Solitude Quotes

It is a frightful satire and an epigram on the modern age that the only use it knows for solitude is to make it a punishment, a jail sentence.

~ Søren Kierkegaard

I’ve always been a sort of self-imposed outsider, not a geeky outsider or a snobby outsider but, I just have a natural desire to live on the fringe. I’m not like a weirdo with a trench-coat but I just prefer to be alone or minimally surrounded by people.

~ Sara Quin

Personally, I'd rather grow old alone than in the company of anyone I've met so far. I don't experience myself as lonely, incomplete, or unfulfilled, but I don't talk about that much. It seems to piss people off--especially men. (Kinsey Millhone)

~ Sue Grafton

We affect one another quite enough merely by existing. Whenever the stars cross, or is it comets? fragments pass briefly from one orbit to another. On rare occasions there is total collision, but most often the two simply continue without incident, neither losing more than a particle to the other, in passing.

~ Gore Vidal

The devil has made it his business to monopolize on three elements: noise, hurry, crowds. He will not allow quietness.

~ Elisabeth Elliot

Everyday brought me further away from other people, I had been placed out of the world's sight, as if in a cupboard, and I hoped it would stay that way. I developed a yearning for being alone, unkempt, untended.

~ Herta Müller

To find is the thing.

~ Pablo Picasso

And so I learned what solitude really was. It was raw material - awesome, malleable,older than men or worlds or water. And it was merciless - for it let a man become precisely what he alone made of himself.

~ David James Duncan

No one can be happy in eternal solitude.

~ Anne Brontë

The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude.

~ James Russell Lowell

There are times when a man should sleep entwined in the warm flesh of a woman, his flanks plummeting into the perfumed bedding while she lovingly rolls her sweet shoulders into his chest. Whereas, there are times to be stoic and solitary—sleeping alone on a wooden board with twill sheets and splinters that scratch the skin.

~ Roman Payne

However, the serious seeker of detachment will have to embrace the Holy Trinity of Ss - Solitude, Stillness and Silence - and reject the new religion of Commotionism, which believes that the meaning of life is constant company, movement and noise.

~ Michael Foley

At first the solitudecharmed me like a prelude,but so much music wounded me.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

You are at my side, dear friends, and God is everywhere. Yet ultimately we are alone, making our way home by the candle of the heart. The light is steady and sure but extends only far enough to see the next step.Many times the light seems to go out. But another light, one held by a stranger or friend, a book or a song, a blackbird or a wild flower, comes close enough so that we can see our path by its light. And in time we realize that the light we have borrowed was always our own.

~ Joan Borysenko

He was a master in the art of spreading boredom and playing the clumsy fool-though never so egregiously that people might enjoy making fun of him or use him as the butt of some crude practical joke inside the guild. He succeeded in being considered totally uninteresting. People left him alone. And that was all he wanted.

~ Patrick Süskind

We born alone,we all die alone.

~ Dalin Shu

He is at home with his solitude as the note reverberating inside a bell.

~ Peter Heller

Life has ill-prepared me for finding any enjoyment in a press of merrymakers.

~ Laurie R. King

CORNELIA: -Sit down. Don't leave the table.GRACE: -Is that an order?CORNELIA: -I don't give orders to you, I make requests.GRACE: -Sometimes the requests of an employer are hard to distinguish from orders. [She sits down]

~ Tennessee Williams

Imagine someone sitting alone in a room without television, radio, computer or phone and with the door closed and the blinds down. This person must be a dangerous lunatic or a prisoner sentenced to solitary confinement. If a free agent, then a panty-sniffing loser shunned by society, or a psycho planning to return to college with an automatic weapon and a backpack full of ammo.

~ Michael Foley

The most important thing is to hold on, hold out, for your creative life, for your solitude, for your time to be and do, for your very life.

~ Clarissa Pinkola Estés

A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.

~ Don Delillo

I find a certain degree of loneliness not only tolerable but deeply pleasurable.

~ Allen Shawn

There are times when I can find myself in a book, too, for two or three hours. But afterward I have such an urge to go out and reach for other people. Very often they're not around. There's also a metaphysical loneliness. We all feel it. The burden of living one's own life is experiencing sensations that no one else can share. You take a step in a house, you start moving around the house, no one else moves with you. You're walking by yourself.

~ David Ignatow

In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again. What was she seeking to salvage from the daily current of living, what sudden revulsions drove her back into the solitary cell of the dream?

~ Anaïs Nin

...the solitude was intoxicating. On my first night there I lay on my back on the sticky carpet for hours, in the murky orange pool of city glow coming through the window, smelling heady curry spices spiraling across the corridor and listening to two guys outside yelling at each other in Russian and someone practicing stormy flamboyant violin somewhere, and slowly realizing that there was not a single person in the world who could see me or ask me what I was doing or tell me to do anything else, and I felt as if at any moment the bedsit might detach itself from the buildings like a luminous soap bubble and drift off into the night, bobbing gently above the rooftops and the river and the stars.

~ Tana French

Part of me remained forever at Latitude 80 degrees 08 minutes South: what survived of my youth, my vanity, perhaps, and certainly my skepticism. On the other hand, I did take away something that I had not fully possessed before: appreciation of the sheer beauty and miracle of being alive, and a humble set of values. All this happened four years ago. Civilization has not altered my ideas. I live more simply now, and with more peace.

~ Richard E. Byrd

In solitude, you listen to sacred voice.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

When from our better selves we have too long been parted by the hurrying world, and droop. Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired, how gracious, how benign is solitude.

~ William Wordsworth

Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.

~ Thomas Merton

We wrote verses that condemned us, with no hope of pardon, to the most bitter solitude.

~ Salvatore Quasimodo

Wit is a weapon. Jokes are a masculine way of inflicting superiority. But humor is the pursuit of a gentle grin, usually in solitude.

~ Frank Muir

With Jackson there was quiet solitude. Just to sit and look at the landscape. An inner quietness. After dinner, to sit on the back porch and look at the light. No need for talking. For any kind of communication.

~ Lee Krasner

In my solitude I have pondered much on the incomprehensible subjects of space, eternity, life and death.

~ Alfred Russel Wallace

In solitude the mind gains strength and learns to lean upon itself.

~ Laurence Sterne

Who hears music feels his solitude peopled at once.

~ Robert Browning

Solitude is independence.

~ Hermann Hesse

How can we have our privacy? How can we have our independence now in these times with these cameras? Because I think privacy and our solitude is really important.

~ Parker Posey

Women need real moments of solitude and self-reflection to balance out how much of ourselves we give away.

~ Barbara De Angelis

The best thinking has been done in solitude. The worst has been done in turmoil.

~ Thomas A. Edison