“Sometimes, meu amor, we lose too much time asking ourselves questions that we can’t answer and forgetting that the answer is just beside us. You have to learn to ask and to listen. If one does not listen, the other does not exist. When the other does not exist, one is alone. I don’t want to be alone, do you?”
Source: Trust: Pandora's Box
“Men and women sleep not with each other but with the memories, the regrets, the hopes of unions yet to come. Our adulteries are internal; they deepen our aloneness.”
“The rhythm of solitude, once so intimidating, began to feel comfortable. Aloneness, I was learning, does not have to equal loneliness.”
Source: Bad Dogs Have More Fun: Selected Writings on Family, Animals, and Life from the Philadelphia Inquirer
“Where had they learned to converse and to dance? I couldn't converse or dance. Everybody knew something I didn't know. The girls looked so good, the boys so handsome. I would be too terrified to even look at one of those girls, let alone be close to one. To look into her eyes or dance with her would be beyond me.
And yet I know that what I saw wasn't as simple and good as it appeared. There was a price to be paid for it all, a general falsity, that could be easily believed, and could be the first step down a dead-end street.”
Source: Ham On Rye
“That’s exactly what I’ll do, I thought to myself. After dinner, I’m going to ask Big
Brother to teach me how to read this map. With Aunt Baba still in Tianjin, there’s
obviously nobody looking out for me. I’ll just have to find my own way.”
Source: Chinese Cinderella: The True Story of an Unwanted Daughter
“If you were alone when you were born, alone when you were dying, really absolutely alone when you were dead, why "learn to be alone" in between? If you had forgotten, it would quickly come back to you. Aloneness was like riding a bike. At gunpoint. With the gun in your own hand. Aloneness was the air in your tires, the wind in your hair. You didn't have to go looking for it with open arms. With open arms, you fell off the bike: I was drinking my wine too quickly.”
Source: Bark
“Relationship Time to Aloneness. And I remember about that. Having a companion fixes you in time and that the present, but when the quality of aloneness settles down, past, present, and future all flow together. A memory, a present event, and a forecast all equally present.”
Source: Travels with Charley: In Search of America
“If solitude feels painful, it's only because we don't know how to be alone.”
“At first the lives of women frightened me. They seemed so fragile, so dependent on fathers and husbands and brothers and lovers. Gradually, though, I noticed how supple their lives were beneath the surface. I saw, too, that sooner or later, by choice or by chance most women faced the task of adapting to a future on their own. When at my most optimistic, I thought of it as independence, in darker moods, as survival. Either way, women had to do it.”
Source: Without Reservations: The Travels Of An Independent Woman
“sendirilah, untuk sementara waktu sementara separuh jiwamu dijaga seorang yang juga menjaga kesendiriannya”