Quotes About Solitude

It's all a sea, I swim out of its in the afternoons.

As I was hiking down the mountain with my pack I turned and I knelt on the trail and said Thank you, shack. The I added Blah with a little grin, because I knew that shack and that mountain would know what that meant, and turned and went on down the trail back to this world

Hopping a freight out of Los Angeles at high noon one day in late September 1955 I got on a gondola and lay down with my duffel bag under my head and my knees crossed and contemplated the clouds as we rolled north to Santa Barbara.

Occasionally bums passed, Mexican mothers passed with children, and the prowl car came by and the cop got out to leak, but most of the time we were alone and mixing up our souls ever more and ever more till it would be terribly hard to say good-by.

I sat back and enjoyed nightfall on the desert and waited for poorchild Angel Dean to wake up again.

There's the spider in the outhouse minding his own business

when they heard we were out in this country not to kill animals but just to climb mountains they took us to be hopeless eccentrics and left us alone.

Across the immense plain of night lay the first Texas town, Dalhart, which I'd crossed in 1947. It lay glimmering on the dark floor of the earth, fifty miles away. The land by moonlight was all mesquites and wastes. On the horizon was the moon. She fattened, she grew huge and rusty, she mellowed and rolled, til the morning star contended and dews began to blow in our windows-and still we rolled.

here I am way below in the Vulcan's Forge itself looking up with sad eyes—Blanking my little Camel cigarette on a billion year old rock that rises behind my head to a height unbelievable—The little kitchen light on the cliff is only on the end of it, behind it the shoulders of the great sea hound cliff go rising up and back and sweeping inland higher and higher till I gasp to think "Looks like a reclining dog, big friggin shoulders on that sonofabitch

there was a most beautiful small lake unknown to the eyes of most men in this world

I decided someday to become a Thoreau of the Mountains. To live like Jesus and Thoreau, except for women.

Beat doesn't mean tired or bushed, so much as it means beato, the Italian for beatific: to be in a state of beatitude, like St. Francis, trying to love all life, trying to be utterly sincere with everyone, practicing endurance, kindness, cultivating joy of heart. How can this be done in our mad modern world of multiplicities and millions? By practicing a little solitude, going off by yourself once in a while to store up that most precious of goals: the vibrations of sincerity.

Qué se siente cuando uno se aleja de la gente y ésta retrocede en el llano hasta que se convierte en motitas que se desvanecen? Es que el mundo que nos rodea es demasiado grande, y es el adiós.

The vast diamond silence of the forest

As though all the world were a bad joke and she was the only one around who knew the punchline.

The dialogue is solo now. I don't talk. No matter who's in bed with me I never do. My thoughts slip off into nightmares sometimes but I don't share them. I have become now what I only began to be then—completely self-protective.

Pray do not interrupt me, he wrote. I am smiling.

Martin heaved a sigh of relief when the door closed behind the laundryman. He was becoming anti-social. Daily he found it a severer strain to be decent with people. Their presence perturbed him, and the effort of conversation irritated him. They made him restless, and no sooner was he in contact with them than he was casting about for excuses to get rid of them.

Having no new companions, nothing remained for him but to read.

Any man who was a man could travel alone.

But remember, my reader, whom I hope to have travel far with me through time and space remember, please, my reader, that I have thought much on these matters that through bloody nights and sweats of dark that lasted years long I have been alone with my many selves to consult and contemplate my many selves.

the human soul is a lonely thing

Too many thousands of opened books yawned between them and him. He had exiled himself.

He could not endure a prolonged contact with another body.  It smacked of danger.  It made him frantic.  He must be away, free, on his own legs, touching no living thing.