Solitude Quotes - Page 27

• The hardest lesson is Clare’s solitude. Sometimes I come home and Clare seems kind of irritated; I’ve interrupted some train of thought, broken into the dreary silence of her day. Sometimes I see an expression on Clare’s face that is like a closed door. She has gone inside the room of her mind and is sitting there knitting or something. I’ve discovered that Clare likes to be alone. But when I return from time traveling she is always relieved to see me.

  Audrey Niffenegger

  Home, Train Of Thought, Knitting

  "The Time Traveller’s Wife". Book by Audrey Niffenegger, 2003.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Letter writing is the only device combining solitude with good company.

  Lord Byron

  Writing, Letters, Good Company

  9 Copy quote

• What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.

  Junot Diaz

  Opposites, People, Community

  4 Copy quote

• My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a 'lone traveler' and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude.

  Albert Einstein

  Inspirational, Spiritual, Country

  Albert Einstein (1995). “Essential Einstein”, Pomegranate

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Spirituality is not to be learned by flight from the world, or by running away from things, or by turning solitary and going apart from the world. Rather, we must learn an inner solitude wherever or with whomsoever we may be. We must learn to penetrate things and find God there.

  Meister Eckhart

  Running, Spiritual, World

  101 Copy quote

• I think there is no way to write about being alone. To write is to tell something to somebody to communicate to others. . . . Solitude is noncommunication, the absence of others, the presence of a self sufficient to itself.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Writing, Thinking, Self

  Ursula K. LeGuin (2014). “The Unreal and the Real Volume 2: Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin: Outer Space & Inner Lands”, p.164, Hachette UK

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• She was bedridden falling a fall which broke her hip. X-rays showed that she had cancer of the colon which had already spreed. To my surprise I found her cheerful and free of pain, perhaps because of the small doses of morphine she was being given. She was surrounded by neighbours and friends who congregated at her bedside day and night. In this cosy, noisy, gregarious world of the "all-chinese" sickbed, so different from the stark, sterile solitude of the American hospital room, her life had assumed the astounding quality of a continuous farewell party.

  Adeline Yen Mah

  Pain, Cancer, Farewell

  17 Copy quote

• One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852. And I realized then, with an amazement I have not been able to lessen since: ‘I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor.’ Sometimes I would mention this amazement, but since no one seemed to share it, nor even to understand it (life consists of these little touches of solitude), I forgot about it.

  Roland Barthes

  Brother, Taken, Eye

  6 Copy quote

• And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Confused, Moving, Want

  Rainer Maria Rilke (2001). “Letters to a Young Poet”

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is clear that we must trust what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Trying, Cost, Alive

  "The Middle of Things: Advice for Young Writers" by Andrew Solomon, www.newyorker.com. March 11, 2015.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude.

  Kate Chopin

  Sea, Voice, Seductive

  Kate Chopin (1899). “The Awakening”, p.300

  69 Copy quote

  Show source

• you can not fully read a book without being alone. But through this very solitude you become intimately involved with people whom you might never have met otherwise, either because they have been dead for centuries or because they spoke languages you cannot understand. And, nonetheless, they have become your closest friends, your wisest advisors, the wizards that hypnotize you, the lovers you have always dreamed of. -Antonio munoz molinas, "the power of the pen

  Cornelia Funke

  Book, People, Wizards

  4 Copy quote

• I hate solitude but I am afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself and to turn it into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls.

  Iris Murdoch

  Hate, Self, Soul

  "Under the Net".

  25 Copy quote

  Show source

• Throwing herself into learning helped Miri ignore the painful chill of solitude around her.

  Shannon Hale

  Inspirational, Students, Chill

  Shannon Hale (2010). “Princess Academy”, p.57, A&C Black

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Solitude has soft, silky hands, but with strong fingers it grasps the heart and makes it ache with sorrow.

  Khalil Gibran

  Sad, Spiritual, Strong

  Khalil Gibran (2007). “Kahlil Gibran: Masterpieces”

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone the pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude. She had never landed at Cork, so this hill and that hill beyond were as unexpected as pictures at which you say "Oh look!" Nobody was beside her to share the moment, which would have been imperfect with anyone else there.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Looks, Elbows, Unexpected

  11 Copy quote

• One must learn an inner solitude, wherever or with whomsoever he may be.

  Meister Eckhart

  May

  "Celebrated 14th Century Mystic and Scholastic Meister Eckhart".

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• God is not solitude, but perfect communion. For this reason the human person, the image of God, realizes himself or herself in love, which is a sincere gift of self.

  Pope Benedict XVI

  Self, Perfect, Catholic

  7 Copy quote

• After a youth and manhood passed half in unutterable misery and half in dreary solitude, I have for the first time found what I can truly love--I have found you.

  Charlotte Bronte

  Found You, Half, Firsts

  Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Anne Bronte (2009). “The Bronte Sisters: Three Novels: Jane Eyre; Wuthering Heights; and Agnes Grey (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.256, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The law of nature is alternation for evermore. Each electrical state superinduces the opposite. The soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Self, Law, Opposites

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2015). “Essays: First Series”, p.105, Sheba Blake Publishing

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I can tell you that solitude Is not all exaltation, inner space Where the soul breathes and work can be done. Solitude exposes the nerve, Raises up ghosts. The past, never at rest, flows through it.

  May Sarton

  Past, Space, Soul

  May Sarton (2015). “May Sarton: A Self-Portrait”, p.17, Open Road Media

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• She turned her face seaward to gather in an impression of space and solitude, which the vast expanse of water, meeting and melting with the moonlit sky, conveyed to her excited fancy. As she swam she seemed to be reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself.

  Kate Chopin

  Sky, Space, Water

  Kate Chopin (1899). “The Awakening”, p.71

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• There, in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning. For loneliness assumed the absence of other people, and the solitude she found in that desperate terrain had never admitted the possibility of other people. She wept then. Tears for the deaths of the littlest things: the castaway shoes of children; broken stems of marsh grass battered and drowned by the sea; prom photographs of dead women she never knew; wedding rings in pawnshop windows; the tiny bodies of Cornish hens in a nest of rice.

  Toni Morrison

  Children, Loneliness, Sea

  Toni Morrison (1987). “Sula”

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Loneliness is a drug, a narcotic; it grows through veins, through nerves and muscles; it assumes some right of possession over your body and mind; it feeds itself, and creates its own requirement. Loneliness and solitude are walls.

  R.J. Ellory

  Wall, Loneliness, Drug

  R. J. Ellory (2010). “A Quiet Belief in Angels: A Novel”, p.100, The Overlook Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Art, Mean, Criticism

  Rainer Maria Rilke (2001). “Letters to a Young Poet”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source