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Solitude Quotes

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Solitude Quotes

“Sometimes callers from a distance invade my solitude, and it is on these occasions that I realize how absolutely alone each individual is, and how far away from his neighbour; and while they talk (generally about babies, past, present, and to come), I fall to wondering at the vast and impassable distance that separates one's own soul from the soul of the person sitting in the next chair.”

SoulSolitude
Book:Elizabeth and Her German Garden
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“I do not know if all kinds of solitary living have the same effect. The solitary sea-life . . . makes me think and feel more than is comfortable for my peace of mind. I have dreadful attacks of remorse. My chief remorse is for unkind acts to friends in the past. Maybe something deeply wounding that I have said or done. Then I find myself stuck with such things for ever; they cannot be undone and the awful thing is that often they did not mean much to me, nor were even seriously believed, but were used as a cruel weapon to hurt. Thank heaven I have a lot of jobs and work waiting to be done; otherwise, if able to lay about with nothing to do but think and feel, I would soon get into a maudlin state and eventually I can imagine the possibility of finding life too hard and cruel to bear. This life makes one so sympathetic with others in trouble with their conscience or unable to cope with the overwhelming difficulties of their life. . . . For me, to be nine months alone without aim, project, objective, challenge, would mean exposing my soul far too much. I can understand it being damaged or destroyed by continuous considering of it, relentless probing of it. I can only stand a very little peep of it now and then. Thank God for activity of body and mind to keep me away from my soul.”

SoulRegretSolitudeSympathySailingAvoidance
Author:Francis Chichester
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“In the end, I will become the ghost I always feared. When the fire I kindled in my mind reaches my heart, I will start turning everyone I meet to ashes. So, I speak less and less, withdrawing more and more from the outside world. I navigate a realm that seems devoid of other human beings. I have become isolated in my mind, knowing that I will no longer encounter others, even in my thoughts. I love the solitude, so far below, so far away from life...”

MindFearFireLonelinessSolitudeGhostIsolationAshesWithdrawal
Author:Rolf van der Wind
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“Half of me is filled with bursting words and half of me is painfully shy. I crave solitude yet also crave people. I want to pour life and love into everything yet also nurture my self-care and go gently. I want to live within the rush of primal, intuitive decision, yet also wish to sit and contemplate. This is the messiness of life - that we all carry multitudes, so must sit with the shifts. We are complicated creatures, and ultimately, the balance comes from this understanding. Be water. Flowing, flexible and soft. Subtly powerful and open. Wild and serene. Able to accept all changes, yet still led by the pull of steady tides. It is enough.”

LoveHumansCareWaterPowerfulBalanceSolitudeCreaturesSilentWordsComplicatedShySteadyTidesMultitudesFlexibleChangesWildSereneWavesBurstingOpenFlowingPull
Author:Victoria Erickson
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“Defined simply, narcissism means excessive self-preoccupation; pragmatism means excessive focus on work, achievement, and the practical concerns of life; and restlessness means an excessive greed for experience, an overeating, not in terms of food but in terms of trying to drink in too much of life...And constancy of all three together account for the fact that we are so habitually self-absorbed by heartaches, headaches, and greed for experience that we rarely find the time and space to be in touch with the deeper movements inside of and around us.”

MeditationSolitudeGreedInner PeaceLustHeartacheNarcissismAvariceHeadacheRestlessnessPragmatismHedonism
Book:The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality
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“I should have written you a letter, it was too late to make the deaths of my brothers an excuse. Since they died, I wrote a book; why not a letter? A mysterious but truthful answer is that while I can gear myself up to do a novel, letters, real-life communications, are too much for me. I used to rattle them off easily enough; why is the challenge of writing to friends and acquaintances too much for me now? Because I have become such a solitary, and not in the Aristotelian sense: not a beast, not a god. Rather, a loner troubled by longings, incapable of finding a suitable language and despairing at the impossibility of composing messages in a playable key--as if I no longer understood the codes used by the estimable people who wanted to hear from me and would have so much to reply if only the impediments were taken away.”

SolitudeLettersCorrespondenceCommunicationsLoners
Author:Saul Bellow
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“There are still souls for whom love is the contact of two poetries, the fusion of two reveries. The epistolary novel expresses love in a beautiful emulation of images and metaphors. To tell a love, one must write. One never writes too much. How many lovers, upon returning home from the tenderest of rendezvous, open their writing desks! Love is never finished expressing itself, and it expresses itself better the more poetically it is dreamed. The reveries of two solitary souls prepare the sweetness of loving. A realist passion will see nothing there but evanescent formulas. But just the same it is no less true that great passions are prepared by great reveries. The reality of love is mutilated when it is detached from all its unrealness.”

LoveSolitudeLettersReverie
Book:The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos
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“we both mistake solitude for safety find comfort in wishing ourselves untouchable you a cloud & i fog daily i remind myself every life must be s e e d e d with fingerprints i say a prayer to an unnameable god the constant motion rotating constellations across a sky that will always be my favorite blue the cactus that has & will continue to bloom every spring of my life & hope it's enough to find you whistling a song only birds sing in morning's memory waiting for me to be present in our living”

LifePrayerSkyComfortSolitudeSafetyMemoryPresentWishingUnnameable God
Book:Poems to Carry in Your Pocket
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“If I am seen to be strong it is because I shall be the first to fall. What courage you sample in my visage is only determinable in defiance for which my ambitions differ entirely. What right have I to speak for those whose suffering exceeds my past, whose fates were obliterated and will ape no more? Shall I expect to inherit this latent expansion for the sort we safely cannot conceive who do not yet suffer emptily? Late morning in a general practice waiting room, do they sleep only of exhaustion?”

SufferingFateSolitudeExistentialismPessimism
Book:The Tedium Lies
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“When he has finished his morning round, Bartholomew is tired and feels lonely. There is still a little time before lunch, and instead of returning to Brother Alice's empty office, he gives himself permission to visit the gardens. He hungers for the sight of birds, he wants to hear the leaves whisper around him and to sit so still the birds accept him as a shrub. He wants the birds to land on his limbs and mistake his eyes for berries. In this cold dry space between seasons, few birds remain. No snow has fallen yet, but the ducks and geese and hummingbirds are gone, while Bartholomew, bound to his clock and trapped inside, has missed their going, the shape and sound of their flight. A few crows and sparrows are the most he hopes to find as he wheels himself into his blind between bushes, birds as ordinary and steadfast as he is himself. The white sky is birdless above him and the wind's small dirge the only song he hears. Deeply he breathes and listens closely inside himself for his own heartbeat, for the clock that keeps his body's time. Eyes closed, he tries to clean his mind of images and of the voices that would tell him he should not be sitting here, that he is a thief of time, or that the Fathers know of and will punish the theft. He breathes and does not mark his breaths with numbers, only in-out, in-out, until he hears the hum of blood in his ears and the inside of his mind is a uniform, cool gray, unmarked by shadows. He waits for birds, but does not name his waiting. His eyes open, his breathing shallows and he hears the wind. Listens, embodied now, with tension in his body. The moan comes again, is fainter. Waits two, three, four. The source is very near him. He moves his chair from the blind and circles the bushes slowly. The voice cries again, and this time, he knows it calls to him. On the ground, which is black and dry, half hidden in the tangle of oldest, lowest branches, bare of leaves, a crow rests, wings pulled tight against its body, impersonating a black stone. The crow's head inclines toward one shoulder, the black dot of an eye regards him and shares its knowledge: I am dying. It is my time to die. The moan now is almost beyond hearing, a soft deep sound free both of anger and of pain. It is too late to speak or intervene. Bartholomew is chosen witness and he watches the death, silent and simple and wholly terrifying. The last breath is released, the bird-heart stops its beating, the film of a lid closing hides the round eye, the black head slumps to rest against the wing, and Bartholomew breathes slowly, without moving, and binds his mind to blankness. If a spirit leaves, he does not see or hear or feel it go. If he has a soul himself, it does not stir. The death of the crow defeats the Fathers' time. At last the lunch bell rings, and it almost surprises him to find he is alive, his body capable of hunger and of obedience to bells. His hands fly automatically to the controls of his chair, automatically he leaves the garden and steers toward the dining hall, looking back only once to the still black form, mostly obscured by branches. The great room is warm and full of people talking, laughing, eating, all oblivious to death, and what separates him from them, what makes him lonely in their company is his awareness that they each and all must die.”

DeathHumanityNatureExistenceAwarenessLonelinessSolitudeMindfulnessObservationMortality
Book:Conscience Place
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“He was going to be relentless. She could tell. This was a kid who prided himself on remembering customers, who would want to make conversation, who probably thought of himself as a charmer, who probably thought that he got tips because of his personality and not because his customers were scared to be assholes. Sure enough, he put a glass of water in front of her and leaned his elbows against the bar as if they were both people.”

HumanitySolitudeBars
Book:Just Like Home
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“Andrei perched on the rooftop of the cinema and looked out at Westwood’s nightlife bustling before him. He was mounted on the single, cream, stoned gargoyle built above in the corner of the theatre. He and his gothic animal breathed under the cold moon. Yes. He always felt like the moon—generally unnoticed by the world, that never minds—and navigated richly through his life alone and uninterrupted, like a ghost. Truth is an unobvious color. Those who attempt truth will never make billboards or conversations but usually sift in the background in awkward veritas.”

CharacterTruthHumanitySocietyLonelinessIdentitySolitudeGhostsMasculinityVeritas
Book:A Happy Ghost
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“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”

WisdomSilenceSolitudeHermit
Author:Henry David Thoreau
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“Great growth comes from loneliness. You have time to develop, dwell in your own mind and go a bit mad. All great people are a bit mad. That’s good to remember. Don’t escape it. Great growth comes from time spent in foreign lands, watching foreign people with foreign cultures. It makes you forget about your own land and race and town for a while. Great growth also comes from rooting yourself into one place from time to time. Unpack your bags, get a nice bed, a book shelf, some friends. Learn to show up, keep in touch, stick around. Growth comes in all sort of forms and shapes, everywhere at all times, and it’s yours to take and consume. Do what ought to be done. Here and now, to get you somewhere — anywhere.”

MindArtInspirationMotivationGrowthLearningGrowingAdviceLonelinessSolitudeTravelLivingLonelyMadDevelopingSelf DevelopmentSelf GrowthWriters LifeLife AdviceDevelopForeign LandsCultures
Author:Charlotte Eriksson
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