Quotes About Solitude

I took another road, past the old sugar works and the water wheel that had not turned for years. I went to parts of Coulibri that I had not seen, where there was no road, no path, no track. And if the razor grass cut my legs and arms I would think 'It's better than people.' Black ants or red ones, tall nests swarming with white ants, rain that soaked me to the skin - once I saw a snake. All better than people. Better, better, better than people.

I stopped going out; I stopped wanting to go out. That happens very easily. It's as if you had always done that - lived in a few rooms and gone from one to the other.

I had two longings and one was fighting the other. I wanted to be loved and I wanted to be always alone

You shut the door and you pull the curtains and then it's as long as a thousand years and yet so soon ended.

Watching the red and yellow flowers in the sun thinking of nothing, it was as if a door opened and I was somewhere else, something else. Not myself any longer. I knew the time of day when though it is hot and blue and there are no clouds, the sky can have a very black look.

Mais dès que je ne veux pas mentir à moi-même, je ne trouve en moi qu'un désir - et il est irréalisable: être loin, être seul, être tout à fait seul pendant des mois, réfléchir, me reprendre, sans mon argent, sans le soutien d'aucun être qui m'aime, pour voir si je vaux quelque chose, pour essayer mes forces, pour être sûr que lorsque j'aime, c'est bien réellement un libre choix!

Mais c'était des voyages d'aveugles, je veux dire des voyages où je restais emprisonné dans mon univers intérieur

La Solitude!...J'aurais mauvaise grâce à en craindre le visage, maintenant qu'il est fatigué et qu'il n'a plus ses belles promesses

It's at moment of misfortune that we remember we're all exiles.

Right is right, even if you're alone.

But not all dark places need light, I have to remember that.

Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home--they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.

I like being on my own better than I like anything else, but I can't give up love. Maybe it's the tension between longing and aloneness that I need. My own funicular railway, holding in balance the two things most likely to destroy me.

When people looked at him they had the feeling of being shut out. He did not shut them out. He shut himself in.

Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home - they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and space. There is warmth there too - a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm.

Loneliness isn't about being by yourself. That's fine, right and good, desirable in many ways. Loneliness is about finding a landing-place, or not, and knowing that, whatever you do, you can go back there. The opposite of loneliness isn't company, it's return. A place to return.

I was never bored except in the company of others.

And myself? Observe me. There is something to be gained from my surface uses, and perhaps a little more from my lower depths, but my very bottom? That's where I am alone, the observer and the observed.

I need the dark places to get outside of common sense

When you are a solitary kid you find an imaginary friend.

Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home - they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and space. There is warmth there too - a hearth. I sit down with a book and I'm warm.

To escape from the weight of the world, I leave my body where it is, in conversation or at dinner, and walk through a series of winding streets to a house standing back from the road.

When I sing the dogs sit quiet and people who pass in the night stop their jabbering and discontent and think of other times, when they were happy. And I sing of other times, when I was happy, though I know that these are figments of my mind and nowhere I have ever been.

The library was quiet. It was busy but it was quiet and I thought it must be like this in a monastery where you had company and sympathy but your thoughts were your own.