#solitude

Imagine someone sitting alone in a room without television, radio, computer or phone and with the door closed and the blinds down. This person must be a dangerous lunatic or a prisoner sentenced to solitary confinement. If a free agent, then a panty-sniffing loser shunned by society, or a psycho planning to return to college with an automatic weapon and a backpack full of ammo. ↗

— Michael Foley

#age

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 life a double, which lead life toward it summits, which make the dreamer too live by splitting... ↗

— Gaston Bachelard

#dreams

Relationship Time to Aloneness." Having a companion fixes you in time and that of the present, but when the quality of aloneness settles down, past, present and future all flow together. A memory, a present event, and a forecast all equally present. ↗

— steinbeck

#solitude #time #equality

I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. ↗

— Rainer Maria Rilke

#friendship #solitude #friendship

Silent solitude makes true speech possible and personal. If I am not in touch with my own belovedness, then I cannot touch the sacredness of others. If I am estranged from myself, I am likewise a stranger to others. ↗

— Brennan Manning

#faith #identity #self #silence #solitude

My fear of loneliness is like a disease. ↗

— Irene Tomkinson

#loneliness #solitude #family

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 against the wall. ↗

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

#beat #bitter #days #freedom #head

The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom." [Dissenting, Public Utilities Commission v. Pollak, 343 U.S. 451, 467 (1952)] ↗

— William O. Douglas

#privacy #solitude #freedom

He is at home with his solitude as the note reverberating inside a bell. ↗

— Peter Heller

#home

With one long breath, caught and held in his chest, he fought his sadness over his solitary life. Don't cry, you idiot! Live or die, but don't poison everything... ↗

— Saul Bellow

#life #solitude #death