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Quote by Thor Benson

“Humans are all too happy to keep company until the company turns out to be less appealing than solitude.”

Quote by Thor Benson

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Thor Benson

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“She has always said that talking makes everyone feel better. He says talking is the equivalent of grooming. The tongue and fingers are governed by the same parts of the brain. He marvels at how close they can be some nights on the phone and how words really are the equal of touch. Bakelite pressed hard against his ear. She says it's not just the freedom from him and from their daughter. I feel some sort of opening. I saw things so clearly today. He thinks about the solitary figure in every religion, the monks, saints and shamans in every tradition who walk out into wilderness on their own and find revelation. It's what solitude does to a social animal he says. People talk of recognizing something greater than themselves when they're alone because we finally have to realize how helpless we are as individuals. There's a freedom, a sense of wonder in feeling for a moment that we don't have to please anyone or adjust to the needs of others. And there's a fear in realizing how small we are, how much those distant others normally insulate us from seeing the limits of our mostly incompetent bodies. When we're on our own we seek solutions and speculate and fictionalize because that's what we do when we're confronted with survival. That's revelation. Maybe she says, I'm just saying I'd like to eat less meat. We could have fish.”

SolitudeRevelationSense Of Wonder
Book:A Beautiful Truth
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“All these years, her sole objective had been to keep still and hope no one would ever know. She had been a mistress of stillness. She had mastered the simulation of peace without a wisp of real peace, like a nun from a silent order who was screaming inside her head, or a yogi racked with pain. How she had managed to fool anyone, let alone everyone, mystified her (how obtuse people were!) and, oddly, made her extraordinarily bitter. Because the price of her gift for evasion was to have no one, not one person, who understood how horrible she felt. All the time. Absolutely all the time.”

SolitudeDepressionFaking Happiness
Book:Admission
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“Saya kesepian, Tuhan. Tidakkah Engkau kasihan pada saya? Saya hanya ingin mempunyai teman. Cukup satu saja. Yang bisa saya ajak bicara, bercanda, dan bercengkrama. Yang selalu ada di kala sedih dan bahagia. Sekali lagi, kabulkan doa saya, Tuhan. Saya rela menjadi idiot asalkan Engkau selamatkan saya dari kesepian panjang ini.”

WishFriendshipSolitude
Book:Menunggu Pagi: Antologi Cerpen Keluarga Mahasiswa Sastra Indonesia
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“What is needed is this, and this alone: solitude, great inner loneliness. Going into oneself and not meeting anyone for hours – that is what one must arrive at. Loneliness of the kind one knew as a child, when the grown-ups went back and forth bound up in things which seemed grave and weighty because they looked so busy, and because one had no idea what they were up to. And when one day you realise that their preoccupations are meagre, their professions barren and no longer connected to life, why not continue to look on them like a child, as if on something alien, drawing on the depths of your own world, on the expanse of your own solitude, which itself is work and achievement and a vocation? Why wish to exchange a child’s wise incomprehension for rejection and contempt, when incomprehension is solitude, whereas rejection and contempt are ways of participating in what, by precisely these means, you want to sever yourself from?”

ChildhoodSolitude
Book:Letters to a Young Poet
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