Quotes About Solitude

If you had more friends, maybe you wouldn't spend so much time with your demons.

THERE HE REMAINED for almost two years, cut off from every other scholar or mathematician. The isolation suited him. "In those days," he would recall half a century later, "I was in the prime of my age for invention & minded Mathematics & Philosophy more than at any time since.

As I drifted along with my bodiless invisibility, I felt myself more and more becoming an empty, floating shape, seeing without being seen and walking without the interference of those grosser creatures who shared my world. It was not an experience completely without interest or even pleasure. The clown's shibboleth of "here we are again" took on a new meaning for me as I felt myself a novitiate of a more rarified order of harlequinry. ("The Last Feast Of The Harlequin")

Jens Bjørneboe wrote that "he who hasn't experienced a full depression alone and over a long period of time—he is a child.

Forsake the world and cling to the shadows.

Sometimes, when I was sitting in the Crimson Cabaret on a rainy night, I thought of myself as occupying a waiting room for the abyss (which of course was exactly what I was doing) and between sips from my glass of wine or cup of coffee I smiled sadly and touched the front pocket of my coat where I kept my imaginary ticket to oblivion.

Only catatonics and coma patients can persevere in a dignified withdrawal from life's rattle and hum.

There are enough fatalities of a mundane sort. Find a quiet place and wait for one of them to carry you off.

For much of that day I had been secluded in my room, intently pursuing a typical activity of my early life and in the process badly ravaging what previously had been a well-made bed.

Their only respite is in the balm of bleakness. Disdainful of the solicitations of hope, they look for sanctuary in desolate places—a scattering of ruins in a barren locale or a rubble of words in a book where someone whispers in a dry voice, "I, too, am here." However,

To think that another person shared my love for the icy bleakness of things .

If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude and leave you by the side of the road with your truth and nothing else.

You see how I live: shadows and silence, leaving things as I find them because I have no reason to disturb them. But there are things that I have known, even though I never wished to know them and cannot give them a name.

Marriage may often be a stormy lake, but celibacy is almost always a muddy horse pond.

The end of the world. Let me tell you about the end of the world. It happened fifty years ago. Maybe a hundred. And since then it's been lovely. I mean it. Nobody tries to bother you. You can relax. You know what? I like the end of the world.

So, without saying anything to the others, it made its way to the farthest corner of the meadow and began to toast an imaginary muffin. That was always the best way to unwind when things got to be too much for it.

Thoughts come clearly while one walks.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But it also gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.

Solitude produces originality, bold & astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd, and the forbidden.

I'm afraid that the best angling is always a respite from burden.

Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.