Quotes About Solitude

The day was hot and windless and the sky a hard china blue and I lay alone on the railroad bridge and cried my heart out above a river that seemed to have none.

He was thinking about what his father had said, how the quiet of the morning was something he had almost entirely to himself, something he would come to appreciate. It was true. On the streets of Aurora in that early hour, he was almost always alone. Sometimes lights were on in a room, usually a kitchen, or on rare occasions, a car might drift past, but he and Jackson owned the sidewalks and the morning was his.

Waiting for the warm affection of another human heart. Waiting to know the reason he has always felt like a soul alone in the universe. But this night, his waiting

It's so quiet you can hear the dark sliding down the sky.

An emptiness opened inside me that could have swallowed the whole universe.

We are all sealed up alone. We all carry the center of the universe inside our own heads. It is, for each of us, a point a few inches behind our eyes where the binocular lines of vision converge. Only a narcissist or a child is fool enough to believe it.

In a somer seson whan soft was the sonne I shope me in shroudes as I a shepe were, In habite as an heremite vnholy of workes, Went wyde in þis worlde wondres to here.

shack first appeared well in the distance, a listing structure marooned by time. It was a mere ghost of what it once had been, and what it once had been was nothing much. She stopped the car, checked her odometer, looked at the building. A single black line ran from the electric wires to the

Why art thou come, man of despair and blood! To these green vales and streams, o'erhung with wood; These hills, where, far from life's discordant throng, The lonely goat-maid chaunts her matin song; This sylvan glen, where age in peace reclines, Soothed by the whisper of his native pines; Where, in the twilight of his closing days, Upon the glimmering lake he loves to gaze; And, like his life, sees on the shadowy flood, The still, sweet eve descending!

In the midst of friends, home, and kind parents, she was alone.

She lived in her past life- these relics and remembrances of dead affection were all that was left her in the world.

Miss Burgess Fern came up, sat in the chair beside her sister, and, after listening a moment, said, "I think the secret of Rhoda's temperament is the simple fact that she doesn't need others, the way most of us do. She is such a self-sufficient little girl! Never in all my life have I seen anybody so completely all-of-one-piece!

The road, it seemed, was a river and he was the only one who knew the stepping-stones.

I secretly worship God," Hunter wrote near the end of his life. "He had the good judgment to leave me alone to write a few genuine black-on-white pages by myself.

What Slattery wants is a ring painted on concrete in the empty desert. With no living spectator around for miles, just him and the grinning demons. A chance to fight them each, one by one . . . to leave them broken and humbled, or even to lose the fights, but with nobility, and earn the respect of all the men who have showed him none. I want peace, he thinks to himself late at night. I want peace. But then he dreams of fistfights.

The most difficult part of being a mother was to observe the mistakes of one's children: the foolish loves, the desperate solitude and alienation, the lack of will, the gullibility, the joyous and naive leaps into the unknown, the ignorance, the panicky choices and the utter determination.

There's something deeply important about the early experience of being in the presence of somebody without being impinged upon by their demands, and without them needing you to make a demand on them. And that this creates a space internally into which one can be absorbed. In order to be absorbed one has to feel sufficiently safe, as though there is some shield, or somebody guarding you against dangers such that you can 'forget yourself' and absorb yourself, in a book, say.

They that walk, walk with many. They that run, run with few. But those that fly, fly alone.

So quiet that house was in the night, so quiet all the other little homes around it were that held the elderly in them and the old alone or still in couples sleeping early, waking, lying awake and thinking about the past. So much past every night in the silence settling over those houses that all looked much the same on a hillside creeping up against the rock and gorse and tipping down to the river where it widened, widened and ended in the sea.

Loneliness is the price you pay for keeping things uncomplicated

While walking back down through the woods to the station, I felt, for a few minutes, an almost overwhelming sense of loss. With the late afternoon sun still pouring down through the trees and Anna's blonde hair dancing on her shoulders in front of me, I needed all my discipline to keep from crying. Nothing tears the heart like a glimpse of happiness.

Einar felt lonely, and he wondered if anybody in the world would ever know him.

Do you know what I miss most about Rosemary? Simply knowing she was there.

I'm getting soft! I need the sea! I miss its greens and blues and grays. Its singing whales. Its silent rays. Its shipwrecks resting on the sand. Undiscovered and unmanned Removed now from all history I miss the sea! Its mystery. Its kelp. Its creatures. Crabs and corals Devoid of complicating morals. Its secrets. All its saline riches. I'm going home.