Solitude Quotes

The lover`s discourse was of an extreme solitude. The solitude was extreme because it wasn`t physical. It was extreme because you felt it while in the company of the person you loved. It was extreme because it was in your head, the most solitary of places.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

He was welcome everywhere he went, and was well-aware of his inability to tolerate solitude. He felt no inclination to be alone and avoided it as far as possible; he didn't really want to become any better acquainted with himself. He knew that if he wanted to show his talents to best advantage, he needed to strike sparks off other people to fan the flames of warmth and exuberance in his heart. On his own he was frosty, no use to himself at all, like a match left lying in its box.

~ Stefan Zweig

Long have I dwelt forgotten hereIn pining woe and dull despair,This place of solitude and gloomMust be my dungeon and my tomb.

~ Anne Brontë

...since I realized that he (Picasso) lived in a self-enclosed world and that his solitude was therefore total, I wanted to explore my own solitude.

~ Françoise Gilot

You should always aim to be your own mouse, Lieam. In fact...you already are. You are not so quick to jump into danger as Saxon and not as pensive of mind as Kenzie. They rely on each other too much. Saxon knows he can afford to be reckless since Kenzie acts as his conscience. And Kenzie can linger in his thoughts and plans, because he knows Saxon can defend him. I tested Kenzie earlier. I wanted to see if he would be swayed by my advice. It took Saxon's coaxing to make up the greyfur's mind. Be compleete with in yourself young redfur...you will never disappoint. Even in solitude.

~ David Petersen

I understand I've made an unusual lifestyle choice. But the label 'crazy' bothers me. Annoys me. Because it prevents response. When someone asks if you're crazy, Knight lamented, you can either say yes, which makes you crazy, or you can say no, which makes you sound defensive, as if you fear that you really are crazy. There's no good answer.

~ Michael Finkel

Quite alone. No voice, no touch, no hand....How long must I lie here? For ever? No, only for a couple of hundred years this time, miss....

~ Jean Rhys

Anyone can retire into a quiet place, wrote Evelyn Underhill, but it's the shutting of the door that makes the difference. Solitude is a time for stripping away everything in order to focus on God. (Matt 6:6)

~ Sue Monk Kidd

. . . solitude, which is held to be cause of eccentricity, in fact imposes excessive normality, and least in public . . . [p. 7]

~ Shirley Hazzard

... all humans are frightened of their own solitude. Yet only in solitude can man learn to know himself, learn to handle his own eternity of aloneness. And love from one being to another can only be that two solitudes come nearer, recognize and protect and comfort each other. - The Mountain is Young

~ Han Suyin

Tea should be taken in solitude.

~ C.s. Lewis

There are sores which slowly erode the mind in solitude like a kind of canker.

~ Sadegh Hedayat

But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing.

~ Virginia Woolf

I have not a desire but a need for solitude.

~ Roland Barthes

Remember you are never really alone. Although it may feel like it for very long stretches of time.

~ Steven L. Peck

The physiognomy of a deserted highway expresses solitude to a degree that is not reached by mere dales or downs, and bespeaks a tomb-like stillness more emphatic than that of glades and pools. The contrast of what is with what might be, probably accounts for this.

~ Thomas Hardy

All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit quiet in a room alone.

~ Blaise Pascal

We dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the household with our wives, and these things make no impression, are forgotten next week; but in the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations, which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart! — it seems to say, — there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

What an ambiance, and such a pity I'm alone: Candles giving off their glow, gusts of wind and the light tapping of rain on the windowpane - a massage for the mind. And a comforting one, too.

~ Donna Lynn Hope

For I have hedged me with a thorny hedge, I live alone, I look to die alone: Yet sometimes, when a wind sighs through the sedge, Ghosts of my buried years, and friends come back, My heart goes sighing after swallows flown On sometime summer's unreturning track.

~ Christina Rossetti

Here must thou be, O man,Strength to thyself — no helper hast thou here —Here keepest thou thy individual state:No other can divide with thee this work,No secondary hand can interveneTo fashion this ability. 'Tis thine,The prime and vital principle is thineIn the recesses of thy nature, farFrom any reach of outward fellowship,Else 'tis not thine at all.

~ William Wordsworth

I go, I go away, I walk, I wander, and everywhere I go I bear my shell with me, I remain at home in my room, among my books, I do not approach an inch nearer to Marrakech or Timbuktu. Even if I took a train, a boat, or a motor-bus, if I went to Morocco for my holiday, if I suddenly arrived at Marrakech, I should be always in my room, at home. And if I walked in the squares and in the sooks, if I gripped an Arab's shoulder, to feel Marrakech in his person - well, that Arab would be at Marrakech, not I : I should still be seated in my room, placid and meditative as is my chosen life, two thousand miles away from the Moroccan and his burnoose. In my room. Forever.

~ Jean-Paul Sartre

There was something lacking – in him, he thought, not in the place. He was not up to it. He was not strong enough to take what was so generously offered. He felt himself dry and arid, like a desert plant, in this beautiful oasis. Life on Anarres had sealed him, closed off his soul; the waters of life welled all around him, and yet he could not drink.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

These words filled me with a sort of melancholy and I was at a loss for an answer, for I felt when I was with him, when I was talking to him - and no doubt it would have been the same with anyone else - none of that happiness which it was possible for me to experience when I was by myself. Alone, at times, I felt surging from the depths of my being one or other ot those impressions which gave me a delicious sense of well-being. But as soon as I was with someone else, as soon as I was talking to a friend, my mind as it were faced about, it was towards this interlocutor and not towards myself that it directed its thoughts, and when they followed this outward course they brought me no pleasure.

~ Marcel Proust

The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.

~ Nadine Gordimer

When I was a child, I thought,Casually, that solitudeNever needed to be sought.Something everybody had,Like nakedness, it lay at hand,Not specially right or specially wrong,A plentiful and obvious thingNot at all hard to understand.Then, after twenty, it becameAt once more difficult to getAnd more desired -- though all the sameMore undesirable; for whatYou are alone has, to achieveThe rank of fact, to be expressedIn terms of others, or it's justA compensating make-believe.Much better stay in company!To love you must have someone else,Giving requires a legatee,Good neighbours need whole parishfulsOf folk to do it on -- in short,Our virtues are all social; if,Deprived of solitude, you chafe,It's clear you're not the virtuous sort.Viciously, then, I lock my door.The gas-fire breathes. The wind outsideUshers in evening rain. Once moreUncontradicting solitudeSupports me on its giant palm;And like a sea-anemoneOr simple snail, there cautiouslyUnfolds, emerges, what

~ Philip Larkin

He had escaped the abhorrent taint! He was truly completely alone! He was the only human being in the world!

~ Patrick Süskind

There is no greater solitude than that of the samurai unless it is that of the tiger in the jungle... Perhaps...

~ Jean-Pierre Melville

He liked the loneliness of inner space, the sense of being forgotten by the world.

~ Richard Preston

In the wide pile, by others heeded not,Hers was one sacred solitary spot,Whose gloomy aisles and bending shelves containFor moral hunger food, and cures for moral pain.

~ Walter Scott

Always. At every moment, asleep and awake, during the most sublime and most abject moments, Amaranta thought of Rebeca, because solitude had made a selection in her memory and had burned the dimming piles of nostalgic waste that life had accumulated in her heart, and had purified, magnified, and eternalized the others, the most bitter ones.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

You need to establish a degree of privacy and solitude in order to write

~ Pamela Glass Kelly

My name it means nothingmy fortune is lessMy future is shrouded in dark wildernessSunshine is far away, clouds linger onEverything I posessed - Now they are goneOh where can I go to and what can I do?Nothing can please me only thoughts are of youYou just laughed when I begged you to stayI've not stopped crying since you went awayThe world is a lonely place when you're on your ownGuess I will go home - sit down and moan.Crying and thinking is all that I doMemories I have remind me of you

~ Black Sabbath

For here, inside the crypt, was where he truly lived. Which is to say, for well over twenty hours a day in total darkness and in total silence and in total immobility, he sat on his horse blanket at the end of the stony corridor, his back resting on the rock slide, his shoulders wedged between the rocks and enjoyed himself.

~ Patrick Süskind

As he took possession of it, he was overcome by a sense of something like sacred awe. He carefully spread his horse blanket on the ground as if dressing an altar and lay down on it. He felt blessedly wonderful. He was lying a hundred and fifty feet below the earth, inside the loneliest mountain in France - as if in his own grave. Never in his life had he felt so secure, certainly not in his mother's belly. The world could go up on flames out there, but he would not even notice it here. He even began to cry softly. He did not know who to thank for such good fortune.

~ Patrick Süskind

He lay in his stony crypt like his own corpse, hardly breathing, his heart hardly beating - and yet lived as intensively and dissolutely as ever a rake had lived in the wide world outside.

~ Patrick Süskind

From his corner office on the ground floor of the St. Cyril station house, Inspector Dick has a fine view of the parking lot. Six Dumpsters plated and hooped like iron maidens against bears. Beyond the Dumpsters a subalpine meadow, and then the snow¬ capped ghetto wall that keeps the Jews at bay. Dick is slouched against the back of his two-thirds-scale desk chair, arms crossed, chin sunk to his chest, star¬ing out the casement window. Not at the mountains or the meadow, grayish green in the late light, tufted with wisps of fog, or even at the armored Dumpsters. His gaze travels no farther than the parking lot—no farther than his 1961 Royal Enfield Crusader. Lands¬man recognizes the expression on Dick's face. It's the expression that goes with the feeling Landsman gets when he looks at his Chevelle Super Sport, or at the face of Bina Gelbfish. The face of a man who feels he was born into the wrong world. A mistake has been made; he is not where he belongs. Every so often he feels his heart catch, like a kite on a telephone wire, on something that seems to promise him a home in the world or a means of getting there. An American car manufactured in his far-off boyhood, say, or a motor¬cycle that once belonged to the future king of England, or the face of a woman worthier than himself of being loved.

~ Michael Chabon

…she had no resources for solitude…

~ Jane Austen

Dantes,rejected by all the world,frequently experienced a desire for solitude, and what solitude is at the same time more complete,more poetical , than that of a bark floating isolated on the sea during the obscurity of the night, in the silence of immensity and under the eye of Heaven? Now this solitude was peopled with this thoughts, the night lighted by his illusions, and the silence animated by his anticipations.

~ Alexandre Dumas

We habitually compare ourselves to others to a debilitating degree, believing our successes can only be captured by how much we've outpaced someone else. We deal in acceptable ideas. We disregard our own capabilities. We waste a lot of time and emotion on what everyone else is doing well or badly, when we should be investing in and celebrating ourselves. And sometimes we simply forget that we like our own company, or that we love things for our own, deeply personal, individualistic reasons.In short, we forget ourselves, and how to be alone.

~ Stacey May Fowles