Quotes About Solitude

Although I am a gregarious person, I love solitude even more.

It is never my custom to use words lightly. If twenty-seven years in prison have done anything to us, it was to use the silence of solitude to make us understand how precious words are and how real speech is in its impact on the way people live and die.

Anna took her solace where she always did. The smell of the earth, the touch of the sky held for her a special alchemy, able to turn loneliness into aloneness, and so make it, if not sacred, at least bearable.

Soon she was going to have to relinquish her self-image as a hermit.

When you pray, enter into your closet, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father which is in secret and your Father which is in secret shall reward you openly" [Matthew 6:6].

He loved the strange privacy of being different.

Men are private. This I have learned. They are whole continents of privacy; you can only go to the borders; you can look in but you cannot enter.

It was the most silent, beautiful city I had ever been in, and I found myself wishing, once or twice, that I was here alone, not worrying about our relationship, not having to make an effort. I would have walked and walked along the deserted paths, not speaking, storing everything up. I wouldn't have minded the rain.

How do you measure absence? There had been minutes that had become hours, and hours that had been like a desert with no horizon. There had been days dull and deadened as lead, and whole weeks when she'd had to force herself forward, inch by inch, across their expanse. How do you know when your heart is ready once more?

En toch dwaalde ze al die tijd in gedachten door de kathedralen van het bos, in die nog altijd witte wereld waar de uilen krasten in het donker en een vriend op sterven lag.

But she would always tell herself, Who needs friends, when you have books.

Who needs friends, when you have books,

Who doesn't want to just disappear, at some point in the day, in a year, to just step off the map and float?

We got him to talk to a psych doctor once, the doctor asked if he heard things other people don't. Sure, Paul answered, I hear birds in the morning when everyone's sleeping, I hear trees rustling when no one's around.

I wanted to be alone, not forgotten.

nothing could be more pleasant than to live in solitude, enjoy the spectacle of nature, and occasionally read some book...

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. No furniture, no light fittings, no carpet, no bodies. Not a single body. Nothing but the million ducks, the three million ducklings and a window.

I stood there for a long time after he bumped his way over the turf and down the track, until the smell of his exhaust had faded into the trees and soil, and I could hear nothing but the buds. The air smelled like rain.

She let the ebb and flow of the hall wash over her, much as she sometimes sat behind bracken at the edge of a clearing or reeds by the edge of a pool.

She liked time at the edge of things-the edge of the crowd, the edge of the pool, the edge of the wood-where all must pass but none quite belonged.

Silence while we both thought our thoughts.

She was glad to be alone, to be free, to be high above the world, where she could see everything coming. She had people to protect.

The king and Osric had vanished, gone ahead around the curve, and Hild walked alone-they all walked alone-along the inwardly spiralling path painted with tales, the characters from songs she had heard in hall all her life, songs of music and magic, of heroes and beginnings.

Lying naked and cold beneath the perfect, whispering dark, I imagined I could feel the curve of the earth under my back, that I circled the whole planet so that my soles touched the top of my head and I blended with the dirt.