Quotes About Solitude

The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life.

It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn't to be shared, no matter how hard you try.

There's a special phenomenology to walking in woods in winter.

Shocking loss isn't to be shared, no matter how hard you try.

At times of difficulty, watching birds ushers you into a different world, where no words need to be spoken.

ran into my old room, sat on the little bed and hugged my knees, pain worming around inside my chest like a thing with a million tiny teeth and claws.

I look. There it is. I feel it. The insistent pull to the heart that the hawk brings, that very old longing of mine to possess the hawk's eye. To live the safe and solitary life; to look down on the world from a height and keep it there. To be the watcher; invulnerable, detached, complete. My eyes fill with water. Here I am, I think. And I do not think I am safe.

So the thing is, you all share the same kind of pain, exactly the same, but you're too busy experiencing total agony to feel anything other than completely alone. That's what it's like!' I

So often we see solitary contemplation as simply the correct way to engage with nature. But it is always a political act, bringing freedom from the pressures of other minds, other interpretations, other consciousnesses competing with your own.

It was quiet, and very, very dangerous. It was a madness designed to keep me sane. My mind struggled to build across the gap, make a new and inhabitable world. The problem was that it had nothing to work with. There was no partner, no children, no home. No nine-to-five job either. So it grabbed anything it could. It was desperate, and it read off the world wrong.

Falling in love is a desolating experience, but not when it is with a countryside.

The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life. I was turning into a hawk.

For a boy who always felt imperilled, that pitch-black cave was a refuge, and he returned to it in his imagination again and again.

I can't help but think of a line written by the poet Marianne Moore: The cure for loneliness is solitude.

I collected pictures and I drew pictures and I looked at the pictures by myself. And because no one else ever saw them, the pictures were perfect and true. They were alive.

If you wish to be truly free, you must love no one.

If you wish to be truly free, you must love no one. But of course if you take that path you may also find that in the end you're unloved.

I would like to have nothing to do with you for hours on end and then come back and find you, come back with things I've thought and found all on my own— on my own, not through you.

She doesn't want to see anyone. She's happy like that, I think. Always relieved at the end of a visit.

Looking at those last photos was like flipping through a book of silence.

Dad has what I think of as only child darkside syndrome; he does everything as if he is being watched.

To you who eat a lot of rice because you are lonely To you who sleep a lot because you are bored To you who cry a lot because you are sad I write this down. Chew on your feelings that are cornered Like you would chew on rice. Anyway life is something that you need to digest. —CHUN YANG HEE

B)ut behind it all-- nothing: just vodka and the void. (Coco Chanel)

The truth is that solitude is the creative condition of genius, religious or secular, and the ultimate sterilising of it. No human soul can long ignore "the giant agony of the world" and live, except indeed the mollusc life, a barnacle upon eternity.