Quotes About Solitude

Books: our unfailing companions

Thus nature has no love for solitude, and always leans, as it were, on some support; and the sweetest support is found in the most intimate friendship.

The apartment was entirely, was only, for her; a wall of books, both read and unread, all of them dear to her not only in themselves, their tender spines, but in the moments or periods they evoked. She had kept some books...which suggested to her that she was, or might be, a person of seriousness, a thinker in some seeping, ubiquitous way; and she had kept, too, a handful of children's books...that conjured for her an earlier, passionately earnest self.

Through the white snow-gate of our ampitheatre, as through a frame we looked eastward upon the summit group; not a tree, not a vestige of vegetation in sight,-sky, snow and granite the only elements in this wild picture.

But here, is this place of eternal bareness and solitude, it seemed that life could never have been. The stark, eroded stones were things that might have been reared by the toil of the dead, to house the monstrous ghouls and demons of primal desolation.

It would seem, from this, that the people of Omanorion had mastered the ultra-civilized art of minding their own business.

He stood and watched his friend hobble around the house, felt the cold claw of loneliness reach out and touch him with icy fingers. A terrible loneliness. The loneliness of age—of age and the outdated.

She was a creature of the woods and hills, of springtime flower and autumn flight of birds. She knew these things and lived with them and was, in some strange way, a specific part of them. She was one who dwelt apart in an old and lost apartment of the natural world. She occupied a place that Man long since had abandoned, if, in fact, he'd ever held it.

Alone and in the silence, I sensed the purpleness - the formless, subtle personality of the things that owned this planet. There was a friendliness, I thought, but a repulsive friendliness, the fawning friendliness of some monstrous beast. And I was afraid.

To dream in isolation can be properly splendid to be sure; but to dream in company seems to me infinitely preferable.

This is a forsaken place...I can think of no use for a place like this, except that you could say of it: I saw the heart of nothing, and survived.

I don't like crowds of any kind. A dinner party of more than six people is not, for me, a pleasure. I get less social as I get older... I am very resistant to anything that keeps me away from the business of making these journeys into the fantastique. They are my reason for being on the planet, as far as I can comprehend, and I pursue them to the cost of almost anything.

He got to his feet and stumbled away from the stench of his vomit, making his way through this graveyard of old glories, heading for the darkest place he could find in which to hide his giddy head.

Like a prisoner without hope of parole she took what entertainment she could find to ease the passage of time.

If you were alone on earth, what would you know? What the mirror told you, that's all. The rest would be myth and conjecture.

You can love the ocean, and many do, but don't expect it to love you back. It's too forever

I'll sing forever and never hear a word.

I went to collect the few personal belongings which...I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.

In its early stages, insomnia is almost an oasis in which those who have to think or suffer darkly take refuge.

Then, bidding farewell to The Knick-Knack, I went to collect the few personal belongings which, at that time, I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.

A journey is not a cure. It brings an illusion, only, of change, and becomes at best a spartan comfort

Sometimes, you feel yourself weightless, thinned. You draw back the curtains (if there are any) on a rectangle of wasteland at dawn, and realise that you are cast adrift from everything that gave you identity. Thousands of miles from anyone who knows you, you have the illusion that your past is lighter, scarcely yours at all. Even your ties of love have been attenuated (the emergency satellite phone is in my rucksack and nobody calls). Dangerously, you may come to feel invulnerable.

Trekkers at high altitudes sometimes sense a person walking a few paces behind them, just out of sight. Often this person is dead. I never feel this, but once or twice I imagine someone walking a little ahead of me.

someone condemned to death says, or thinks an hour before his death, that if he had to live on a high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only have room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than die at once. Only to live, to live and live. Life, whatever it may be...