Quotes About Solitude

She couldn't swim, but enjoyed standing at the water's edge with a pole in her hand. It wasn't exactly what you'd call fishing, as she caught nothing and expressed neither hope nor disappointment in regard to her efforts. What she thought about while looking at the waves was a complete mystery, yet you could tell that these thoughts pleased her, and that she liked herself better while thinking them.

friends will be much apart.they will respect more other's privacy than their communion.

Soy el ser más egoísta del mundo porque quise ser independiente. Eso me alejó de todos, me convirtió en una isla.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.

one small thing I've learned these years, how to be alone, and at the edge of aloneness how to be found by the world.

some of us live in big cities so we can be alone, so we can avoid ourselves, and yet by living within massive populations we can have help or love within reach if necessary.

All the verdant growth had been left behind them to the south. Up ahead, the roads dissected what looked like a vast wasteland. Far in the distance rose a lone hill, upon which a Roman fortress held its place like a stone buzzard. The desert plain seemed to go on forever. And over it all, the wind moaned.

It was not a jolly place at all for a sun-loving soul

Those who understand the true nature of humanity are always loners

I have found my church, and it is at the end of a long trail on a distant mountainship. It is there that I feel most at peace, entirely content and whole.

As a runner, that's what I know how to do. To strike out on a trail and just go and go and go like there's no tomorrow; to run until my problems fade beneath my feet and the world becomes new again.

Given enough time, you could convince yourself that loneliness was something better, that it was solitude, the ideal condition for reflection, even a kind of freedom. Once you were thus convinced, you were foolish to open the door and let anyone in, not all the way in. You risked the hard-won equilibrium, that tranquility that you called peace

Books were this wonderful escape for me because I could open a book and disappear into it, and that was the only way out of that house when I was a kid.

Nothing is worse than being alone on the evening of the day when one's cow has exploded.

Being alone can be good. It's easy to find peace alone. But sometimes, being alone is a king of death.

I believe our recognition of reality's complex dimensions is a consequence of our solitude.

All this is just a place, she said. And sometimes such a lonely one.

Life is a train ride, and at the many stations along the route, people important to us debark, never to get aboard again, until by the end of the journey, we sit in a passenger car where most of the seats are empty.

I stopped in St. Bernadette's Cemetery one of my favorite places... The trunks of six giant oaks rise like columns supporting a ceiling formed by their interlocking crowns. In the quiet space below, is laid out an aisle similar to those in any library. The gravestones are like rows of books bearing the names of those whose names have been blotted from the pages of life; who have been forgotten elsewhere but are remembered here.

There are silences and silences. No one of them is like another. There is the silence of grief in velvet-draped rooms of a plushly carpeted funeral parlor which is far different from the bleak and terrible silence of grief in a widower's lonely bedroom.

I became aware of a voice inside my head. [...] It was only later that I realized that this voice was my own thinking, that this moment of anguish was my first inkling that I was a ceaseless monologue trapped within myself.

It was only later that I realized that this voice was my own thinking, that this moment of anguish was my first inkling that I was a ceaseless monologue trapped within myself.

We're fine together, just like this: Our silence protects us from ourselves

Solitude is long. The joys that connect us leave almost no trace.