Quotes About Solitude

The Abandoned Valley" Can you understand being alone so long you would go out in the middle of the night and put a bucket into the well so you could feel something down there tug at the other end of the rope?

You hear yourself walking on the snow. You hear the absence of the birds. A stillness so complete, you hear the whispering inside of you. Alone morning after morning, and even more at night. They say we are born alone, to live and die alone. But they are wrong. We get to be alone by time, by luck, or by misadventure. — Jack Gilbert, from "Betrothed," Collected Poems (Knopf, 2012)

Alone on Christmas Eve in Japan" Not wanting to lose it all for poetry. Wanting to live the living. All this year looking on the graveyard below my apartment. Holding myself tenderly in this marred body. Wondering if the quiet I feel is that happiness wise people speak of, or the modulation that is the acquiescence to death beginning.

My friend, you are truly yourself alone. God must have broken the mould after turning you out.

My witness is the empty sky.

An ocean with a single shore gets little traffic.

Early on, if I was alone two three nights in a row, I'd start writing poems about suicide.

Early on, if I was alone two or three nights in a row, I'd start writing poems about suicide.

I do read books. I suppose it's more or less the same thing, but at least I'm alone and I'm an individual. I can stop anytime I want, which I frequently do.

Maybe everyone is crazy up in these mountains. Maybe the air up here makes you absurd, the scent of flowers and rock and snow. And I've never spoken like that to anyone in my life before. You're my only friend here, you know that? And you're fifty years away.

I've started to feel very odd within my own life. It's most peculiar to feel lonely inside your own life.

The sound of his sleep, the snores and sighs and small noices, is company.

I talk to myself because I like dealing with a better class of people.

Does she have a name, this woman? If she does, it is known only to a handful of people. The bear knows. He is the only creature of the earth she would call her friend. Between them there is trust, love. Her world is between the dusk light and the dawn light, the time of the moths, of the owls and the bats.

He woke in the dimity light of dusk to owl song and found her gone. Far across the valley the keen, yearning song of a solitary vixen called to his blood. The world turned.

I don't like needing anyone for anything.

No matter how close to yours another's steps have grown, in the end there is one dance you'll do alone.

I prefer to sing in the shower vs. the car. The shower is just steam, you know, its just you, and nature, and no clothing. You know, there's nothing separating you. It's just you, and the voice - you, and the water.

Perhaps you never have time when you are alone? You only acquire it by watching it go by in others".

what does it matter if I've become mute in a world where there is no one to talk to?

I wondered what would make me stop, whether it would be hunger, sleep or boredom – in other words, what prompts decisions when you are utterly alone.

Here the work had a beginning and an end, like house painting or carpentry, and if she didn't want to talk to anyone, she didn't have to.

But here alone, not needing to take care of anyone else and not caring very much what happened because all the worst things had already happened, she stepped into the

Alone on the summit of Mount Everest.