Quotes About Solitude

I was a loner in high school. I keep to myself, but I love life.

There's something lovely about writing a book, doing what you want. I love the solitariness of it.

I live in New York, and when you're older and widowed, it's a perfect place because you just don't feel lonely there, and, luckily, I like my own company, too.

Taking lunch by myself every once in a while and slowing down - that helps me a lot.

Reading is my greatest luxury.

Anyone would be lying if they said they didn't get lonely at times.

I do all my thinking lying down.

The most common time I write lyrics is the middle of the night.

I think I'd go mad if I didn't have a place to escape to.

Where I live, it's better to write in the morning because the night is really, really, really dark, and I do believe you'd go mad if you weren't asleep for most of it.

You're on your own with the book. And while you are writing fiction, you're spending all this time with people who don't actually exist, which is just madness.

It was a challenge with 'In My Room,' because I was the only person in that room making the record, to maintain perspective.

I don't think I should have been married... to anybody.

Of course I loved book more than people.

Tell me, do you sometimes find yourself unaccountably sad on some days?

Emmeline didn't call me anything. She didn't need, for I was always there. You only need names for the absent.

For it must be very lonely being dead.

As one tends to the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. I clean them, do minor repairs, keep them in good order. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head. Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so, for it must be very lonely being dead.

In the background is the hiss of the gas heater; we hear the sound without hearing it for, side by side, together and miles apart, we are deep in our books.

For at eight o'clock the world came to an end. It was reading time. The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours. Against the blue candlewick bedspread the white pages of my open book, illuminated by a circle of lamplight, were the gateway to another world.

Our clients' faces, with the customary outward paleness and inner glow of the book lover.

on those days when he could not spend half an hour in the company of a good book, he felt deprived.

Again she missed God. She had shared everything with him. From childhood she had gone to him with every question, doubt, delight, and triumph. He had accompanied every advance in her thinking; in action he had been her daily collaborator. But God was gone. This was something she was going to have to work out by herself.

They are more real than the books on the shelves, books that are sketched with the barest hint of a line here and there, fading in places to a ghostly nothingness. Why recall the picture now, you must be wondering. The reason I remember it so well is that it seems to be an image of the way I have lived my own life. I have closed my study door on the world and shut myself away with people of my imagination.