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Solitude Quotes

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Solitude Quotes

“I have often wished in vain,' said she, 'for another's judgment to appeal to when I could scarcely trust the direction of my own eye and head, they having been so long occupied with the contemplation of a single object as to become almost incapable of forming a proper idea respecting it.' 'That,' replied I, 'is only one of many evils to which a solitary life exposes us.”

EvilSolitudeJudgmentVain Hopes
Book:The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
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“Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but 'steal' some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.”

SadnessSolitudeDepressionMeaningPrivacy
Book:Notebooks 1951-1959
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“Everyone experiences the feelings of sadness and loneliness. We might rue our lack of companionship, but some people present a desperate need for aloneness. Being alone allows a person to think, imagine, and take in nature. Because being alone is essential for specific human actions, similar to all other aspects of life, it is a gift.”

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Author:Kilroy J. Oldster
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“Jacques Prévert (1900–77) The Message The door that someone opened The door that someone closed The chair on which someone sat The cat that someone petted The fruit that someone bit into The letter that someone read The chair that someone tipped over The door that someone opened The road that someone ran down The woods that someone crossed The river in which someone jumped The hospital where someone died. (с. 1950) Translated by Terry Lajtha”

LifePoetrySadnessSolitude
Author:Jacques Prévert
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“It was hard to invest in a person when one saw how things passed. Take the ball player, for example, who dedicates his life, gets injured, and then watches the sport proceed without him. He sits on his leather couch, watching better athletes run across his television screen, younger ones on renovated fields. And he, who sacrificed his sweat, youth, and sanity to the sport and knew coaches, teammates, and even janitors at the stadium like brothers—is forced to still live afterward. His teammates said kind words before a match, hugged him after a goal, but now seem to be focused on new seasons and new goals. He gets left behind. Did none of it mean anything? He cries for the fast world to stop and says, “Slow down. This pains me. We were just here. I used to joke with you. We said we loved each other. Wait for me. Will you just wait for me?” Those hands he shook after a victory could not care for the weeping, broken-footed man hiding in the shadows of his home, once lit by the sun, once the life of the party. When Andrei walked into a job now, or even met someone for the first time, he thought: How long will it take you to forget me?”

FearSportsFriendshipSadnessSocietyLonelinessFailureSolitudeIllnessAbandonment
Book:A Happy Ghost
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“Sometimes, Andrei would feel like the moon. When he dined in solitude, when he masturbated to the couple at the hotel, or when he finished a book he could tell no one around him about, he felt singular and unaccompanied, like the stupid, radiating circle stuck in the sky. His soul would glow softly, through the darkness, deadened, but there, as if solemnly leaving a light on for anyone to come join him. Andrei would feel so far away from everyone else, like a floating object in space, lost in orbit, that no hand worried about, remembered, or attempted to retrieve.”

SadnessSocietyLonelinessSolitudeMoonDepressionAbandonment
Book:A Happy Ghost
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“People had tried to reel Raphael in from his silence. Their attempts were precisely why he felt so uncomfortable. He did not want to be saved or included. He liked to listen. When he asked a question, it was because he wanted to know the answer. But then they turned it around to ask, “What about you?” and this bothered Raphael, who believed the speaker only returned the question out of manners and so was never a real inquiry. Raphael would be pressured to respond and endure the painful seconds of saying something someone did not want to hear. He would trace their faltering eyes, then his words would crumble into sand, and his listener would never notice because they were not interested in the first place.”

RelationshipsFriendshipSilenceSadnessSocietyLonelinessSolitudeConversationDatingShyness
Book:A Happy Ghost
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“Pornography did not serve him either. Andrei used to have his personal kinks and fetishes, but after a while, nothing could get him off. For a long time, the only videos he would search were the ones titled: “Who is she?” The only thing that vitalized his self-play was the prospect of some woman on the earth no one knew of and could not find. There was something infinite to these tapes, not the appearance of the girls, but the agitating dissatisfaction and momentary access of a not-so-innocent stranger who men innocently lost forever. It consisted of poorly recorded videos, posted from a smartphone or webcam, and a desperate number of melancholy comments trying to search for the mystery woman. There were plenty of these recordings. But it broke Andrei even more when eventually he knew all the girls no one knew.”

SadnessLonelinessSolitudeAddictionMasculinityPornographyMasturbationPornThe InternetPorn Addiction
Book:A Happy Ghost
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“... then came a period when nothing soothed me ... there was no balm in the festive herbal splendor of my kitchen, no balm in the exhaustive evening showers before and after the Brooklyn Bridge excursion ... the waking hours weighted themselves between my legs, and there was no relief in sight .. I took to the reading of memoirs ... it was one of my finer moments when I discovered that no human life escapes the tribulation of solitude ...”

ReadingSadnessLonelinessSolitudeDepressionMemoirsTribulations
Book:Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?
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“A veces volvía a ser piedra negra y entonces yo no sabía qué pasaba del otro lado, qué era de ella en esos intervalos anónimos, qué extraños sucesos acontecían; y hasta pensaba que en esos momentos su rostro cambiaba y que una mueca de burla lo deformaba y que quizá había risas cruzadas con otro y que toda la historia de los pasadizos era una ridícula invención o creencia mía y que en todo caso había un solo túnel, oscuro y solitario: el mío, el túnel en que había transcurrido mi infancia, mi juventud, toda mi vida. Y en uno de esos trozos transparentes del muro de piedra yo había visto a esta muchacha y había creído ingenuamente que venía por otro túnel paralelo al mío, cuando en realidad pertenecía al ancho mundo, al mundo sin límites de los que no viven en túneles; y quizá se había acercado por curiosidad a una de mis extrañas ventanas y había entrevisto el espectáculo de mi insalvable soledad.”

SadnessSolitude
Book:El Túnel
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“He thrust his pelvis against his mattress, humping his pillow and thinking of no particular woman or memory, but merely the idea of being touched by someone—anyone. It was a sort of sorrowful pornography, masturbating to the day he would never need to masturbate. He closed his eyes and released on his sheets two fluids of desperation: semen of a lonely man and tears of a lonelier one.”

SadnessLonelinessSolitudeIsolationAbandonmentSad QuotesMasturbationThe Goodbye Song
Book:The Goodbye Song
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“The best lover you could ever have will sit on this very bench 270 years from now. You two will never meet. And will never know you’ll never meet. They are, however, currently sitting with you because if you two did meet, you’d spend your time sitting as you are now. Because returning to that bench every afternoon, happily single, was like spending a day with every soul who wants to sit there too.”

PainRelationshipsFriendshipSadnessLonelinessSolitudeGetting OlderBeing AloneThe Goodbye Song
Book:The Goodbye Song
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“In those blank pages is my story, Nothing ever written that wasn’t erased, Every thought was already a waste, And time preserves its own memory, A memory of me fading into time… I carry the weight of my emptiness, And see the world through eyes of needs, These needs breeds more habits, And these habits preserve my loneliness… So don’t confuse immortality with life, For life belongs to those who can live, We are infected with non-existence, And there was never a cure, We are the immortal clones of repetition… Four walls is what remains of my kingdom now, As history repeats itself, We all just change names, And the story remains the same, You took birth inside my head, For you are my imagination, And I am your reality… But reality expired long back in childhood, A memory of ‘would be could be’ life we carry now, But we still gift ourselves expectations, And hope engulfs every illusion, We just live on to pleasure our senses again… --- Trans-Sexual Adolescence”

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Book:Narcissistic Romanticism
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“I think I meant an intimation of sadness, a first recognition that there was so much to understand that one might never find one's way and the first signs, perhaps, that for a nature like mine, the way would not be easy. I cannot be sure that I felt all that then, although I can be sure that it was in the fig tree, a few years later, that I was first puzzled by the conflict which would haunt me, harm me, and benefit me the rest of my life: simply, the stubborn, relentless, driving desire to be alone as it came into conflict with the desire not to be alone when I wanted not to be.”

LifeCompanySadnessSolitudeDifficultiesComplications
Book:An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir
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“So, now I shall talk every night. To myself. To the moon. I shall walk, as I did tonight, jealous of my loneliness, in the blue-silver of the cold moon, shining brilliantly on the drifts of fresh-fallen snow, with the myriad sparkles. I talk to myself and look at the dark trees, blessedly neutral. So much easier than facing people, than having to look happy, invulnerable, clever. With masks down, I walk, talking to the moon, to the neutral impersonal force that does not hear, but merely accepts my being. And does not smite me down.”

PeopleNatureSolitude
Book:The Journals of Sylvia Plath
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“It’s the beating of my heart. The way I lie awake, playing with shadows slowly climbing up my wall. The gentle moonlight slipping through my window and the sound of a lonely car somewhere far away, where I long to be too, I think. It’s the way I thought my restless wandering was over, that I’d found whatever I thought I had found, or wanted, or needed, and I started to collect my belongings. Build a home. Safe behind the comfort of these four walls and a closed door. Because as much as I tried or pretended or imagined myself as a part of all the people out there, I was still the one locking the door every night. Turning off the phone and blowing out the candles so no one knew I was home. ’cause I was never really well around the expectations of my personality and I wanted to keep to myself. and because I haven’t been very impressed lately. By people, or places. Or the way someone said he loved me and then slowly changed his mind.”

PeopleLoveHomeNightFoundLostDoorsWallPersonalitySolitudeMoonTravelThoughtsExpectationsWindowLonelyAloneWanderAwakeLost LoveImpressedMoonlightBerlinShadowsWanderingPlacesCandles
Book:Another Vagabond Lost To Love: Berlin Stories on Leaving & Arriving
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“I am not poor, I am not rich; nihil est, nihil deest, I have little, I want nothing: all my treasure is in Minerva’s tower...I live still a collegiate student...and lead a monastic life, ipse mihi theatrum [sufficient entertainment to myself], sequestered from those tumults and troubles of the world...aulae vanitatem, fori ambitionem, ridere mecum soleo [I laugh to myself at the vanities of the court, the intrigues of public life], I laugh at all.”

PeopleSolitudeQuietAloneSolitaryPublicHermit
Book:The Anatomy of Melancholy
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“I wish to forget, a considerable part of every day, all mean, narrow, trivial men (and this requires usually to forego and forget all personal relations so long), and therefore I come out to these solitudes, where the problem of existence is simplified. I enter some glade in the woods, perchance, where a few weeds and dry leaves alone lift themselves above the surface of the snow, and it is as if I had come to an open window. I see out and around myself.”

PeopleNatureSolitudeSuperficiality
Book:The Journal, 1837-1861
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“The city doesn't beckon or lend me a shoulder today. Maybe it knows I'm about to leave. The sun's dull disk defeats me; the dense sky is the same one that will carry me away. The vast and vaporous territory, lacking precise pathways, is all that binds us together now. But it never preserves our tracks. The sky, unlike the sea, never holds on to the people that pass through it. The sky contains nothing of our spirit, it doesn't care. Always shifting, altering its aspect from one moment to the next, it can't be defined.”

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Book:Whereabouts
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