c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
There was something lacking – in him, he thought, not in the place. He was not up to it. He was not strong enough to take what was so generously offered. He felt himself dry and arid, like a desert plant, in this beautiful oasis. Life on Anarres had sealed him, closed off his soul; the waters of life welled all around him, and yet he could not drink.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
I could not possibly have been placed in circumstances more highly favorable for study and exploration than those which I now enjoy. I am free from the distractions constantly arising in civilized life from social claims. Nature offers unceasingly the most novel and fascinating objects for learning. The only drawbacks to this solitude are the want of information on the progress of scientific discovery in Europe and the lack of all the advantages arising from an interchange of ideas.
— Alexander von Humboldt
These words filled me with a sort of melancholy and I was at a loss for an answer, for I felt when I was with him, when I was talking to him - and no doubt it would have been the same with anyone else - none of that happiness which it was possible for me to experience when I was by myself. Alone, at times, I felt surging from the depths of my being one or other ot those impressions which gave me a delicious sense of well-being. But as soon as I was with someone else, as soon as I was talking to a friend, my mind as it were faced about, it was towards this interlocutor and not towards myself that it directed its thoughts, and when they followed this outward course they brought me no pleasure.
— Marcel Proust
The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.
— Nadine Gordimer, Conversations With Nadine Gordimer
When I was a child, I thought,Casually, that solitudeNever needed to be sought.Something everybody had,Like nakedness, it lay at hand,Not specially right or specially wrong,A plentiful and obvious thingNot at all hard to understand.Then, after twenty, it becameAt once more difficult to getAnd more desired -- though all the sameMore undesirable; for whatYou are alone has, to achieveThe rank of fact, to be expressedIn terms of others, or it's justA compensating make-believe.Much better stay in company!To love you must have someone else,Giving requires a legatee,Good neighbours need whole parishfulsOf folk to do it on -- in short,Our virtues are all social; if,Deprived of solitude, you chafe,It's clear you're not the virtuous sort.Viciously, then, I lock my door.The gas-fire breathes. The wind outsideUshers in evening rain. Once moreUncontradicting solitudeSupports me on its giant palm;And like a sea-anemoneOr simple snail, there cautiouslyUnfolds, emerges, what 
— Philip Larkin, Collected Poems
He had escaped the abhorrent taint! He was truly completely alone! He was the only human being in the world!
— Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
There is no greater solitude than that of the samurai unless it is that of the tiger in the jungle... Perhaps...
— Jean-Pierre Melville
He liked the loneliness of inner space, the sense of being forgotten by the world.
— Richard   Preston, The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus
In the wide pile, by others heeded not,Hers was one sacred solitary spot,Whose gloomy aisles and bending shelves containFor moral hunger food, and cures for moral pain.
— Walter Scott, Rob Roy
Always. At every moment, asleep and awake, during the most sublime and most abject moments, Amaranta thought of Rebeca, because solitude had made a selection in her memory and had burned the dimming piles of nostalgic waste that life had accumulated in her heart, and had purified, magnified, and eternalized the others, the most bitter ones.
— Gabriel García Márquez
You need to establish a degree of privacy and solitude in order to write
— Pamela Glass Kelly, From Inspiration to Publication: How to Succeed as a Children's Writer: Advice from 15 Award Winning Writers
My name it means nothingmy fortune is lessMy future is shrouded in dark wildernessSunshine is far away, clouds linger onEverything I posessed - Now they are goneOh where can I go to and what can I do?Nothing can please me only thoughts are of youYou just laughed when I begged you to stayI've not stopped crying since you went awayThe world is a lonely place when you're on your ownGuess I will go home - sit down and moan.Crying and thinking is all that I doMemories I have remind me of you
— Black Sabbath, Black Sabbath - Master of Reality
For here, inside the crypt, was where he truly lived. Which is to say, for well over twenty hours a day in total darkness and in total silence and in total immobility, he sat on his horse blanket at the end of the stony corridor, his back resting on the rock slide, his shoulders wedged between the rocks and enjoyed himself.
— Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
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 it. He felt blessedly wonderful. He was lying a hundred and fifty feet below the earth, inside the loneliest mountain in France - as if in his own grave. Never in his life had he felt so secure, certainly not in his mother's belly. The world could go up on flames out there, but he would not even notice it here. He even began to cry softly. He did not know who to thank for such good fortune.
— Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
He lay in his stony crypt like his own corpse, hardly breathing, his heart hardly beating - and yet lived as intensively and dissolutely as ever a rake had lived in the wide world outside.
— Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
From his corner office on the ground floor of the St. Cyril station house, Inspector Dick has a fine view of the parking lot. Six Dumpsters plated and hooped like iron maidens against bears. Beyond the Dumpsters a subalpine meadow, and then the snow¬ capped ghetto wall that keeps the Jews at bay. Dick is slouched against the back of his two-thirds-scale desk chair, arms crossed, chin sunk to his chest, star¬ing out the casement window. Not at the mountains or the meadow, grayish green in the late light, tufted with wisps of fog, or even at the armored Dumpsters. His gaze travels no farther than the parking lot—no farther than his 1961 Royal Enfield Crusader. Lands¬man recognizes the expression on Dick's face. It's the expression that goes with the feeling Landsman gets when he looks at his Chevelle Super Sport, or at the face of Bina Gelbfish. The face of a man who feels he was born into the wrong world. A mistake has been made; he is not where he belongs. Every so often he feels his heart catch, like a kite on a telephone wire, on something that seems to promise him a home in the world or a means of getting there. An American car manufactured in his far-off boyhood, say, or a motor¬cycle that once belonged to the future king of England, or the face of a woman worthier than himself of being loved.
— Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union
…she had no resources for solitude…
— Jane Austen, Persuasion
Dantes,rejected by all the world,frequently experienced a desire for solitude, and what solitude is at the same time more complete,more poetical , than that of a bark floating isolated on the sea during the obscurity of the night, in the silence of immensity and under the eye of Heaven? Now this solitude was peopled with this thoughts, the night lighted by his illusions, and the silence animated by his anticipations.
— Alexandre Dumas
We habitually compare ourselves to others to a debilitating degree, believing our successes can only be captured by how much we've outpaced someone else. We deal in acceptable ideas. We disregard our own capabilities. We waste a lot of time and emotion on what everyone else is doing well or badly, when we should be investing in and celebrating ourselves. And sometimes we simply forget that we like our own company, or that we love things for our own, deeply personal, individualistic reasons.In short, we forget ourselves, and how to be alone.
— Stacey May Fowles, Baseball Life Advice
Kisses are a shared solitude.
— Marty Rubin
No real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or moral, can arise without solitude.
— William Deresiewicz
Events like this don't give me the sense of oneness others seem to enjoy; it's always been private occasions that make me feel connected to the joys and sorrows of the world, often in the form of communion with writers and musicians I'll never meet in person. Proust called these moments of unity between writer and reader 'that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.
— Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
Solitude and reflection are necessary to give to wishes the force of passions.
— Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
After chopping off all the arms that reached out to me; after boarding up all the windows and doors; after filling all the pits with poisoned water; after building my house on the rock of a No inaccessible to flattery and fear; after cutting out my tongue and eating it; after hurling handfuls of silence and monosyllables of scorn at my loves; after forgetting my name and the name of my birthplace and the name of my race; after judging and sentencing myself to perpetual waiting and perpetual loneliness, I heard against the stones of my dungeon of syllogisms the humid, tender, insistent onset of spring.
— Octavio Paz, Selected Poems
My heart almost died within me; miserable longings strained its chords. How long were the September days! How silent, how lifeless!
— Charlotte Brontë, Villette
Connections are difficult. There’s an irritation in being among people who’ve already found their connection, and finding that those left who haven’t are just as undesirable as the void they would be replacing. The numbing mind-ream of knowing you're alone not because people won't accept you but because you find so little worth accepting. An imposed solitude is better than simply tolerating your company in waiting for something better. So loneliness is not such a terrible thing when you consider that the alternative to thought provoking solace is to be surrounded only by reminders of why that solitude is preferable.
— Jhonen Vásquez
To be alone was my best interest because needing myself was looking for you
— Nicola An, Soul Song: Poetry and Prose of Awakening to Divine Love
The person who knows how to enjoy their own company knows the most important thing.
— Marty Rubin
Only those who spend long times with themselves can touch the depths of life!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
As much as anything else, it was a stare, not so paradoxically, of a privacy-lover who, once his privacy has been invaded, doesn't quite approve when the invader just gets up and leaves, one-two-three, like that.
— J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone her pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude.
— Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris
Some people, weak people, fear solitude. What they fail to understand is that there’s something very liberating about it; once you realize that you don’t need anyone, you can take care of yourself. That’s the thing: it’s best just to take care of yourself.
— Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine
Solitude is the best school where you can scrutinize your past mistakes and make necessary corrections for the future
—  it is your greatest opportunity to create a better fate!
It's the solitude that slays you. Maybe because you'd expected ruin to arrive in a grander and more romantic form.
— Michael Cunningham, A Wild Swan: And Other Tales
I am so tired. I have grown old from being serious. I have grown ill from being serious. I want to laugh at myself. I want to forget myself. I am so tired.
— Kamand Kojouri
How can you make an informed decision about whether to save the world if you never leave your tiny part of it?
— Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants
I never went downstairs to join my housemates around the television. I cooked dinner later than everyone else and carried the plate up to my bedroom. I knew they must have thought me aloof, or a little bit eccentric, or maybe even unkind, but I didn't care. Once the kitchen door swung shut behind me, I was alone, and so everything was okay.
— Sara Baume, A Line Made by Walking
He imagined himself lying there, unable to sleep, thinking of his mother, separated from her by the unresponsive blankets tucked too tightly round him, feeling the ceaseless thumping of his heart in the silence of the night, the irrevocability of absence, the rigid stillness of repose, the agony of solitude and sleeplessness. If the room was a prison, the bed was a tomb.
— Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil
I like the sound of rain more than my 
— Nâzım Hikmet, Poems of Nazım Hikmet
The more we frequent men, the blacker our thoughts; and when, to clarify them, we return to our solitude, we find there the shadow they have cast.
— Emil M. Cioran
The cynicism of utter solitude is a calvary relieved by insolence.
— Emil M. Cioran
Be open minded to the empowering nature of being alone.
— Dee Waldeck
The armchairs, with their flat, sedentary cushions, were designed for society, but the bed was made for solitude. It had a straitened and measured narrowness, an austere frame made to contain the curves of a single body, to circumscribe it, carry it, give it a place, and when I slept at night, I possessed it entirely.
— Amit Chaudhuri, Afternoon Raag
You are the richest person if you own the treasures of both the solitude and the togetherness!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
The most perfect solitude must entail the absence of all beings, but it must also tremble with the light of life. For example, a perfect solitude may find itself haunted by lives born of the imagination, characters lying on shelves in rows of books, or accompanied by figures waiting in dreams. The perfect solitude pushes one to sense the pulse of solitude itself; for example, a perfect solitude may be marked with the beat of one’s heart.
— Meia Geddes, The Little Queen
Unerring solitude forces a person to confront their morality and aloneness. Solitude makes personal confession possible.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The psyche of some people, whether through innate structure or via adaption to personal experiences, is uniquely adept for absolute aloneness.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.
— Jane Hirshfield, Come, Thief
The farm is a base of operations–a stronghold. You can withdraw into yourself there. Solitude for reflection is an essential ingredient in self-development. I think a person has to be withdrawn into himself to gather inspiration so that he is somebody when he comes out again among folks–when he “comes to market’ with himself. He learns that he’s got to be almost wastefully alone.
— Robert Frost, Interviews with Robert Frost
It turned out plant collecting was a solitary occupation. In the past Robert had enjoyed being alone, or so he thought. Actually he had rarely been alone for long: working in hotels, in stables, on ranches and farms, and as a miner, he had always been around others. Now, out in the woods or up in the hills or out on the flat central plain, he could go for days without speaking to anyone. His throat seemed to close up and he had to keep clearing it, singing songs aloud or reciting the Latin names of plants, just to check that he still had a voice. 'Araucaria imbricata. Sequoia sempervirens. Pinus lambertiana. Abies magnifica'. He was surprised at how much he missed people..
— Tracy Chevalier, At the Edge of the Orchard
It never ceased to amaze me, until suddenly one day I felt beautiful and holy for having had the courage to hold on to my sanity after all I'd seen and been through, body and soul, in too loud a solitude, and slowly I came to the realization that my work was hurtling me headlong into an infinite field of omnipotence.
— Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude
Solitary writers come out of nowhere and do not belong anywhere. They are not domesticated or socialized, not as writers. Their subject is not the world about them but the one within them. From story to story or poem to poem, they repeat themselves because all they have to work with are themselves and their dreams, which are strange dreams and often bad dreams. As anyone knows, nothing is more troublesome to communicate than yourself and your dreams, the feelings and visions that have molded you into what you are.
— Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
There was no one to complain to in the woods, so I did not complain,' Knight said.
— Michael Finkel, The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit
fallin lovewith your solitude
— Rupi Kaur, Milk and Honey
Talk of solitude (...). It is the last resort of the civilised: our souls are so creased and soured in meaning we can only unfold them when we are alone. (5/4/1927 - From a Letter to Vita Sackville-West)
— Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Three, 1923-1928
As some heads cannot carry much wine, so it would seem that I cannot bear so much society as you can. I have an immense appetite for solitude, like an infant for sleep, and if I don’t get enough of it this year I shall cry all the next.
— Henry David Thoreau, The Quotable Thoreau
I avoid the looming visitor,Flee him adroitly around corners,Hating him, wishing him well;Lest if he confront me I be forced to say what is in no wise true:That he is welcome; that I am unoccupied;And forced to sit while the potted roses wilt in the crate or the sonnet coolsBending a respectful nose above such dried philosophiesAs have hung in wreaths from the rafters of my house since I was a child.Some trace of kindliness in this, no doubt,There may be.But not enough to keep a bird alive.There is a flaw amounting to a fissureIn such behaviour.
— Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Poems
Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, wrote that nothing can be expressed about solitude "that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.
— Michael Finkel, The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit
It's nice to be able to control my smell environment, and I can hear myself think better when it's quiet. It wasn't easy to become a person who's OK being alone on a Saturday night, but I did the work, I got there...
— Jonathan Franzen, Purity
We are living in an era where mental health has become equated with, and measured by, the success of our interpersonal relationships, particularly the extent to which they bring us happiness. Yet as important as it is to be able to live peaceably with others, mental and interpersonal health ultimately require the ability to be at peace in the solitude of oneself and to enjoy, and be enriched by, the company of one’s own thoughts.
— James Castleton, MD, Mending of a Broken Heart
The acts of observing and judging are necessarily solitary acts.
— Mike Klepper
The American essayist William Deresiewicz wrote that "no real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or moral, can arise without solitude.
— Michael Finkel, The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit
He'd drop his clothes and slip into the water. The lake's top few inches, after cooking all day in the sun, would be nearly bath warm. "I'd stretch out in the water, " he said, "and lie flat on my back, and look at the stars.
— Michael Finkel, The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit
Near me nothing but distances.
— Antonio Porchia, Voices
How difficult it is to find solitude in a world that constantly demands your attention.
— Joyce Rachelle
I need to be alone. After a full day of talking, smiling, listening, showing, nodding, translating, I want to be alone. I want simply to come home, close the door, and sit in silence, gathering up the bits of myself that have come loose. I want to think, or not think. I want to rest.
— Jamie Zeppa, Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A Journey into Bhutan
If you can find no way of getting the Notes duplicated, why not try the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, who might be sympathetic (provided they do not actually read them)? I must, however, confess to a rooted dislike—perhaps you share it?—of seeking the help of Official (particularly Government) Bodies. Whenever anyone addresses me in his official capacity, I am at once filled with a desire to attack the Official Body he represents. I have every sympathy with the Irishman who, on being fined five shillings for Contempt of Court, asked the Magistrate to make it ten shillings; 'Five shillings' he explained 'do not adequately express the Contempt I have for this Court'. I am quite unable to identify myself with any organized body or cause (even if it is a body of opposition or a lost cause). I am a born blackleg. I thoroughly approve of E. M. Forster's declaration, 'If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country'. For me, there is no doubt that the very small word in the centre of the blank canvas at the end of 'The Artist at Work' is solitaire, not solidaire.
— Nanavira Thera
A person realizes inner calm and a state of rapturous peacefulness with nature whenever they stand in solitude and contemplate their existence in an infinite world filled with multiple galaxies.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Retire within yourselves
—  but first prepare yourselves to receive yourselves there. It would be madness to trust yourselves to yourselves if you do not know how to control yourselves. There are ways of failing in solitude as well as in company.
All the world's a stage, and all the men and women actors on it" says Shakespeare. But actually only the men and women in the public gaze are actors on it. I, for instance, whom — and this I hold one of my greatest blessings while it is so — the public does not gaze on, am not an actor, but only a scene-shifter: the stage is curtained when I and those like me move on it. (Addition:) Or that is how I should like it to be always
— Nanamoli Thera
Genuine tranquility of the heart and perfect peace of mind, the highest blessings on earth after health, are to be found only in solitude and, as a permanent disposition, only in the deepest seclusion.
— Schopenhauer
She had headed towards town aimlessly, looking for the kind of escape that could be found only in a solitary walk through a crowd.
— Jade Chang, The Wangs vs. the World
When you want to be alone, even few people around you will seem like a tremendous crowd to you!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Once a person has become detached from his possessions, his customary duties, his moments of solitude, where is he? What is he?
— Patricia Highsmith, Nothing That Meets the Eye: The Uncollected Stories of Patricia Highsmith
I have always been a loner. Even as a child, when my family and friends were off attending parties I would be sequestered in my room, sketchpad in hand, stereo by my side, listening to seductive R&B. Solitude was something I took for granted. Coming from a large family I needed solitude in order to think straight and paint my way out of confusion. My parents were accepting of the fact that I kept to myself and they respected my decision even though it went against my Somali upbringing, a culture rooted in boisterousness and joie de vivre.
— Diriye Osman
If people never learned the truth about him, then they couldn't turn around and use it against him. The lie was a way of buying protection.
— Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude
To imbibe so much quiet is to become the music inside it.
— Aditya Bhaskara
I fear that moments of quietude are on the endangered list
—  right behind solitude.
But I need solitude--which is to say, recovery, return to myself, the breath of a free, light, playful air.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo
I begin to be impatient of solitude - to feel its draperies hang sweltering, unwholesome about me.
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Solitude is the path to visit yourself, it is the path to yourself!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Whenever one speaks of lonely people one takes too much for granted. One thinks people all know what they're dealing with. No, they do not. They've never seen a lonely person, they've simply hated him without knowing him. They've been his neighbours who've used him up, they were the voices in the next room who tempted him. They roused things up against him, getting them to make a din and drown him out. Children ganged up against him when he was a tender child, and at every stage of his growing up he grew hostile to grown-ups . They tracked him to his hiding-place like an animal of chase and throughout his long youth there was no closed season. And when he didn't allow himself to be worn out so that he got away they yelled about what came forth from him and called it ugly and were suspicious of it. And as he didn't stop they grew more obvious and gobbled up his food and breathed up his air and spat into his poverty so that he himself became disgusted at it. They brought him into disrepute as if he were a contagion and threw stones at him to speed his departure. And they were right to follow their age-old instinct: because he really was their enemy. But then when he didn't look up they had second thoughts. They suspected that in all of this they had acted as he had willed them to act; they had strengthened him in his solitude and had helped him separate himself from them for ever.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
People give me looks of pity and ask me why I want to wallow in my disconnection from a very connected world. It is simple. The world seems way too connected to me now. It seems to be ruining the lives of teenagers and bringing out the bestial cruelty in those who can hide their vileness under the mask of some idiotic pseudonym. I like to sit alone and think about things. Solitude is as precious as coin silver and it takes labor to attain it.
— Pat Conroy, A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life
From our solitudewe shall create,forge songs ,pour in the reflectionof the stars and refresh the mindabout the silk-ridden roads that wait for them who have forgotten to feel.
— Tara Estacaan
In solitude we can come to the realization that we are not driven together but brought together. In solitude we come to know our fellow human beings not as partners who can satisfy our deepest needs, but as brothers and sisters with whom we are called to give visibility to God's all-embracing love. In solitude we discover that community is not a common ideology, but a response to a common call. In solitude we indeed realize that community is not made but given.
— Henri J.M. Nouwen
...still, I’m lucky: I feast on solitude, I will never miss the crowd. I could read the great books but the great books don’t interest me. I sit in bed and wait for the whole thing to go one way or the other. just like everybody else.
— Charles Bukowski
I've always had the sense that my life is run by other people. Except for a few years after Martin died. Those were the toughest years, I was alone with my children, I had to cope by myself. Complete poverty. You won't believe this, but nowadays when I look back, those are my happiest years.
— Milan Kundera, Ignorance
In a lot of ways, living with Charlie was like having my own place, and I found myself reveling in the aloneness instead of being lonely.
— Stephenie Meyer
She dried her tears, and they did smileTo see her cheeks’ returning glow;Nor did discern how all the whileThat full heart throbbed to overflow.With that sweet look and lively tone,And bright eye shining all the day,They could not guess, at midnight loneHow she would weep the time away.
— Emily Brontë
Loneliness is the way by which destiny endeavors to lead man to himself.
— Hermann Hesse
Being a lone wolf is sometimes better than being in a pack.
— PureDragonWolf
I used up most of my passions and energies during the years I've mentioned, and though I don't talk much about it, the chief thing I've asked from the world since then is to leave me alone.
— James Hilton
Believe me, friend Hellishnoise: the greatest events—they are not our loudest but our stillest hours.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
He walked up to me with his heart on his sleeve,Asking, 'Where'd we go wrong on the way?For I've wandered this city and oh its a pity,They talk but have nothing to say,"I told him that's true about cities like ours;Cities of footsteps and phones.It could be only me and the wild open sea,And I still wouldn't fee as alone.
— Emily Hanson
Clara looked at Maria and tried to understand what she must do so that Maria would be able to see her. But the little French girl cast all around her the bronze of infinite solitude.
— Muriel Barbery
For a long while, he sat on the steps and sharpened the chain-saw blade with a round file, dipping it in bar-and-chain oil and raking it over each tooth with sleek, grating sounds. He lost himself in the rhythm of the labor. A victory over tears is a small thing, but it was his. The sky went from indigo to blackness, and he saw nothing ominous in it, nothing but cold stars wheeling in their course, a course determined by the same firm hand he hoped was guiding his own. But satellites, too, crossed the sky in sly, winking arcs. Sull knew that. He could not let himself be confounded. He went inside, to sleep beside his wife.
— Matthew Neill Null, Allegheny Front
Solitude was a spell that freed her.
— Robert Crais
Solitude is sanity.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
In solitude, you listen to the sacred voice.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
What is the sweetness of flowers compared to the savour of dust and confinement?
— Peter Ackroyd
I covet solitude and storms…and rain, with its geography of dark silence and distance
— John J. Geddes
Things hurt more when you were alone, that was all.
— Richard Bachman, Thinner
Opposites though they are, both solitude and solidarity are essential if the artist is to produce works that are not only significant to his or her age, but that will also speak to future generations.
— Rollo May, The Courage to Create
I hate the very noise of troublous man Who did and does me all the harm he can. Free from the world I would a prisoner be And my own shadow all my company.
— John Clare, Poems Chiefly from Manuscript
There is only one solitude, and it is great and is not easy to bear, and to almost everyone there come hours when they would gladly exchange it for some kind of communion, however banal and cheap, for the appearance of some slight harmony with the most easily available, with the most undeserving… But perhaps those are just the hours when solitude grows; for its growing is painful like the growing of boys and sad like the beginning of Spring.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
I have always believed it my right to have a locked door between me and the world, and to hold the key myself. Now look at it, kicked open. The doors are off their hinges, the portals unguarded, every cover blown.
— Mihail Sebastian, For Two Thousand Years
Solitude is not a port to drop anchor, but only a port to rest for a while!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
And while he sat there on the end of the jetty, he’d let the sound of the waves fill his ears, watch the clouds and schools of tiny sweetfish, take pebbles he’d pocketed on the way and throw them out into the deep. Then when dusk began to settle he would retrace his steps, back to his own world. And on the way home, a loneliness would always claim his heart. He could never quite get a grip on what it was. It just seemed that whatever lay waiting “out there” was all too vast, too overwhelming for him to possibly ever make a dent in.
— Haruki Murakami
You can be in love with solitude
—  it won’t last long! You can be in love with crowds
I descended into solitude so thick that conversations with repairmen became anxious social occasions.
— Louisa Hall
Make time to be still.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
I told her it takesa lot of solitude to write a poem.She told me it takes a lot of solitudeto die.
— Ronald Baatz
In times of solitude, we are still to hear the voice of God.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
You are right; I am not good at moving in society. Be merciful. You do not understand me; I live in the woods by choice--that is my happiness. Here, where I am all alone, it can hurt no one that I am as I am; but when I go among others, I have to use all my will power to be as I should.
— Knut Hamsun, Pan: From Lieutenant Thomas Glahn's Papers
Now the New Year reviving old Desires,The thoughtful Soul to Solitude retires.
— Omar Khayyám, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
People who smile while they are alone used to be called insane, until we invented smartphones and social media.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
In solitude every fear, every longing, becomes exaggerated.
— Marty Rubin
This is a new nonnegotiable: to feel safe, you have to be connected.
— Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
We have testimony about solitude from the most creative among us. For Mozart, "When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer -- say, traveling in a carriage or walking after a good meal or during the night when I cannot sleep -- it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly." For Kafka, "You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked." For Thomas Mann, "Solitude gives birth the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous -- to poetry." For Picasso, "Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.
— Sherry Turkle
It is true that many young people who wrongly, that is, simply with abandon and unsolitarily, feel the oppressiveness of a failure and want to make the situation in which they have landed viable and fruitful in their own personal way—; for their nature tells them that, less even than all else that is important, can questions of love be solved publicly and according to this or that agreement; that they are questions, intimate questions from one human being to another, which in any case demand a new, special, only personal answer—: but how should they, who have already flung themselves together and no longer mark off and distinguish themselves from each other, who therefore no longer possess anything of their own selves, be able to find a way out of themselves, out of the depth of their already shattered solitude?
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
In his history of solitude, Anthony Storr writes about the importance of being able to feel at peace in one's own company. But many find that, trained by the Net, they cannot find solitude even at a lake or beach or on a hike. Stillness makes them anxious. I see the beginnings of a backlash as some young people become disillusioned with social media. There is,. too, the renewed interest in yoga, Eastern religions, meditating, and "slowness.
— Sherry Turkle
Increasingly, people feel as though they must have a reason for taking time alone, a reason not to be available.
— Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
I took you to that windy hill where stars on every side fall away
— John J. Geddes
All the same, a seductive voice from afar kept breaking into her conjugal peace: it was the voice of solitude. She closed her eyes and listened to the sound of a hunting horn coming from the depths of distant forests. There were paths in those forests...
— Milan Kundera
My own study of the networked life has left me thinking about intimacy - about being with people in person, hearing their voices and seeing their faces, trying to know their hearts. And it has left me thinking about solitude-the kind that refreshes and restores. Loneliness is failed solitude. To experience solitude you must be able to summon yourself by yourself; otherwise you will only know how to be lonely
— Sherry Turkle
Only solitude means never having to say you’re sorry.
— Peter  Kirby, Open Season
The more I'm let alone and not worried the better I can function.
— Ernest Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway on Writing
And in this we must for the most part entertain ourselves with ourselves, and so privately that no exotic knowledge or communication be admitted there; there to laugh and to talk, as if without wife, children, goods, train, or attendance, to the end that when it shall so fall out that we must lose any or all of these, it may be no new thing to be without them. We have a mind pliable in itself; that will be company; that has wherewithal to attack and to defend, to receive and to give: let us not then fear in this solitude to languish under an uncomfortable vacuity.
— Michel de Montaigne
On the one hand we can't be alone, people like us; on the other we can't stand company. We can't stand male company, which bores us to death, or female company either. I gave up male company for years because it's totally unprofitable, and female company gets on my nerves in no time.
— Thomas Bernhard, Concrete
I...think it much more supportable to be always alone, than never to be so.
— Michel de Montaigne
Let's just enjoy it for ourselves. Dawn is such a private hour, don't you think? Such a solitary hour. One always hears that said of midnight, but I think of midnight as remarkably companionable—everyone together, sleeping in the dark.''I am afraid I am interrupting your solitude,' Anna
— Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries
One of the down-side factors to living alone is that you sometimes get overly absorbed with how exact segments of time are consumed, and can begin to feel a pleasure with life that is hopelessly tinged with longing.
— Richard Ford, The Sportswriter
So it ever must be in the conflicting scenes of life, in the long, weary march, each one walks alone. We may have many friends, love, kindness, sympathy and charity, to smooth our pathway in everyday life, but in the tragedies and triumphs of human experience, each mortal stands alone.
— Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The ingenious person will above all strive for freedom from pain and annoyance, for tranquility and leisure, and consequently seek a quiet, modest life, as undisturbed as possible, and accordingly, after some acquaintance with so-called human beings, choose seclusion and, if in possession of a great mind, even solitude. For the more somebody has in himself, the less he needs from the outside and the less others can be to him. Therefore, intellectual distinction leads to unsociability.
— Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena
Being single is like being an artist, not because creating a functional single life is an art form, but because it requires the same close attention to one's singular needs, as well as the will and focus to fulfill them. Just as the artist arranges her life around her creativity, sacrificing conventional comforts and even social acceptance, sleeping and eating according to her own rhythms, so that her talent thrives above all else, nurtured the way a child might be, so a single person has to think hard to decipher what makes her happiest and most fulfilled.
— Kate Bolick, Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own
Respect but do not fear your own fear. Do not let it come between you and something that might be deeply enjoyable. Remember it is quite normal to be a bit frightened of being alone. Most of us grew up in a social environment that sent out the explicit message that solitude was bad for you: it was bad for your health (especially your mental health) and bad for your 'character' too. Too much of it and you would promptly become weird, psychotic, self-obsessed, very possibly a sexual predator and rather literally a wanker. Mental (and even physical) well-being, along with virtue, depends, in this model, on being a good mixer, a team-player, and having high self-esteem, plus regular, uninhibited, simultaneous orgasms with one partner (at a time). Actually, of course, it is never this straightforward because at the same time as pursuing this 'extrovert ideal', society gives out an opposite - though more subterranean - message. Most people would still rather be described as sensitive, spiritual, reflective, having rich inner lives and being good listeners, than the more extroverted opposites. I think we still admire the life of the intellectual over that of the salesman; of the composer over the performer (which is why pop stars constantly stress that they write their own songs); of the craftsman over the politician; of the solo adventurer over the package tourist. People continue to believe, in the fact of so much evidence - films, for example - that Great Art can only be produced by solitary geniuses. But the kind of unexamined but mixed messages that society offers us in relation to being alone add to the confusion; and confusion strengthens fear.
— Sara Maitland, How to Be Alone
At these moments I took refuge in the most perfect solitude. I passed whole days on the lake alone in a little boat, watching the clouds, and listening to the rippling of the waves, silent and listless.
— Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein
The acquisition of culture requires repose, sitting quietly in a room with a book, or alone with one's thoughts even any crowded concert or art museum.
— Joseph Epstein
Death and birth are solitary experiences. We are born alone and we die alone. When we are expelled from the maternal womb, we begin the painful struggle that finally ends in death.
— Octavio Paz
To interrupt the writer from the line of thought is to wake the dreamer from the dream. The dreamer cannot enter that dream, precisely as it was unfolding, ever again.
— Mary Oliver
Solitude is very different from a ’time-out’ from our busy lives. Solitude is the very ground from which community grows. Whenever we pray alone, study, read, write, or simply spend quiet time away from the places where we interact with each other directly, we are potentially opened for a deeper intimacy with each other.
— Henri J.M. Nouwen
For a man who finds life tolerable only by staying on the surface of himself, it is natural to be satisfied with offering no more than his surface to others.
— Paul Auster
Every moment of life wants to tell us something, but we do not want to hear what it has to say: when we are alone and quiet we are afraid that something will be whispered into our ear and hence we despise quiet and drug ourselves with sociability.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Unpublished Writings from the Period of Unfashionable Observations
The sight of the wall of water outside reassured me, giving me the idea that it made very little difference whether I stayed with her, or set out alone on my journey that had neither visible starting point nor destination. It didn't matter: since, however closely I became involved with another existence, my own world would always remain secret, inaccessible and shut-off; nobody would ever see me, except as a dim, changeable, wavering shadow, through its impenetrable, semi-opaque walls.
— Anna Kavan, Eagles' Nest
One of the reasons that hiddenness is such an important aspect of the spiritual life is that it keeps us focused on God. In hiddenness we do not receive human acclamation, admiration, support, or encouragement. In hiddenness we have to go to God with our sorrows and joys and trust that God will give us what we most need.In our society we are inclined to avoid hiddenness. We want to be seen and acknowledged. We want to be useful to others and influence the course of events. But as we become visible and popular, we quickly grow dependent on people and their responses and easily lose touch with God, the true source of our being. Hiddenness is the place of purification. In hiddenness we find our true selves.
— Henri J.M. Nouwen, Bread for the Journey: A Daybook of Wisdom and Faith
Solitude is precious balm to my heart in these paradistic parts.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther
Was I (am I not still?) a victim of words and books merely, and are books just an excuse for living, living things out in parenthesis, even in the most desolate stony place as I was, quotations and misquotations raining down on me thick and fast – words, words, words – the multitude of words, a parody of rain? For after all, as old Mrs Feany said, the rain is healthy. And the rain it raineth everyday. But the stuff of books and solitude and spying on the poor, could they be healthy? Or were my doubts the real heresy and treason? What book ever changed the world? It seems a solipsism to say that what changes the way we see the world, changes the world, but it is not. Where do you want me to begin? The Bible, Das Kapital? The Divine Comedy, The Satanic Verses?
— Andrew McNeillie
There was an emptiness about the heart of life
—  an attic room. Women must put off their rich apparel. At midday they must disrobe.
To get matured, you must have an education in the School of Solitude!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
I fear I've become a "confirmed solitary" after all, despite everyone's best attempts at getting me more socialized. One becomes accustomed to one's solitude, and it begins to seem rather phony to try to reach out.
— Louisa Hall
in a few moments he came into the core of himself, where he was alone, and felt strangely companioned, not by anyone or anything, but by himself. The rejected self found refuge here, not a cowed refuge, but somehow a wandering ease; as if it were indestructible, and had its own final pride, its own secret eyes.
— Neil M. Gunn
You can't miss me, because I was never there.
— Ili Ann
It's not your enemies who condemn you to solitude, it's your friends
— Milan Kundera
Speaking of happiness, those distinctive moments are found outdoors – in the fall, in the winter and always in the mountains where people are few, wildlife is abundant and there is peace in the quiet.
— Donna Lynn Hope
I'll never stop wandering. And when the time comes to die, I'll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is.
— Everett Ruess
Healthy introspection, without undermining oneself; it is a rare gift to venture into the unexplored depths of the self, without delusions or fictions, but with an uncorrupted gaze.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Unpublished Writings from the Period of Unfashionable Observations
Solitude has seven skins
—  nothing gets through any more.
All geniuses are peculiarly inclined to solitude, to which they are driven as much by their difference from others as the inner wealth with which they are quipped, since among humans, among diamonds, only the uncommonly great are suited as solitaires: the ordinary ones must be set in clusters to produce any effect.
— Arthur Schopenhauer, On The Will In Nature
When alone, concentrate on the fruits of the solitude, not on the poisons of it!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
a person can also find solitude with others, though it is more difficult
— Tove Jansson, The Summer Book
We don not think, in the holy places; we think in bed, afterwards, when the glare, and the the noise, and the confusion are gone, and in fancy we revisit alone, the solemn monuments of the past, and summon the phantom pageants of an age that has passed away.
— Mark Twain
Still, Luce held firm to the belief that quiet and solitude were good for you, offering peace, or at least hope for peace.
— Charles Frazier, Nightwoods
Solitude was her anchor. A familiar misery, and anymore the safest, most sensible approach.
— Jill Alexander Essbaum, Hausfrau
Solitude is a temple for me.
— M. T. Panchal
She wanted to ask about the McCaffreys' children, but the question seemed too personal. Westerners were private sorts, in Evangeline's judgment, with more than their share of secrets. "It scares me a little," she confessed. "The idea of being so alone, I mean."June-bug favored her with another smile. "Bein' alone ain't necessarily bad, you know. A person can come to understand herself real well that way. Some folks pass their whole lives without learnin' a thing about their own minds and spirits, but out here, all you've got to do is pay attention.
— Linda Lael Miller, Springwater