Quotes About Solitude

Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was. The radical aloneness of the PCT had altered that sense. Alone wasn't a room anymore, but the whole wide world, and now I was alone in that world, occupying it in a way I never had before.

For once I didn't ache for a companion. For once the phrase a woman with a hole in her heart didn't thunder into my head. That phrase, it didn't even live for me anymore.

Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was. The

Bagby Hot Springs.

I saw no one, but, strange as it was, I missed no one. I

Each day I felt as if I were looking up from the bottom of a deep well.

ou let time pass. That's the cure . You survive the days. You float like a rabid ghost through the weeks. You cry and wallow and lament and scratch your way back up through the months. And then one day you find yourself alone on a bench in the sun and you close your eyes and lean your head back and you realize you're okay.

when I lay alone and lonely in my tent at night I asked, often out loud: Who is tougher than me? The answer was always the same, and even when I knew absolutely there was no way on this earth it was true, I said it anyway: No one.

She'd been dead an hour. Her limbs had cooled, but her belly was still an island of warm. I pressed my face into the warmth and howled some more.

Of all the things I'd been skeptical about, I didn't feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.O

It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild.

Someone's in here," I called, though that was obvious. Someone was in here. It was me. I was here. I felt in a way I hadn't in ages: the me inside of me, occupying my spot in the fathomless Milky Way.

Here it could be the fourth of July or the tenth of December. These mountains didn't count the days. The

He was the first person I'd met who was doing essentially what I was doing, though he was hiking much farther. He didn't need me to explain what I was doing out here. He understood.

But a woman who walks alone in the wilderness for eleven hundred miles? I'd never been anything like that before. I had nothing to lose by giving it a whirl.

La solitudine era sempre stata un luogo reale per me, come se fosse una stanza dove potevo rifugiarmi per essere davvero me stessa.

The staying and doing it, in spite of everything. In spite of the bears and the rattlesnakes and the scat of the mountain lions I never saw; the blisters and scabs and scrapes and lacerations. The exhaustion and the deprivation; the cold and the heat; the monotony and the pain; the thirst and the hunger; the glory and the ghosts that haunted me as I hiked eleven hundred miles from the Mojave Desert to the state of Washington by myself.

It didn't matter whether someone came along anyway. I was in this alone. I

It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets.

Every evening, I ached for the shelter of my tent, for the smallest sense that something was shielding me from the entire rest of the world, keeping me safe not from danger, but from the vastness itself.

I'd loved books in my regular, pre- PCT life, but on the trail, they'd taken on even greater meaning. They were the world I could lose myself in when the one I was actually in became too lonely or harsh or difficult to bear.

How strange and glorious it was to be anchored to nothing, to be free, in some particular way, for the first time in my life.

to me sitting alone in Old Station, California, on a picnic table beneath the magnificent sky. I didn't feel sad or happy. I didn't feel proud or ashamed. I only felt that in spite of all the things I'd done wrong, in getting myself here, I'd done right.

Difficulty, solitude, and risk are the three things that all rites of passage have in common. It's because putting ourselves in situations where we must do hard things that scare us without anyone there to intervene pushes us beyond what we previously thought ourselves capable of. It expands our perception of our own courage, strength, and endurance. It forges us out of who we were before into the person we will become.