Quotes About Solitude

I've done what I could; a man that can live as lone as I have and not know when to quit is a fool.

Some looked at him as they passed, at the man sitting quietly behind the wheel of a small car, with his invisible life ravelled out about him like a wornout sock.

era de esa clase de individuos a los que no se les ve a primera vista, aunque estén solos en el fondo de una piscina de cemento vacía

He was known through all that country. He had no kin, no ties, and he antedated everyone; nobody knew how old he was—a tall thin man in a filthy frock coat and no shirt beneath it and a long, perfectly white beard reaching below his waist, who lived in a mud-daubed hut in the river bottom five or six miles from any road. He made and sold nostrums and charms, and it was said of him that ate not only frogs and snakes but bugs as well—anything that he could catch.

The grass was buzzing in the moonlight where my shadow walked on the grass.

The newly emerging ideal was solitude, purity, perfect waves far from civilization.

For me, and not only for me, surfing harbors this paradox: a desire to be alone with waves fused to an equal desire to be watched, to perform.

and the romantics end up anchorites in the desert.

Three in the morning. Making yourself a cup of coffee in the dark, using a flashlight when you pour the boiling water.

Otherwise, he'd have found the ruin empty, and then, somehow, very quietly and almost naturally, he would have died.

Unstuck her in time, day-sleeping in her bedroom. How old was she? Seven, seventeen, twenty-seven? Dusk or dawn? Couldn't tell by the light outside. Checked her phone. Evening. The house silent, her mother probably asleep. Out through the smell of her grandfather's fifty years of National Geographic, shelved in the hall.

Sometimes, at dawn, perched on the edge of his unmade bed, drifting into sleep—he never slept lying down, now—he thought about her. Antoinette. And them. The belonging kind. Sometimes he speculated dreamily. . . . Perhaps they were like house mice, the sort of small animal evolved to live only in the walls of man-made structures.

I had no idea that no one else would do it.

Seated here, none too comfortably, on a truncated stalagmite, he could at least be glad the place made a decent flat white.

Slick stayed where he was, looking up at Gentry's pale eyes, gray in this light, his taut face. Why did he put up with Gentry anyway? Because you needed somebody, in the Solitude. Not just for electricity; that whole landlord routine was really just a shuck. He guessed because you needed somebody around.

When Lowbeer wished a conversation in public to be private, which she invariably did, London emptied itself around her.

What I mean is... maybe it's only us...

We're all mad, the whole damned race. We're wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we're all mad and in solitary confinement.

If you could shut your ears to the slow suck down of the sea and boil of the return, if you could forget how dun and unvisited were the ferny coverts on either side, then there was a chance that you might put the beast out of mind and dream for a while.

You could concentrate much more deeply when you were alone with agony.

I can live without love." And with that she left Westley alone.

He always felt better when he could dole out pain alone.

each of God's beings, from the lowliest on up, is entitled to at least a few moments of genuine privacy.

And, suddenly, it came home to me that I was a little man in a little ship, in the midst of a very great sea.