Quotes About Solitude

To live on the prairie is to daydream. It is the only conceivable response to such immensity. It is when we are smallest that our daydreams come quickest.

The pygmies, for example, or the Mindoro of the Philippines, do not want equal rights – they just want to be left alone.

All the lonely people. Where do they all belong

I'll put it to you simply: love is the enemy. That's my conclusion. We should all live in our little monk cells and never venture out ...

And a rock feels no pain; And an island never cries.

Hello darkness, my old friend I've come to talk with you again.

I have my books and my poetry to protect me.

Solitary people make the best travellers

To travel unconnected, away from anyone's gaze or reach, is bliss

To travel unconnected, away from anyone's gaze or reach, is a bliss.

And yet on that bench at Jacobacci, I was glad I had left everyone else behind. Although this was a town with a main street and a railway station, and people with dogs and electric lights it was near enough to the end of the earth to give me the impression that I was a solitary explorer in a strange land. That illusion (which was an illusion in the South Pole and at the headwaters of the Nile) was enough of a satisfaction to me to make me want to go forward.

When she was done, I talked to her a little—and I was the only one.

the conceit of the long-distance traveler is the belief that he is going so far, he will be alone—inconceivable that another person has the same good idea.

The recluse, the shunner of fame, the "I just want to be alone" escapee—B. Traven was one, so was J. D. Salinger—seems perversely to invite intrusion.

after the town of Tehuacán into the heights of the rocky past, not a person in sight, the summits of these nameless mountains looking scalded and bare and terrifying in their flinty emptiness.

spent the rest of the morning in the gardens on my own, loving the solitude

bleak and beautiful expanse of lifeless isolation.

But there is a singular connection between Samuel Beckett, "the grammarian of solitude," sunk in his comical Irish gloom, hiding in a tiny apartment in Paris, and the condition of Manuel Othón, the late-nineteenth-century Mexican recluse, brooding in the parched wasteland in the middle of Mexico. Seemingly at a loss for words around 1900, Othón, in a despairing poem, wrote the Beckett-like line "the desert, the desert and the desert.

The train was sunlit and emptier.

I found my berth and discovered that no one else was going to Xian. The sleeper was empty. This was the rarest situation on a Chinese train, and one to be relished. Such circumstances were almost luxurious and definitely cozy.

And I began writing, to console myself in my solitude and to ease the passing of time.

The greatest justification for travel is not self-improvement but rather performing a vanishing act, disappearing without a trace

His book accurately reflects what I feel in traveling in America—the solitary road trip that is in many respects a Zen experience, scattered with road candy, unavailable to motorists in any other country on earth.

This is a triumphant mood for a long trip, just slipping out and not telling anyone, and fairly sure that no one will notice I've gone.