Solitude Quotes

Kisses are a shared solitude.

~ Marty Rubin

No real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or moral, can arise without solitude.

~ William Deresiewicz

Events like this don't give me the sense of oneness others seem to enjoy; it's always been private occasions that make me feel connected to the joys and sorrows of the world, often in the form of communion with writers and musicians I'll never meet in person. Proust called these moments of unity between writer and reader 'that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.

~ Susan Cain

Solitude and reflection are necessary to give to wishes the force of passions.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

After chopping off all the arms that reached out to me; after boarding up all the windows and doors; after filling all the pits with poisoned water; after building my house on the rock of a No inaccessible to flattery and fear; after cutting out my tongue and eating it; after hurling handfuls of silence and monosyllables of scorn at my loves; after forgetting my name and the name of my birthplace and the name of my race; after judging and sentencing myself to perpetual waiting and perpetual loneliness, I heard against the stones of my dungeon of syllogisms the humid, tender, insistent onset of spring.

~ Octavio Paz

My heart almost died within me; miserable longings strained its chords. How long were the September days! How silent, how lifeless!

~ Charlotte Brontë

Connections are difficult. There’s an irritation in being among people who’ve already found their connection, and finding that those left who haven’t are just as undesirable as the void they would be replacing. The numbing mind-ream of knowing you're alone not because people won't accept you but because you find so little worth accepting. An imposed solitude is better than simply tolerating your company in waiting for something better. So loneliness is not such a terrible thing when you consider that the alternative to thought provoking solace is to be surrounded only by reminders of why that solitude is preferable.

~ Jhonen Vásquez

To be alone was my best interest because needing myself was looking for you

~ Nicola An

The person who knows how to enjoy their own company knows the most important thing.

~ Marty Rubin

As much as anything else, it was a stare, not so paradoxically, of a privacy-lover who, once his privacy has been invaded, doesn't quite approve when the invader just gets up and leaves, one-two-three, like that.

~ J.d. Salinger

Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone her pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude.

~ Elizabeth Bowen

Some people, weak people, fear solitude. What they fail to understand is that there’s something very liberating about it; once you realize that you don’t need anyone, you can take care of yourself. That’s the thing: it’s best just to take care of yourself.

~ Gail Honeyman

It's the solitude that slays you. Maybe because you'd expected ruin to arrive in a grander and more romantic form.

~ Michael Cunningham

I am so tired. I have grown old from being serious. I have grown ill from being serious. I want to laugh at myself. I want to forget myself. I am so tired.

~ Kamand Kojouri

How can you make an informed decision about whether to save the world if you never leave your tiny part of it?

~ Shaun David Hutchinson

I never went downstairs to join my housemates around the television. I cooked dinner later than everyone else and carried the plate up to my bedroom. I knew they must have thought me aloof, or a little bit eccentric, or maybe even unkind, but I didn't care. Once the kitchen door swung shut behind me, I was alone, and so everything was okay.

~ Sara Baume

He imagined himself lying there, unable to sleep, thinking of his mother, separated from her by the unresponsive blankets tucked too tightly round him, feeling the ceaseless thumping of his heart in the silence of the night, the irrevocability of absence, the rigid stillness of repose, the agony of solitude and sleeplessness. If the room was a prison, the bed was a tomb.

~ Marcel Proust

I like the sound of rain more than my

~ Nâzım Hikmet

The more we frequent men, the blacker our thoughts; and when, to clarify them, we return to our solitude, we find there the shadow they have cast.

~ Emil M. Cioran

The cynicism of utter solitude is a calvary relieved by insolence.

~ Emil M. Cioran

Be open minded to the empowering nature of being alone.

~ Dee Waldeck

The armchairs, with their flat, sedentary cushions, were designed for society, but the bed was made for solitude. It had a straitened and measured narrowness, an austere frame made to contain the curves of a single body, to circumscribe it, carry it, give it a place, and when I slept at night, I possessed it entirely.

~ Amit Chaudhuri

The most perfect solitude must entail the absence of all beings, but it must also tremble with the light of life. For example, a perfect solitude may find itself haunted by lives born of the imagination, characters lying on shelves in rows of books, or accompanied by figures waiting in dreams. The perfect solitude pushes one to sense the pulse of solitude itself; for example, a perfect solitude may be marked with the beat of one’s heart.

~ Meia Geddes

Unerring solitude forces a person to confront their morality and aloneness. Solitude makes personal confession possible.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The psyche of some people, whether through innate structure or via adaption to personal experiences, is uniquely adept for absolute aloneness.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.

~ Jane Hirshfield

The farm is a base of operations–a stronghold. You can withdraw into yourself there. Solitude for reflection is an essential ingredient in self-development. I think a person has to be withdrawn into himself to gather inspiration so that he is somebody when he comes out again among folks–when he “comes to market’ with himself. He learns that he’s got to be almost wastefully alone.

~ Robert Frost

It turned out plant collecting was a solitary occupation. In the past Robert had enjoyed being alone, or so he thought. Actually he had rarely been alone for long: working in hotels, in stables, on ranches and farms, and as a miner, he had always been around others. Now, out in the woods or up in the hills or out on the flat central plain, he could go for days without speaking to anyone. His throat seemed to close up and he had to keep clearing it, singing songs aloud or reciting the Latin names of plants, just to check that he still had a voice. 'Araucaria imbricata. Sequoia sempervirens. Pinus lambertiana. Abies magnifica'. He was surprised at how much he missed people..

~ Tracy Chevalier

It never ceased to amaze me, until suddenly one day I felt beautiful and holy for having had the courage to hold on to my sanity after all I'd seen and been through, body and soul, in too loud a solitude, and slowly I came to the realization that my work was hurtling me headlong into an infinite field of omnipotence.

~ Bohumil Hrabal

Solitary writers come out of nowhere and do not belong anywhere. They are not domesticated or socialized, not as writers. Their subject is not the world about them but the one within them. From story to story or poem to poem, they repeat themselves because all they have to work with are themselves and their dreams, which are strange dreams and often bad dreams. As anyone knows, nothing is more troublesome to communicate than yourself and your dreams, the feelings and visions that have molded you into what you are.

~ Thomas Ligotti

There was no one to complain to in the woods, so I did not complain,' Knight said.

~ Michael Finkel

fallin lovewith your solitude

~ Rupi Kaur

Talk of solitude (...). It is the last resort of the civilised: our souls are so creased and soured in meaning we can only unfold them when we are alone. (5/4/1927 - From a Letter to Vita Sackville-West)

~ Virginia Woolf

As some heads cannot carry much wine, so it would seem that I cannot bear so much society as you can. I have an immense appetite for solitude, like an infant for sleep, and if I don’t get enough of it this year I shall cry all the next.

~ Henry David Thoreau

I avoid the looming visitor,Flee him adroitly around corners,Hating him, wishing him well;Lest if he confront me I be forced to say what is in no wise true:That he is welcome; that I am unoccupied;And forced to sit while the potted roses wilt in the crate or the sonnet coolsBending a respectful nose above such dried philosophiesAs have hung in wreaths from the rafters of my house since I was a child.Some trace of kindliness in this, no doubt,There may be.But not enough to keep a bird alive.There is a flaw amounting to a fissureIn such behaviour.

~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, wrote that nothing can be expressed about solitude that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.

~ Michael Finkel

It's nice to be able to control my smell environment, and I can hear myself think better when it's quiet. It wasn't easy to become a person who's OK being alone on a Saturday night, but I did the work, I got there...

~ Jonathan Franzen

We are living in an era where mental health has become equated with, and measured by, the success of our interpersonal relationships, particularly the extent to which they bring us happiness. Yet as important as it is to be able to live peaceably with others, mental and interpersonal health ultimately require the ability to be at peace in the solitude of oneself and to enjoy, and be enriched by, the company of one’s own thoughts.

~ James Castleton

The acts of observing and judging are necessarily solitary acts.

~ Mike Klepper

The American essayist William Deresiewicz wrote that no real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or moral, can arise without solitude.

~ Michael Finkel