Quotes About Solitude

The time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself.

To a shameful extent, the charm of marriage boils down to how unpleasant it is to be alone.

I think some people are good at being alone, and some people aren't, and as a child, I really liked it.

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.

Over there, in Europe, all was shame and anger. Here it was exile or solitude, among these languid and agitated madmen who danced in order to die.

One of the best things you can do in this world is take a nap in the woods.

All I needed was to be alone and quiet and in the dark, so that my mind could concentrate itself of fearful things, and it could not be unconcentrated sometimes until daylight.

It has always taken me a long time to think of something to say, and then more often than not I say it to myself.

We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness.

Pursuing originality, the would-be creator works alone. In loneliness one assumes the responsibility for oneself that one cannot fulfill. Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.

The woods is old enough to be fairly free of undergrowth. I go along slowly, watching for whatever may present itself.

I was changed by Nathan's death, because I had to be. Our life together here was over. It was my life alone that had to go on. The strand had slackened. I had begun the half-a-life you have when you have a whole life that you can only remember.

But we had a year when even to look at one another would make us grieve.

All friends and comfortable with each other have ceased to talk, each occupied in that wide quiet with his own thoughts.

a place where thought can take its shape as quietly in the mind as water in a pitcher...

Nothing takes you out of yourself the way a good book does, but at the same time nothing makes you more aware of yourself as a solitary creature, possessing your own particular tastes, memories, associations, beliefs. Even as it fully engages you with another mind (or maybe many other minds, if you count the characters' as well as the author's), reading remains a highly individual act. No one will ever do it precisely the way you do.

In the evening I finished reading a book, and because I was feeling so alone, I buried the book on the edge of the forest with a borrowed spade.

One solitary, overriding thought: get away from here. People frighten me.

Today I often said 'forest' to myself. Truth itself wanders through the forests.

No one knows how another person feels in private.

I should not ever live with anyone, because I just don't have the patience for it. I'm very cranky around other people.

I roused myself from the book which I was dreaming over rather than reading, and left my chambers to meet the cool night air in the suburbs.

He bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of his circumstances, like a skilful general who marshals his limited forces with all the strategy of war . . . . He is his own best friend, and takes delight in privacy whereas the man of no virtue or ability is his own worst enemy, and is afraid of solitude.

MAN is not willingly a political animal. The human male associates with his fellows less by desire than by habit, imitation, and the compulsion of circumstance; he does not love society so much as he fears solitude.