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.
4827 Franz Kafka
I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.
3488 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.
3110 Natalie Goldberg
Know that you will eventually have to leave everything behind; the writing will demand it of you.
2172 Harold Bloom
Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.
1920 Marcel Proust
Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.
2953 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.
3224 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.
4865 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.
3754 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.
4445 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.
1161 Charlotte Eriksson
I think I’m learning
that sometimes the bravest thing is not to face the world,
but to turn away from it.
4071 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.
4273 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.
3628 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.
3504 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...
2877 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.
1935 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.
2523 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.
4663 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.
3446 P.D. James
I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.
2729 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.
1549 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.
2803 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
3050 Paul Valéry
God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly
4001 Lailah Gifty Akita
In times of solitude, I have find rest for my soul and uphold the glory of inner peace.
3256 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.
1632 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
2061 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.
3184 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.
3089 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
2209 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.
1221 Sylvia Plath
I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss?
Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?
3446 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.
2802 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?
1431 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.
4762 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.
2817 John Clare
Crowded places, I shunned them as noises too rude
And fled to the silence of sweet solitude.
4126 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.
1471 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.
3786 Gilles Deleuze
You never walk alone. Even the devil is the lord of flies.
1994 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
2502 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.
1151 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.
3410 Theodore Roethke
Love makes me naked;
Propinquity's a harsh master;
O the songs we hide singing to ourselves!
4878 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.
2106 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.
1741 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.
3421 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.
2847 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.
3660 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)
4233 Jean Rhys
Not that she objected to solitude. Quite the contrary. She had books, thank Heaven, quantities of books. All sorts of books.
1987 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.
3173 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.
3813 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.
1440 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.
2228 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.
2704 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.
1389 Edgar Rice Burroughs
Even brave men, and D'Arnot was a brave man, are sometimes frightened by solitude.
2651 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!
1889 Milan Kundera
It's not your enemies who condemn you to solitude, it's your friends
2470 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.
3025 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.
4078 Alan Bennett
To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less...selfish.
2923 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.
2445 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.
4186 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.
2180 C.S. Lewis
We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.
2996 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.
3406 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.
4053 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.
4242 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.
2118 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.
1390 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.
4133 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...
3326 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.
4086 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.
3077 Kahlil Gibran
Solitude has soft, silky hands, but with strong fingers it grasps the heart and makes it ache with sorrow.
2330 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.
1283 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.
1505 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.
4423 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.
1556 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.
4355 Rainer Maria Rilke
We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all.
2331 Dinakar Phillip
To speak your Heart out
nothing can be better than Night and Acoustic guitar !!
3478 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
1605 Durgesh Satpathy
I can’t help you, I can only guide you, and you are the one who can help yourself.
2475 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.
2206 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.
3843 Nation C White
my dearest agony let us be together, i am not seasoned for this solitude.
1430 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.
2618 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.
2543