Solitude Quotes

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.

I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.

Anything we fully do is an alone journey.

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.

Know that you will eventually have to leave everything behind; the writing will demand it of you.

Silence is most meaningful.

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.

Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think I’m learning
that sometimes the bravest thing is not to face the world,
but to turn away from it.

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.

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 Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful - only then do I find myself and feel comforted.

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.

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...

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.

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.