Quotes About Solitude

You've said good-by to everyone but yourself. How does a person say good-bye to himself? It's a juicy existential dilemma.

The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments.

The desert was outside my range, it was an alien being, it was science fiction, both saturating and remote, and I had to force myself to believe I was here.

Nie mam cia?a. Jestem umys?em, ?wiadomo?ci?, samotny w wielkiej przestrzeni.

Moj? dusz? wype?nia?a lito?? nade mn? samym.

Nada existía a su alrededor. Solo el sonido dentro de su cabeza, la mente suspensa en el tiempo. Cuando muriese, no seria su fin. Seria el fin del mundo.

Now and then, especially at night, solitude loses its soft power and loneliness takes over. I am grateful when solitude returns.

When you live on your own for a long time, however, your personality changes because you go so much into yourself you lose the ability to be social, to understand what is and isn't normal behavior. There is an entire world inside yourself, and if you let yourself, you can get so deep inside it you will forget the way to the surface. Other people keep our souls alive, just like food and water does with our body.

the words alone, lonely, and loneliness are three of the most powerful words in the English language...those words say that we are human; they are like the words hunger and thirst. But they are not words about the body, they are words about the soul.

alone, lonely, and loneliness are three of the most powerful words in the English language... Those words say that we are human; they are like the words hunger and thirst. But they are not words about the body, they are words about the soul.

Six billion people live in this world, and I can only muster thoughts for one. Me.

When a person has no other persons he invents them because he was not designed to be alone, because it isn't good for a person to be alone.

If you're going to have an existential crisis, Portland in winter is hard to beat.

we have to stop blasting them with noise.

I liked the idea of living in a city — any city, especially a strange one — liked the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a bookstore, waiting tables in a coffee shop, who knew what kind of solitary life I might slip into? Meals alone, walking the dogs in the evenings; and nobody knowing who I was.

Out in the country it was not uncommon to discover that she had slipped away, alone, out to the lake, maybe, or down to the cellar, where once I found her sitting in the big marooned sleigh, reading, her fur coat thrown over her knees. Things would have been terrible strange and unbalanced without her. She was the Queen who finished out the suit of dark Jacks, dark King, and Joker.

She looked up at me, her eyes large with compassion, with understanding of the solitude and incivility of grief.

But though it was the most resonant and real-seeming thing that had happened in a long time, I didn't want to spoil it by talking about it...

It's crazy, she'd said, but I'd be perfectly happy if I could sit looking at the same half dozen paintings for the rest of my life. I can't think of a better way to go insane.)

but it was excruciating to emerge from my eerie submarine existence into this harsh stampede of noise and light.

still when I lost her I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life.

a light that made me think of long hours in dusty libraries, and old books, and silence.

There was a strong sense of being alone, in wintry deadness. Nothing made sense in any direction.

What if there was a disease in Alexandria, she thought, and everybody died but me? I'd go live at the library, she told herself. The notion was cheering. She saw herself reading by candlelight, shadows flickering on the ceiling above the labyrinth of shelves. She could take a suitcase from home–peanut butter and crackers, a blanket, a change of clothes–and pull together two of the big armchairs in the Reading Room to sleep on…