Solitude Quotes

Jonathan Safran Foer

Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on.
I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you.

Franz Kafka

I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.

Natalie Goldberg

Anything we fully do is an alone journey.

Tobias Wolff

There are very few professions in which people just sit down and think hard for five or six hours a day all by themselves. Of course it's why you want to become a writer - because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.

Natalie Goldberg

Know that you will eventually have to leave everything behind; the writing will demand it of you.

Ram Mohan

Silence is most meaningful.

Harold Bloom

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.

Marcel Proust

Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.. Marcel Proust
Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.

Betty Smith

From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood.

Thomas Mann

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.

George Santayana

We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.

Sigmund Freud

As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude.

Charlotte Eriksson

I think I’m learning
that sometimes the bravest thing is not to face the world,
but to turn away from it.

Lauren DeStefano

It's quiet for a while, and then Rowan says; "We could talk now. We're alone out here. No walls."
"There are always walls." I say.

Fernando Pessoa

I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful - only then do I find myself and feel comforted.

Charlotte Eriksson

You read and write and sing and experience, thinking that one day these things will build the character you admire to live as. You love and lose and bleed best you can, to the extreme, hoping that one day the world will read you like the poem you want to be.

Saul Bellow

With one long breath, caught and held in his chest, he fought his sadness over his solitary life. Don't cry, you idiot! Live or die, but don't poison everything...

Michel De Montaigne

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.

Isabelle Eberhardt

For those who know the value of and exquisite taste of solitary freedom (for one is only free when alone), the act of leaving is the bravest and most beautiful of all.

Tom Stoppard

The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devices - after a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people's.

Dalit Orbach

The cold rationalism simply covers for raw, wounded emotion. The more driven people are by the mind, the more they feel and further encode their feelings. The thickness of the tarpaulin cover is as the size of the emotion.

Virginia Woolf

Septimus has been working too hard" - that was all she could say to her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she thought.

P.D. James

I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.

Donna Lynn Hope

Speaking of happiness, those distinctive moments are found outdoors – in the fall, in the winter and always in the mountains where people are few, wildlife is abundant and there is peace in the quiet.

Angela Carter

She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening. She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man’s land between life and death, sleeping and waking.

Jack Kerouac

Way far back in the beginning of the world was the whirlwind warning that we could all be blown away like chips and cry- Men with tired eyes realize it now, and wait to deform and decay- with maybe they have the power of love yet in their hearts just the same, I just don't know what that word means anymore- All I want is an ice cream cone

Paul Valéry

God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly

Lailah Gifty Akita

In times of solitude, I have find rest for my soul and uphold the glory of inner peace.

Octavio Paz

Pero su recuerdo no me abandona. Quien ha visto la Esperanza, no la olvida. La busca bajo todos los cielos y entre todos los hombres. Y sueña que un día va a encontrarla de nuevo, no sabe dónde, acaso entre los suyos. En cada hombre late la posibilidad de ser o, más exactamente, de volver a ser, otro hombre.

George Gordon Byron

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more

Mary Oliver

The Old Poets Of China

Wherever I am, the world comes after me.
It offers me its busyness. It does not believe
that I do not want it. Now I understand
why the old poets of China went so far and high
into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.

Philip Larkin

Uncontradicting solitude
Supports me on its giant palm;
And like a sea-anemone
Or simple snail, there cautiously
Unfolds, emerges, what I am.

William Wordsworth

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

W.B. Yeats

I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.

Sylvia Plath

I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss?
Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?

Heinrich Heine

A pine tree standeth lonely
In the North on an upland bare;
It standeth whitely shrouded
With snow, and sleepeth there.

It dreameth of a Palm tree
Which far in the East alone,
In the mournful silence standeth
On its ridge of burning stone.

Jack Gilbert

The Abandoned Valley

Can you understand being alone so long
you would go out in the middle of the night
and put a bucket into the well
so you could feel something down there
tug at the other end of the rope?

William Shakespeare

Thus weary of the world, away she hies,
And yokes her silver doves; by whose swift aid
Their mistress mounted through the empty skies
In her light chariot quickly is convey'd;
Holding their course to Paphos, where their queen
Means to immure herself and not be seen.

Wisława Szymborska

Four billion people on this earth
but my imagination is still the same.
It's bad with large numbers.
It's still taken by particularity.
It flits in the dark like a flashlight,
illuminating only random faces
while all the rest go by,
never coming to mind and never really missed.

John Clare

Crowded places, I shunned them as noises too rude
And fled to the silence of sweet solitude.

Robert M. Pirsig

The range of human knowledge today is so great that we're all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely between them almost has to forego closeness with the people around him.

William Temple

Religion is what you do with your solitude.

Lailah Gifty Akita

The pleasure of reading is the greatest solitude.

Lailah Gifty Akita

We must not only observe but listen to the sound of nature.

Karl Lagerfeld

People who do a job that claims to be creative have to be alone to recharge their batteries. You can’t live 24 hours a day in the spotlight and remain creative. For people like me, solitude is a victory.

Gilles Deleuze

You never walk alone. Even the devil is the lord of flies.

Stephanie Dowrick

Sound crazy? It may well be, but it is precisely in relationships of intimacy that your craziness (and mine) will be hardest to conceal. p.215

Catherynne M. Valente

... relationships required such vigilance, such attention. You had to hold them together by force of will, and other people took up so much space, demanded so much time. It was exhausting.

Steven L. Peck

I could tell you of occasionally, every eon, meeting a person, with whom I might stay for a billion years. But what of it? After a billion years there is nothing left to say, and you wander apart, uncaring in the end.

Theodore Roethke

Love makes me naked;
Propinquity's a harsh master;
O the songs we hide singing to ourselves!

Sanhita Baruah

Even when it seems that there is no one else, always remember there's one person who never ceased to love you - yourself.

John Lubbock

The whole value of solitude depends upon oneself; it may be a sanctuary or a prison, a haven of repose or a place of punishment, a heaven or a hell, as we ourselves make it.

Brennan Manning

Silent solitude makes true speech possible and personal. If I am not in touch with my own belovedness, then I cannot touch the sacredness of others. If I am estranged from myself, I am likewise a stranger to others.

Mike Norton

Solitude is the soil in which genius is planted, creativity grows, and legends bloom; faith in oneself is the rain that cultivates a hero to endure the storm, and bare the genesis of a new world, a new forest.

Joshua Slocum

I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else.

J.D. Salinger

I’ll read my books and I’ll drink coffee and I’ll listen to music, and I’ll bolt the door."

( A Boy in France : Saturday Evening Post CCXVII, March 31, 1945)

Jean Rhys

Not that she objected to solitude. Quite the contrary. She had books, thank Heaven, quantities of books. All sorts of books.

Aldous Huxley

A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.

Girolamo Cardano

I prefer solitude to companions, since there are so few men who are trustworthy, and almost none truly learned. I do not say this because I demand scholarship in all men - although the sum total of men's learning is small enough; but I question whether we should allow anyone to waste our time. The wasting of time is an abomination.

Pema Chödrön

Making good use of our limited time - the limited time from birth to death, as well as our limited time each day - is the key to developing inner steadiness and calm.

Bell Hooks

But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.

Michael Bassey Johnson

The consequences of seeking popularity is not only the chronic feeling of lonliness, but a desire to hide your face from the eyes of the universe.

Michael Bassey Johnson

You only know me as an ordinary human being, with flesh, blood and bones, but there is something about me too hard for you to decipher, for if i let you, you will ever regret knowing me.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Even brave men, and D'Arnot was a brave man, are sometimes frightened by solitude.

Roman Payne

Wherever you go in the next
catastrophé
Be it sickroom, or prison,
or cemet’ry
Do not fear that your stay will be
solit’ry
Countless souls share your fate,
you’ll have company!

Milan Kundera

It's not your enemies who condemn you to solitude, it's your friends

Fernando Pessoa

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

Heather King

Was I being groomed for some special mission? What possible purpose could an existence like mine serve? When I wasn’t drinking in crappy bars, I was home by myself reading: a life that was achingly lonely, and yet perversely designed to prevent anybody from ever getting close enough to really know me.

Storm Jameson

We need the slower and more lasting stimulus of solitary reading as a relief from the pressure on eye, ear and nerves of the torrent of information and entertainment pouring from ever-open electronic jaws. It could end by stupefying us.

Alan Bennett

To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less...selfish.

Anna Quindlen

Since the age of five I had been one of those people who was an indefatigable reader, more inclined to go off by myself with a book than do any of the dozens of things that children usually do to amuse themselves. I never aged out of it.

Italo Calvino

Reading is solitude.

Suzanne Palmieri

Father and Ivy used to go off on their excursions, never knowing that I was relieved when they were gone. That I'd wear my nightgowns all day and read from dawn till dusk.

Everett Ruess

I prefer the saddle to the streetcar and star-sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail leading into the unknown to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bread by cities... it is enough that I am surrounded by beauty.

C.S. Lewis

We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.

Margaret Atwood

Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings...but there’s something dead about it, something deserted.

Roman Payne

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.

John Fowles

I knew that on that island one was driven back into the past. There was so much space, so much silence, so few meetings that one too easily saw out of the present, and then the past seemed ten times closer than it was.

John Clare

In mid-wood silence, thus, how sweet to be;
Where all the noises, that on peace intrude,
Come from the chittering cricket, bird, and bee,
Whose songs have charms to sweeten solitude.

John Clare

O lead me onward to the loneliest shade,
The darkest place that quiet ever made,
Where kingcups grow most beauteous to behold
And shut up green and open into gold.

John Clare

O take me from the busy crowd,
I cannot bear the noise!
For Nature's voice is never loud;
I seek for quiet joys.
The book I love is everywhere,
And not in idle words;
The book I love is known to all,
And better lore affords.

Oksana Rus

Just take my hand, lead, dance with me...and I will simply follow the blueness of the water, the white waves rolling free...where the earth beneath my feet and stars make my heart whole again...in long and priceless moments of shared solitude...

Évariste Régis Huc

On re-entering cultivated lands, the agitation, perplexity, and turmoil of civilization oppressed and suffocated us; the air seemed to fail us, and we felt every moment as if about to die of asphyxia.

Edwin Way Teale

Nature is shy and noncommittal in a crowd. To learn her secrets, visit her alone or with a single friend, at most. Everything evades you, everything hides, even your thoughts escape you, when you walk in a crowd.

Kahlil Gibran

Solitude has soft, silky hands, but with strong fingers it grasps the heart and makes it ache with sorrow.

Patrick Süskind

And suddenly solitude fell across his heart like a dusty reflection. He closed his eyes. The dark doors within him opened and he entered. The next performance in the theater of Grenouille's soul was beginning.

Alice Koller

But there is saying, and there is doing, and almost always people do something better than they can talk about it, as though the minded body defeats every attempt to select out only the mind part as deserving sole responsibility for the success.

Jodi Picoult

If you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.

Alberto Caeiro

I’d like to have enough time and quiet
To think about absolutely nothing,
To not ever feel myself living,
To only know myself in others’ eyes, reflected.

Amina Gautier

They were both from the real world, their own distinct ones, but I was somewhere in limbo. Set apart, I didn't know how to let either of them in.

Rainer Maria Rilke

We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all.

Dinakar Phillip

To speak your Heart out
nothing can be better than Night and Acoustic guitar !!

Mohadesa Najumi

Aloneness is a gift. A beautiful gift to the human soul. True and consistent satisfaction comes from the bond you form with yourself. Nobody else is a constant

Durgesh Satpathy

I can’t help you, I can only guide you, and you are the one who can help yourself.

Diana Gabaldon

I've seen women-and men too, sometimes-as canna bear the sound of their own thoughts, and they maybe dinna make such good matches with those who can.

Paul Tillich

Language ... has created the word 'loneliness' to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word 'solitude' to express the glory of being alone.

Mark Z. Danielewski

Noli me tangere,
noli me legere,
noli me videre,
noli me

Nation C White

my dearest agony let us be together, i am not seasoned for this solitude.

Jennifer Elisabeth

I’m going inside of myself and never coming out.

Elizabeth Gilbert

This was not my moment to be seeking romance and (as day follows night) to further complicate my already knotty life. This was my moment to look for the kind of healing and peace that can only come from solitude.

A.S. Byatt

My Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have. I hesitate to go out. If you opened the little gate, I would not hop away - but oh how I sing in my gold cage.

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