Quotes About Solitude

You see it's a peculiar case. It won't be like an ordinary marriage, a young couple and so on, nor a mariage de convenance, either, in the ordinary sense. Here are two lonely people intending to live solitary lives. Suddenly, you -- most kindly, I must say -- introduce us. I, with my great experience and my instinctive flair, see immediately that this is the right woman in the right place. I bother her until she consents -- and there you are.

I had to share a room with my sister, who is five and a half years older than I am. We didn't get along well, and I felt that I had no privacy. So books were my privacy, because no one could join me in a book, no one could comment on the action or make fun of it. I used to spend hours reading in the bathroom -- and we only had one bathroom in our small apartment!

We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.

Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet.

Writing is a strange and solitary activity. There are dispiriting times when you start working on the first few pages of a novel. Every day, you have the feeling you are on the wrong track. This creates a strong urge to go back and follow a different path. It is important not to give in to this urge but to keep going.

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.

May we have communion with God in the secret of our hearts, and find Him to be to us as a little sanctuary.

The tree I had in the garden as a child, my beech tree, I used to climb up there and spend hours. I took my homework up there, my books, I went up there if I was sad, and it just felt very good to be up there among the green leaves and the birds and the sky.

I used to like to break into other people's houses and sit in their rooms. I found it very comforting to be in someone's empty house.

When I was younger, I could do something useful just by being free for half a day, but now I need five days to get the world I've left out of my head and ten days or a fortnight not talking to anyone to hold what I need to hold inside my head.

I find it quite useful to be alone when I'm making music, but also in general, in life.

I've always been someone who needs someone with them to poke and annoy. I'm useless at being by myself.

Unknown in Paris, I was lost in the great city, but the feeling of living there alone, taking care of myself without any aid, did not at all depress me. If sometimes I felt lonesome, my usual state of mind was one of calm and great moral satisfaction.

It's fascinating to go somewhere where you're away from everything. There are no houses, no buildings, no roads, no people. And for a little less extreme hunting, any place in the West - Colorado, Utah, Montana - that's just beautiful country.

For me, a theatre is a dark place. It should be mysterious; it's where we go to get away from all the utilitarian things we do in the daylight.

One of the greatest sounds of them all - and to me it is a sound - is utter, complete silence.

It was a place without a single feature of the space-time matrix that he knew. It was a place where nothing yet had happened - an utter emptiness. There was neither light nor dark: there was nothing here but emptiness.

I'm a freelance writer, and I work alone at a big desk in the living room of my apartment. There are many days when I don't utter a single word to anyone but my husband.

I myself have been on my own and utterly independent since I graduated. I haven't belonged to any company or any system. It isn't easy to live like this in Japan.

The most terrifying thing I can think of is being alone - and I mean utterly alone, like no one else in the world alone - at night. That's the nucleus of the first story in my collection and it's also where the title came from for the book.

And then when all around grows dark, when we feel utterly alone, when all men right and left pass us by and know us not, a forgotten feeling rises in the breast.

I probably have fundamentally antisocial tendencies. I never took one extracurricular activity. I just failed utterly at that level. Part of me still rebels against that.

How do people who live utterly alone survive? There are so many things that won't open. I've got a few dresses in New York, and I can somehow get them on, but I can't get them off.

It was a very idyllic childhood, surrounded by utterly beautiful landscapes that I got very, very bored of when I hit my teens. But being on your own a lot and being bored is good for your imagination. It makes it stretch.