To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less…selfish.

Living alone,’ November whispered, ‘is a skill, like running long distance or programming old computers. You have to know parameters, protocols. You have to learn them so well that they become like a language: to...

One of the greatest acts of service you can do is to find someone who is secretly lonely and be a friend to them, if only for a day.

The writer’s curse is that even in solitude, no matter its duration, he never grows lonely or bored.

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,There is a rapture on the lonely shore,There is society, where none intrudes,By the deep sea, and music in its roar:I love not man the less, but Nature...

Work is not always required. There is such a thing as sacred idleness.

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the...

I am alone so I dream of the being who has cured my solitude, who would be cured by solitudes. With its life, it brought me the idealizations of life, all the idealizations which give...

Given enough time, you could convince yourself that loneliness was something better, that it was solitude, the ideal condition for reflection, even a kind of freedom.Once you were thus convinced, you were foolish to open...

After all, she is lucky. I have been much too calm these past three years. I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity. I leave.

SolitudeThere is a charm in Solitude that cheersA feeling that the world knows nothing ofA green delight the wounded mind endearsAfter the hustling world is broken offWhose whole delight was crime at good to scoffGreen...

I am afflicted with the power of thought, which is a heavy curse. The less a person thinks and inquires regarding the why and the wherefore and the justice of things, when dragging along through...

I always forget how important the empty days are, how important it may be sometimes not to expect to produce anything, even a few lines in a journal. A day when one has not pushed...

Maybe you’ve understood by now that for men like myself, that is, melancholy men for whom love, agony, happiness and misery are just excuses for maintaining eternal loneliness, life offers neither great joy nor great...

Solitude is the rebel of the freedom.

Loneliness is a poison, but aloneness is a catalyst.

We need the slower and more lasting stimulus of solitary reading as a relief from the pressure on eye, ear and nerves of the torrent of information and entertainment pouring from ever-open electronic jaws. It...

My imagination functions much better when I don’t have to speak to people.

It was so quiet, a reservation kind of quiet, where you can hear somebody drinking whiskey on the rocks three miles away.

…solitude is not to be recommended to everyone, for you have to be strong in order to bear it and act alone.

We all are individual and lonely, like stars which appear so close but millions of miles apart.

Ironically, the only way to see clearly is to stand at a distance. You might be focused, but that doesn’t mean you are seeing correctly. Sometimes, you have you to grab the camera from the...

All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit quiet in a room alone.

In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable...

I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me. I took no pride in my solitude; but I was...

I don’t like crowds of any kind. A dinner party of more than six people is not, for me, a pleasure. I get less social as I get older… I am very resistant to anything...

You once said that you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen, in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing oneself to excess; that utmost of self-revelation...

It wasn’t the fog I minded, Cathleen. I really love fog. […] It hides you from the world and the world from you. You feel that everything has changed, and nothing is what it seemed...

La solitude est une belle chose; mais il faut quelqu’un pour vous dire que la solitude est une belle chose.

Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison to you.

The devil has made it his business to monopolize on three elements: noise, hurry, crowds. He will not allow quietness.

I’ll read my books and I’ll drink coffee and I’ll listen to music, and I’ll bolt the door.”( A Boy in France: Saturday Evening Post CCXVII, March 31, 1945)

She had dreamed some brilliant dreams during the past winter and now they lay in the dust around her. In her present mood of self-disgust, she could not immediately begin dreaming again. And she discovered...

My aloneness had never bothered me; I hadn’t even been aware of it. But now it overwhelmed me. The awareness washed over me with painful sharpness and deep grief. Now that I had company.

Solitude is the soil in which genius is planted, creativity grows, and legends bloom; faith in oneself is the rain that cultivates a hero to endure the storm, and bare the genesis of a new...

I am vehemently grateful that, by whatever means, I learned to assume that loneliness should be in part pleasure, sensitizing and clarifying, and that it is even a truer bond among people than any kind...

Solitude was my only consolation – deep, dark, deathlike solitude.

I might be alone, but i’m never lonely.

Some people are so boring that you are more bored when you are with them … than when you are alone.

As he took possession of it, he was overcome by a sense of something like sacred awe. He carefully spread his horse blanket on the ground as if dressing an altar and lay down on...

I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.

At life’s most significant moments, we are always alone

Solitude is the house of peace.

Loneliness clarifies. Here silence standsLike heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken, Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken, Luminously-peopled air ascends; And past the poppies bluish neutral distance Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach Of shapes...

But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing.

Religion is what you do with your solitude.

Life without a friend is death without a witness.

Se ama para dejar de amar y se deja de amar para empezar a amar a otros, o para quedarse solos, por un rato o para siempre. Ése es el dogma. El único dogma.

He had been for many years, a quiet silent man, associating but little with other men, and used to companionship with his own thoughts. He had never known before the strength of the want in...

There are days when solitude is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head...