Quotes About Solitude

The grand highway is crowded with lovers and searchers and leavers so eager to please, and to forget. Wilderness

It wasn't…too long ago. But it feels like…years ago…since I felt…the warm hello of the sun. Lately things seem a little colder, the wind…it seems to get a little bolder. The eagle was flying…now it's on the run. But then again, it's all in my mind. Ever since I lost that glow I've been feeling so down all the time. Where's that girl of mine…

I have never cared about setting world records, or filling my boat with fish, or, for that matter, even catching fish. I go for the experience of spending six hours in the arms of the ocean, never thinking of a single thing except chasing fish.

Be good & you will be lonesome. Be lonesome & you will be free.

Not just the absence of sound, but positive, warm, burnished silence.

But the fact of it was that I liked it out there, a ruin devoid of human vanities, clean of human illusions, an empty place reclaimed by the weather where a woman plays an organ to stop the wind's whining and an old man plays ball with a dog named Duke. I could tell you that I came back because I had promises to keep, but maybe it was because nobody asked me to stay.

It's not you. It's anyone. Sometimes I don't want anyone around. Some afternoons I lie on my bed and the light comes through the shutters on the floor and I think I never want to leave my own room.

Yet I was myself in no way prepared to accept this news as final: there was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible. That was why I needed to be alone. After

Seuls ceux qui survivent à une mort se retrouvent véritablement seuls. Les liens qui constituaient leur existence - les plus profonds comme les plus insignifiants en apparence - ont tous disparu.

Only the survivors of a death and truly left alone

the only safe place for me to be, the place where everything would be the same, the place where no one would know about or refer to the events of my recent life; the place where I would still be the person I had been before any of this happened.

The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people," she said. "The hardest is with one.

She knew all the indices to the idle lonely, never bought a small tube of toothpaste, never dropped a magazine in her shopping card.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

She knew all the indices to the idle lonely, never bought a small tube of toothpaste, never dropped a magazine in her shopping cart.

but spend the afternoon in total silence, which involves not only not talking but also not reading, not writing, and not smoking. Even on discussion days, this silence is invoked for regular twenty-minute or hour intervals, a regimen described by one student as "invaluable for clearing your mind of personal hangups" and by Miss Baez as "just about the most important thing about the school.

A single person is missing for you and the whole world is empty.

We went to get away from ourselves, and the way to do that is to drive, down through Nogales some day when the pretty green places pall and all that will move the imagination is some place difficult, some desert.

Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone.

I'm only myself in front of my typewriter.

But the fact of it was that I liked it out there, a ruin devoid of human vanities, clean of human illusions, an empty place reclaimed by the weather where a woman plays an organ to stop the wind's whining and an old man plays ball with a dog named Duke.

It takes time to learn to live in the here and now. You have to hang on past the bad times, ... If you do hang on and do not run from your life you discover that you have more control of your thoughts and feelings, and your life, than you believed possible. You learn to quiet your frantic mind, to downgrade your expectations of things and people, find pleasure in solitude, and finally discover who you really are.

I liked my floaty, superior life more than I could have admitted. I liked the remote spaces I was settling into. I liked looking down from above — the calm of it. I kept this preference to myself. Mostly.

If I could only meet Sally in the silent reading room of the public library, it wouldn't make any difference.