Quotes About Solitude

I loved my coat and the cafe and my morning routine. It was the clearest and simplest expression of my solitary identity.

It was unsettling to imagine it alone on the bench without a film, unable to record its own passage into the hands of a stranger.

Murakami is not here anyway, I thought. He is most likely somewhere else, sealed in a space capsule in the center of a field of lavender, laboring over words.

Varför måste man skriva? För att ställa sig vid sidan om, som i en kokong, försjunken i ensamhet, på trots mot andras behov. Virginia Woolf hade sitt rum. Proust sina stängda fönsterluckor. Marguerite Duras sitt tysta hus. Dylan Thomas sin enkla bod. Alla var de ute efter en tomhet att fylla med ord. Orden som ska tränga in i orörda marker, uppdaga oinmutade associationer, ge uttryck åt oändligheten.

where there were angels I saw no one. nothing. not even space.

El muchacho que yo había conocido era tímido y tenía dificultad para expresarse. Le gustaba dejarse llevar, que lo cogieran de la mano para entrar sin reservas en un mundo distinto. Era masculino y protector, pese a ser femenino y sumiso. Meticuloso en su vestuario y modales, también era capaz de un desorden atemorizante en su obra. Sus mundos eran solitarios y peligrosos, y vaticinaban libertad, éxtasis y liberación.

I skip Thanksgiving, dragging my malaise through December, with a prolonged period of enforced solitude, though sadly without crystalline effect.

I was my own lucky hand of solitaire.

For the first time, I lived alone... in a luxury apartment on Sunset Strip. For a few days I loved the idea, but I got lonely and restless.

Libraries aren't in the real world, after all. They're places apart, sanctuaries of pure thought. In this way I can go on living on the moon for the rest of my life.

Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist, except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.

Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he's there, he's not really there.

Every book is an image of solitude. It is a tangible object that one can pick up, put down, open, and close, and its words represent many months if not many years, of one man's solitude, so that with each word one reads in a book one might say to himself that he is confronting a particle of that solitude

Solitary. But not in the sense of being alone. Not solitary in the way Thoreau was, for example, exiling himself in order to find out where he was; not solitary in the way Jonah was, praying for deliverance in the belly of the whale. Solitary in the sense of retreat. In the sense of not having to see himself, of not having to see himself being seen by anyone else.

There is nothing more terrible, I learned, than having to face the objects of a dead man. Things are inert: that have meaning only in function of the life that makes use of them. When that life ends, the things change, even though they remain the same. […] they say something to us, standing there not as objects but as remnants of thought, of consciousness, emblems of the solitude in which a man comes to make decisions about himself.

This is the kind of room poets are supposed to work in, the kind of room that threatens to break your spirit and forces you into constant battle with yourself.

On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere. New York was the nowhere he had built around himself, and he realized that he has no intention of ever leaving it again.

The room was a machine that measured my condition: how much of me remained, how much of me was no longer there. I was both perpetrator and witness, both actor and audience in a theater of one. I could follow the progress of my own dismemberment. Piece by piece, I could watch myself dissapear.

I became hypnotized by my own loneliness, unwilling to stop until my eyes wouldn't stay open anymore, watching the white line of the highway as though it was the last thing that connected me to the earth.

I was in the book, and the book was in my head, and as long as I stayed inside my head, I could go on writing the book. It was like living in a padded cell, but of all the lives I could have lived at that moment, it was the only one that made sense to me. I wasn't capable of being in the world, and I knew that if I tried to go back into it before I was ready, I would be crushed.

I was looking for a quiet place to die.

You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one person encountering the book, it's not an audience, it's one to one.

Better to wait quietly in their corner, they think, than to be dashed against the stones.

They have trapped Blue into doing nothing, into being so inactive as to reduce his life to almost no life at all. Yes, says Blue to himself, that's what it feels like: like nothing at all. He feels like a man who has been condemned to sit in a room and go on reading a book for the rest of his life. This is strange enough - to be only half alive at best, seeing the world only through words, living only through the lives of others.