter longings. There is an empty place within me where my heart was once.

He cries behind his wall, I think, and no one knows, not even he. And no one will ever know, and in the end he'll always be alone in smiling pain.

There are other things I newly wake with. A sadness that is different altogether from the cloudy sediment dread bears up. It is dark and solo. I can't see the bottom of it. And another thing I don't recognise, a kind of hunger to grab another person and press them as deep into knowing as I've gone.

The Wall was like that. Sometimes he could almost forget that it was there, the way you forgot about the sky or the earth underfoot, but there were other times when it seemed as if there was nothing else in the world.

Lonely? Yes. But a solemn, brooding, tragic loneliness that a man hates with a passion—and yet loves so much he craves for more.

It is hard to die unmourned.

No one sang up there. No one ever laughed too loud. Even the gods were silent.

A snail hides in his shell.

Maybe he had fallen asleep out in the snows and dreamed himself a safe, warm place.

Consciousness is a born hermit.

I love moving water, I love ships, I love the sharp definition, the concentrated humanity, the sublime solitude of life at sea. The dangers of it only make present to us the peril inherent in all existence, which the stupid, ignorant, untravelled land-worm never discovers; and the art of it, so mathematical, so exact, so rewarding to intelligence, appeals to courage and clears the mind of superstition, while filling it with humility and true religion.

When I was young, I was afflicted with what my aunt called "convenient deafness." I still am. I have the ability to tune out what is going on around me. It is normal for me to retreat inside myself and become less and less aware of my surroundings. If I am in a group and not talking, do not suppose I am listening. I am "away." I am off in another world. Off in my natural habitat, my mind. Being

There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.

Nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of the woods before sunrise.

Truly it may be said that the outside of a mountain is good for the inside of a man.

Like the owl, I fly in the night over my own misfortune.

Sovereignty, loyalty, and solitude.

No one ever discovers the depths of his own loneliness.

No one discovers the depths of his own loneliness.

Tiens, une ville qu'on traverse la nuit, et tout à coup tu dépasses la dernière maison, tu retombes dans le silence, comme dans le vide.

A gap will yawn, achingly, day by day, it will turn into a colossal pit, an abyss without foundation, a gradual invasion of words by margins, blank and insignificant, so that all of us, to a man, will find nothing to say.

Thus the tower was both disease and cure. It rendered him unfit for the world and it remedied the hurts inflicted by the world.

All lovers desire solitude in order to possess each other more completely. They create for each other a new universe inhabited by the two of them alone. ("The Dead Town")