Quotes About Solitude

Loneliness is black coffee and late-night television; solitude is herb tea and soft music. Solitude, quality solitude, is an assertion of self-worth, because only in the stillness can we hear the truth of our own unique voices.

I need some time to myself by myself! There must be time for thought and music and peace and solitude! Also: No one can keep a creative house and work every day from nine to five. Can't be done, folks. Ain't no way.

Inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up.

No existe soledad mayor que la de no sentirte acompañado por tu propia imagen. El testimonio de los demás no basta, ni siquiera el de los seres queridos. Al no poder contemplar mi propio rostro llegué a pensar que carecía de él. Estaba seguro de que, si Dios existía, pertenecía a la familia de los Espejos y, por alguna razón que se me escapaba, le gustaba negar nuestra existencia.

In solitude, man is his truth; in society, he tends to be his mere conventionality or falsification.18

King Basilius, who doth bow 'Neath the weight of years, the doom Age imposes, more inclined To the studies of the mind Than to women, wifeless, lone, Without sons, to fill his throne

I went into the house. I put on Jimi Hendrix's 'Red House' at full volume, filled the glass to the brim with rum, without ice, and went back to the terrace. To gaze at the night and the dark sea and the night.

La soledad siempre está ahí. La siento, la toco, hablo con ella. Forma parte de mi vida. La soledad es inevitable. Y ayuda. Me concentro más. Soy más yo cuando convivimos bien apretaditos: la soledad y yo. Nos adoramos. No podría vivir sin la soledad.

The result of joining two solitudes will always be a greater solitude.

Prayer is the hardest thing. And no one congratulates you for doing it because no one knows you're doing it, and if things turn out well they likely won't thank God in any case. But I have a feeling that the hardest thing is what we all better be doing now, and that it's not only the best answer but the only one.

Dead indeed is the heart from which the balmy air of the sea cannot banish sorrow and grief.

Behind their dark glass, the mad own nothing.

Florence had noticed one or two eccentricities in herself lately, which might be the result of hard work, or of age, or of living alone. When the letters came, for example, she often found herself wasting time in looking at the postmarks and wondering whoever they could be from, instead of opening them in a sensible manner and finding out at once.

I was alone with myself, and we watched each other with steady, cold, inward eyes: the past and its consequence, the reality and its insubordinate dream.

In the late twentieth century we consider solitude our natural condition. Mates divorce, and even friendship is diagnosed as a disorder - co-dependency. So the concept of living a life interlocked with another human is unthinkable

and I grew up with no one. Except my grandmother. And even she died.

A dead dog is more quiet than a house on the steppes, a chair in a empty room.

There is nothing I need from the shop, and this is not the day for social profligacy.

I did not bring a television set out here with me, and I regret it sometimes when the evenings get long, but my idea was that living alone you can soon get stuck to those flickering images and to the chair you will sit on far into the night, and then time merely passes as you let others do the moving.

the difference between talking and not talking is slowly wiped out, that the unending, inner conversation we carry on with ourselves merges with the one we have with the few people we still see, and when you live alone for too long the line which divides the one from the other becomes vague, and you do not notice when you cross that line. Is

I wondered how it might affect your way of thinking, if you always had a lighthouse in the corner of your eye.

I wonder whether that is how we get to be after living alone for a long time, that in the middle of a train of thought we start talking out loud, that the difference between talking and not talking is slowly wiped out, that the unending, inner conversation we carry on with ourselves merges with the one we have with the few people we still see.

I could suddenly get a longing to be in a place where there was only silence. Years might go by and I did not think about it, but that does not mean that I did not long to be there. And now I am here, and it is almost exactly as I had imagined it.

All my life I have longed to be alone in a place like this. Even when everything was going well, as it often did. I can say that much. That it often did. I have been lucky. But even then, for instance in the middle of an embrace and someone whispering words in my ear I wanted to hear, I could suddenly get a longing to be in a place where there was only silence.