Motherhood rarely allows for solitude, yet it begets its own kind of isolation: from one's past, from one's youth, from the women we once thought we were and would become.
It can be frightening to spend 5 weeks alone in a cabin in the wilderness. I was able to collect my thoughts and worked a lot - because I couldn't do anything else.
Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.
Solitude matters. And for some people it's the air they breathe.
Why should we faint and fear to live alone,Since all alone, so Heaven has willed, we die?Nor even the tenderest heart, and next our own,Knows half the reasons why we smile and sigh.
Where now is Britain?. Even as the savage sits upon the stone That marks were stood her capitols, and hears The bittern booming in the weeds, he shrinks From the dismaying solitude.
I go to work as others rush to see their mistresses, and when I leave, I take back with me to my solitude, or in the midst of the distractions that I pursue, a charming memory that does not in the least resemble the troubled pleasure of lovers.
If from society we learn to live, solitude should teach us how to die.
I live now in solitude and am able to use my time reflecting on the past and preparing for death. I cannot put away the thought of the Indians and in my ambition I fly to the Rockies.
I was trundling around with my inadequacies, and inner pain and loneliness. I yearned, desperately, to be something. I yearned to get out from where I was. . . some deep discontent within myself, actually some deep dislike of myself.
When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.
Though man's feeling for the other-worldly often has recourse to solitude, solitude does not foster its development; rather, it is nourished by communion, to which the church is more propitious than the cemetery.
I feel like I veer more away from technology than toward it. I'm a little scared of the direction we're going, to be honest. It feels like a sci-fi novel from the '50s, the way we can control everything and the solitude we each have in our own little bubbles, and yet we feel like we have social interactions. We're moving in a weird direction, at least.
Solitude becomes a sort of tangible enemy, the more dangerous, because it dwells within the citadel itself.
There is nothing harder to come by than detachment and solitude; and nothing more important.
A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.
The doctors are all agreed that I am suffering for want of society. Was never a case like it. First, I did not know that I was suffering at all. Secondly, as an Irishman might say, I had thought it was indigestion of the society I got.
In thinking about religion and society in the 21st century, we should broaden the conversation about faith from doctrinal debates to the larger question of how it might inspire us to strengthen the bonds of belonging that redeem us from our solitude, helping us to construct together a gracious and generous social order.
In solitude the passions feed upon the heart.
Letter writing is the only device combining solitude with good company.