Solitude Quotes

Solitude is obviously dangerous for people with active brains. We need men around us who have ideas and like talking. Leave us alone for any length of time, and we start filling the void with supernatural creatures.

~ Guy De Maupassant

I love the dark hours of my being.My mind deepens into them.There I can find, as in old letters,the days of my life, already lived,and held like a legend, and understood.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

..i spill intothe kind of silenceonly Khalil Gibran would understand.

~ Sanober Khan

I can tell you that solitudeIs not all exaltation, inner spaceWhere the soul breaths and work can be done.Solitude exposes the nerve,Raises up ghosts.The past, never at rest, flows through it.

~ May Sarton

As I walk I mediate on the word of God. It comforts me.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Experience has tutored me well that most will lie or cheat to get the better hand. It's why I prefer solitude to social interaction. - Bethany

~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

The letters released something, maybe a sense that he was not alone, that the world was a place where travelers in language could know the same things.

~ Don Delillo

Reading and writing are solitary activities that increase a person’s capacity for concentration, awareness, and conceptual thought as the person weaves immediate information with stored memories.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The image of a cleanly, self-possessed man exploiting his solitude was not easy to come by, but then he had not expected that it would be.

~ John Cheever

Now I have to lie on the bed for a few minutes and let the solitude gather round me once more.

~ Martin Amis

Thinking is a way of condemning oneself to solitude.

~ Marty Rubin

Machineries of reason, machineries of conduct, machineries of virtue. The machine that regulates instinct, keeps one’s hands free of another man’s throat, free of one’s own. These machines have all, as someone said, gone too long in the elements. Gummed now, rusted, bloodless.I forget who said it and I no longer care.

~ Ben Marcus

Sitting on the porch alone, listening to them fixing supper, he felt again the indignation he had felt before, the sense of loss and the aloneness, the utter defenselessness that was each man's lot, sealed up in his bee cell from all the others in the world. But the smelling of boiling vegetables and pork reached him from the inside, the aloneness left him for a while. The warm moist smell promised other people lived and were preparing supper.He listened to the pouring and the thunder rumblings that sounded hollow like they were in a rainbarrel, shared the excitement and the coziness of the buzzing insects that had sought refuge on the porch, and now and then he slapped detachedly at the mosquitoes, making a sharp crack in the pouring buzzing silence. The porch sheltered him from all but the splashes of the drops that hit the floor and their spray touched him with a pleasant chill. And he was secure, because someewhere out beyond the wall of water humanity still existed, and was preparing supper.

~ James Jones

I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.

~ Henry Miller

How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.

~ Virginia Woolf

For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others... and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.

~ Virginia Woolf

But there is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question.

~ Thomas Merton

All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.

~ Virginia Woolf

Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that’s what I’ve had to make the best of.

~ Samuel Beckett

When words don't come easy, I make do with silence and find something in nothing. ~ Strider Marcus Jones, Poet

~ Strider Marcus Jones

In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong.

~ Sarah Orne Jewett

Quartering the topmost branches of one of the tall trees, an invisible bird was striving to make the day seem shorter, exploring with a long-drawn note the solitude that pressed it on every side, but it received at once so unanimous an answer, so powerful a repercussion of silence and of immobility, that one felt it had arrested for all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more quickly.

~ Marcel Proust

Phoebe Marks was a person who never lost her individuality. Silent and self-contained, she seemed to hold herself within herself, and take no colour from the outer world.

~ Mary Elizabeth Braddon

What other knowledge will my solitude and muteness bring? What other worlds?

~ Kathy Acker

. . . I am in my hermitage perhaps 70 to 80 percent of the time. I relish and enjoy time with others. I have been called the sociable hermit. Ironically, lengthy solitude often invokes a verbal avalanche when I find myself with a dear and treasured friend, or at a rare social occasion. . . . Solitaries, I suppose, are not always introverts.

~ Barbara Erakko Taylor

For the modern solitary, the quest for silence has vastly broader boundaries than what one's predecessors faced. Solitude is real only when it is relative to the world in which it is lived. It is unreal if attempted in fantasy--as though telephones and fax machines, the Internet and E-mail did not exist. (36)

~ Barbara Erakko Taylor

Periods of silent solitude spent in introspective reflecting are sacred and a source of great strength and comfort. We can learn from listening to the rhythms of nature and from appreciating the eternal hush of the cosmos.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Who says that we always have to be ready to communicate?

~ Sherry Turkle

Solitude helps the soul remember that life andwork have two completely different meanings. It remindsus that we were created for greatness in relationship withothers, not task lists and spreadsheets.

~ Angela L Craig

I see myself abandoned, solitary, thrown into a cell without dimensions, where light and shadows are silent phantoms. Within my inner self I find the silence I am seeking. But it leaves me so bereft of any memory of any human being and of me myself, that I transform this impression into the certainty of physical solitude. Were I to cry out — I can no longer see things clearly — my voice would receive the same indifferent echo from the walls of the earth.

~ Clarice Lispector

But the night doesn't swallow her up.Everywhere she goes she is still there,the silence is as big as herself.

~ Adrienne Su

I am always quiet so that I know what to say when I must speak.

~ Ishmael Beah

It was either the chaos of a crowd of thoughts or the silence of solitude... nothing in between..

~ Sanhita Baruah

He had grown fat on solitude, he thought, and had learned to expect nothing from the day but at best a dull contentment. Sometimes the dullness came to the fore with a strange and insistent ache which he would entertain briefly, but learn to keep at bay. Mostly, however, it was the contentment he entertained; the slow ease and the silence could, once night had fallen, fill him with a happiness that nothing, no society nor the company of any individual, no glamour or glitter, could equal.

~ Colm Tóibín

The ambiance of solitude, the absence of any disturbing noise and of worldly desires and images, the quiet and calm attention of the mind to God, helped by prayer and leisurely reading, flow into that quies or rest of the soul in God. A simple and joyful rest, full of God, that leads the monk to feel, in some way, the beauty of eternal life.

~ Carthusian Monks

Silence is fine if I am on my own but it's not overly sociable if my husband is around!

~ Joanna Runciman

Let your need draw you closer to your Creator.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

We enter this universe alone in search of microscopic beauty—and while we love, or are loved by others—we leave this world completely alone, having only found infinite sorrow. Despite there being so many of us, each of us tragically realizes that everyone is on a solitary journey. No one else can see what we see, hear what we hear, feel, what we feel. All we have of each other are glimpses of moments, whispers of experiences, memories of the past we wish we could make eternal, but in the end, we become a faint memory in the minds of a few good people.

~ Bruce Crown

The rocking of the boat by the waves was soothing but unknown. The men on the shore were asleep. Not the twelve-year-old, though. He shifted and lay on his back and decided to look up at the sky. What he saw took him by surprise. He was basically a city kid. He had never really seen the night sky for what it is. As he stared up at millions of stars, he was filled with a dread he had never known before.I was just a boy, I said to my wife in a hotel room in Cornwall. I was just a boy on a boat in the universe.

~ Joseph O'neill

The reason that extended solitude seemed so hard to endure was not that we missed others but that we began to wonder if we ourselves were present, because for so long our existence depended upon assurances from them.

~ Doris Grumbach