Solitude Quotes - Page 26

• This was my moment to look for the kind of healing and peace that can only come from solitude.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Healing, Looks, Kind

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2009). “Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything”, p.8, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.

  Oscar Wilde

  Bores You, Boredom, Novelists

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• Both looked back then on the wild revelry...and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Cost, Paradise, Revelry

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• He is his own best friend and takes delight in privacy whereas the man of no virtue or ability is his own worst enemy and is afraid of solitude.

  Aristotle

  Single, Men, Worst Enemy

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• 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.

  George Santayana

  Running, Holiday, Order

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• Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you. To be without the slightest subject for a book, the slightest idea for a book, is to find yourself, once again, before a book. A vast emptiness. A possible book. Before nothing. Before something like living, naked writing, like something terrible, terrible to overcome.

  Marguerite Duras

  Book, Writing, Ideas

  Marguerite Duras (1998). “Writing”, Brookline Books

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• Some people prefer solitude. They say their peace of mind depends on this. Others say they would be better off in church. If you do well, you do well wherever you are. If you fail, you fail wherever you are. Your surroundings don't matter. God is with you everywhere -- in the market place as well as in seclusion or in the church. If you look for nothing but God, nothing or no one can disturb you. God is not distracted by a multitude of things. Nor can we be.

  Meister Eckhart

  Spiritual, People, Mind

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• I think a lot about the poems I wasn't able to write...I masturbrated...Solitude is essentially a matter of pride; you bury yourself in your own scent. The issue is the same for all real poets. If you've been happy for too long, you become banal. By the same token, if you've been unhappy for a long time, you lose your poetic power...Happiness and poverty can only coexist for the briefest time. Afterword either happiness coarsens the poet or the poem is so true it destroys his happiness.

  Orhan Pamuk

  Real, Writing, Pride

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• I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Littles, Purity, Empty

  Jean-Paul Sartre (2013). “Nausea”, p.36, New Directions Publishing

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• Embrace your solitude and love it. Endure the pain it causes, and try to sing out with it. For those near to you are distant.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Pain, Trying, And Love

  Rainer Maria Rilke (2010). “Letters to a Young Poet”, p.39, New World Library

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• Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense.

  Tom Robbins

  Thinking, Two, Romance

  Tom Robbins (2003). “Still Life with Woodpecker”, p.257, Bantam

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• I didn't think I was in a morbid mood, but it appears I am. My mind goes round and round trying to figure things out, but I always come back to the same two things: Loneliness and Death. Life ends before we figure anything out, most importantly how not to be lonely. Solitude is fine. But feeling like you have no one to love - abject lonliness - is not alright.

  Jonathan Ames

  Lonely, Loneliness, Thinking

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• A beautiful woman risking everything for a mad passion. A few wild weeks of happiness cut short by a hideous, treacherous crime. Months of voiceless agony, and then a child born in pain. The mother snatched away by death, the boy left to solitude and the tyranny of an old and loveless man. Yes, it was an interesting background. It posed the lad, made him more perfect as it were. Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.

  Oscar Wilde

  Beautiful, Mother, Pain

  Oscar Wilde, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Novel, Short Stories, Poetry, Essays and Plays”, p.36, GENERAL PRESS

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• Solitude: a sweet absence of looks.

  Milan Kundera

  Sweet, Loneliness, Being Alone

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• What's agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to somebody, that solitude is a mistake. The inner voice doesn't care about who you find. It just keeps pestering you, tormenting you--if you happen to be me--with homecoming queens first, then girls next door, and finally anybody who might be pleased to see you now and then at the dinner table and in bed on occasion. You look up from reading the newspaper and realize that no one loves you, and no one burns for you.

  Charles Baxter

  Girl, Queens, Mistake

  Charles Baxter (2009). “The Feast of Love”, p.87, Vintage

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• Loneliness is black coffee and late-night television; solitude is herb tea and soft music. Solitude, quality solitude, is an assertion of self-worth, because only in the stillness can we hear the truth of our own unique voices.

  Pearl Cleage

  Loneliness, Coffee, Self Worth

  Pearl Cleage (1990). “Mad at Miles: a blackwoman's guide to truth”, Cleage Group

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• In that Macondo forgotten even by the birds, where the dust and the heat had become so strong that it was difficult to breathe, secluded by solitude and love and by the solitude of love in a house where it was almost impossible to sleep because of the noise of the red ants, Aureliano, and Amaranta Úrsula were the only happy beings, and the most happy on the face of the earth.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Strong, Sleep, Dust

  "One Hundred Years of Solitude". Book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (p. 404), 1967.

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• I learned...that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness.

  Brenda Ueland

  Inspiration, Creativity, Creating

  Brenda Ueland (2013). “If You Want to Write”, p.37, Simon and Schuster

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• More than mother and son, they were accomplices in solitude.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Mother, Son, Accomplices

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez (2014). “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, p.131, Penguin UK

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• A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.

  Aldous Huxley

  Purpose, Excess, Asceticism

  Peter Edgerly Firchow, Aldous Huxley (1984). “The end of Utopia: a study of Aldous Huxley's Brave new world”, Bucknell Univ Pr

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• Alas, everything that men say to one another is alike; the ideas they exchange are almost always the same, in their conversation. But inside all those isolated machines, what hidden recesses, what secret compartments! It is an entire world that each one carries within him, an unknown world that is born and dies in silence! What solitudes all these human bodies are!

  Alfred de Musset

  Men, Ideas, Unknown Worlds

  Alfred de Musset, David Sices (1994). “Comedies & proverbs”, Johns Hopkins Univ Pr

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• Marriage I think For women Is the best of opiates. It kills the thoughts That think about the thoughts, It is the best of opiates. So said Maria. But too long in solitude she'd dwelt, And too long her thoughts had felt Their strength. So when the man drew near, Out popped her thoughts and covered him with fear. Poor Maria! Better that she had kept her thoughts on a chain, For now she's alone again and all in pain; She sighs for the man that went and the thoughts that stay To trouble her dreams by night and her dreams by day.

  Stevie Smith

  Dream, Pain, Night

  Stevie Smith (2015). “Collected Poems and Drawings of Stevie Smith”, p.707, Faber & Faber

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• I always tell my students that Malcolm X came both to his spirituality and to his consciousness as a thinker when he had solitude to read. Unfortunately, tragically, like so many young black males, that solitude only came in prison.

  Bell Hooks

  Black, Males, Spirituality

  "“There’s No Place to Go But Up” — Bell Hooks and Maya Angelou in conversation". Interview with Melvin McLeod, www.lionsroar.com. January 1, 1998.

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• I have been a lucky man. To feel the intimacy of brothers is a marvelous thing in life. To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life. But to feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know, from those unknown to us, who are watching over our sleep and solitude, over our dangers and our weaknesses – that is something still greater and more beautiful because it widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things.

  Pablo Neruda

  Beautiful, Brother, Sleep

  Pablo Neruda, Mikis Theodorakis (1985). “Canto general: a song of the people”

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• Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Lost, Immense, Loses

  "One Hundred Years of Solitude". Book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (p. 166), 1967.

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