Quotes About Solitude

In spite of sheer concentration and every effort of will power, Byrd could not avoid the terrible evenness and loneliness of silence.

I could never again see the evening sun fading into oblivion without feeling lonely.

Waiting for someone to rescue him from abandonment. Waiting. There was no one.

Yet in my rural town I almost never run into anyone on my nightly walks—except for one eccentric, a man everyone calls Jogger John.

Someone, and no matter where, collects the pieces of my shadow.

Someone, and no matter who, inhabits my head like it's an empty house, he enters, he leaves, he bangs each door behind him, powerless I put up with this ruckus. Someone, and maybe it's me, palms my most private thoughts, he crumples them, returns them to dust. Someone, and it's much later now, slowly walks across the room and, not seeing me, stops to contemplate the havoc. Someone, and no matter where, collects the pieces of my shadow.

But I'm exhausted, finally, by this mob within me that keeps me from being myself. I suppose one feels the need to be alone in order to grow old and die.

His sad expression, now, that isolates Irene and me, destroying the universe around us. It's his turn to envy me, twenty years after those days when the beauty, elegance and notoriety of his mistresses gave him, in my eyes, a painful prestige. The apparent modesty of my triumph doesn't at all diminish its cruelty. I feel almost happy over the sufferings of this man. His solitude wins me from my own.

La soledad es un estado interior que puede practicarse, incluso, estando con otra gente, cree.

Sólo un solitario es capaz de estar al lado de otro sin sentir la necesidad, la obligación y el derecho, de poseerlo ni de cambiarlo.

Ser un solitario es algo constitutivo, una forma de ser, algo que no suele cambiar con el paso del tiempo ni con que se llene la casa de gente.

In a taxi speeding uptown on the West Side Highway, I let my thoughts drift below the surface of the Hudson until it finally occurs to me that feelings fill the gaps created by the indirectness of experience. Though the experience is social, thoughts carry it into a singular space and it is this that causes the feelings of loneliness; or it is this that collides the feeling with the experience so that what is left is the solitude called loneliness.

Leaving the day to itself, you close the door behind you and pour a bowl of cereal, then another, and would a third if you didn't interrupt yourself with the statement - you aren't hungry. Appetite won't attach you to anything no matter how depleted you feel.

You can close the shutters on your life and dwell in a dreamlike existence, poor in deeds but effervescent in thought.

You 're too sufficient by yourself...too inside yourself

When I'm online, I'm alone in a room, tapping on a keyboard, staring at a cathode-ray tube.

Being alone is being strong. In many ways it helps. The only thing that may not help is when you only listen to yourself and ignore everything around you.

The purpose of living is not to live in misery or hatred. Solitude cannot fill anybody's emptiness if the object of living is not known.

There is no boredom or denial of faith in solitude, only privacy of priorities.

To heal mine aching moods, Give me God's virgin woods.

Tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes. —ALBERT CAMUS, THE REBEL

No cries, no convulsions, nothing more than a face fixed in thought. The gods no longer existed, Christ didn't exist yet, and there was, from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, a unique moment in which man was alone. —GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, IN AN 1861

When everything has left you, you are alone. When you have left everything, you are lonely.

My friends, there are no friends.