Quotes About Solitude

I never understood until the past months why the Master so often withdrew alone into the wilderness. There is not only food and medicine for one's body; there is also healing for the heart and strength for the soul in nature. One gets very close to God…in these temples of God's own building.

But in the end, in the end one is alone. We are all of us alone. I mean I'm told these days we have to consider ourselves as being in society... but in the end one knows one is alone, that one lives at the heart of a solitude.

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.

Real reading is a lonely activity.

Such a reader does not read for easy pleasure or to expiate social guilt, but to enlarge a solitary existence.

Rereading old books is the highest form of literary pleasure and instructs you in what is deepest in your own yearnings. Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends. Imaginative literature is otherness and as such, alleviates loneliness.

Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.

Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness.

There are places in my heart...where no living soul...has...or can ever...trespass.

It was completely still, not a sound within or outside. As if it was just the two of them, nothing more in the world, in this room alone.

Alone in her apartment, writing or thinking on her own, everything was always clear. It was talking aloud, interacting with people that tripped her up: It was reality she found difficult

That was the only decision there was once upon a time: what to do with the night.

My mind was on a silent hillside, in a land far away, and gods who should be left to sleep. *

It's a fish eagle, Jock.' 'It sounds so sad.' He nodded. 'It is. They mate for life and if their mate dies they never take another. That's the sound they make when they've lost their mate.' It was something I will never forget. Even now, years later, when I watch the sun go down, I still hear it, an echo from my past.

Team sports aren't my thing. I find it easier to pick something up if I can do it at my own speed. And you don't need a partner to go running, you don't need a particular place, like in tennis, just a pair of trainers.

Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o'clock in the morning can only produce writing that matches what they do. And that includes me.

But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning.

Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all. It just leads to disappointment.

But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning.

Silence is golden, but sometimes invisibility is golder.

when a rose stands alone, thriving where no others thrive, a rare bouquet of one still strong, still alive.... and I smile...

In the hours of contemplation and solitude, and in the hours when he is in the midst of the world, the music is always there, he is always enjoying its harmony. ##

Sometimes you have to be alone to think, and sometimes the best place for thinking isn't home.

Joss's ears perked up. He loved libraries. Nowhere else in the world felt so safe and homey. Nowhere else smelled like books and dust and happy solitude quite like a library did.