#solitude

I never said, 'I want to be alone.' I only said 'I want to be let alone!' There is all the difference. ↗

— Greta Garbo

#freedom #privacy #respect #solitude #freedom

Nothing is more capable of troubling our reason, and consuming our health, than secret notions of jealousy in solitude. ↗

— Aphra Behn

#capable #consuming #health #more #nothing

Since the age of five I had been one of those people who was an indefatigable reader, more inclined to go off by myself with a book than do any of the dozens of things that children usually do to amuse themselves. I never aged out of it. ↗

— Anna Quindlen

#children #entertainment #readers #reading #solitude

We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#friendship #privacy #solitude #friendship

Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one's self? ↗

— Edith Wharton

#solitude #age

I think solitude is a really positive thing. I cherish solitude immensely. In today’s society, there’s so much pressure to communicate, eat out, be friends with people. Why can’t you read a book on your own? Why have you got to have a book club? ↗

— Nicky Wire

#communication

Language ... has created the word 'loneliness' to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word 'solitude' to express the glory of being alone. ↗

— Paul Tillich

#independence #language #loneliness #pain #paradox

The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable. ↗

— Karl Kraus

#prison #solitude #life

If you are in the mountains alone for some time, many days at minimum, & it helps if you are fasting. The forest grows tired of its weariness towards you; it resumes its inner life and allows you to see it. Near dusk the faces in tree bark cease hiding, and stare out at you. The welcoming ones and also the malevolent, open in their curiosity. In your camp at night you are able to pick out a distinct word now and then from the muddled voices in creek water, sometimes an entire sentence of deep import. The ghosts of animals reveal themselves to you without prejudice to your humanity. You see them receding before you as you walk the trail their shapes beautiful and sad. ↗

— Charles Frazier

#reflection #serenity #solitude #thirteen-moons #beauty

I paused to listen to the silence. My breath, crystallized as it passed my cheeks, drifted on a breeze gentler than a whisper. The wind vane pointed toward the South Pole. Presently the wind cups ceased their gentle turning as the cold killed the breeze. My frozen breath hung like a cloud overhead. The day was dying, the night being born — but with great peace. Here were the imponderable processes and forces of the cosmos, harmonious and soundless. Harmony, that was it! That was what came out of the silence — a gentle rhythm, the strain of a perfect chord, the music of the spheres, perhaps. It was enough to catch that rhythm, momentarily to be myself a part of it. In that instant I could feel no doubt of man's oneness with the universe. The conviction came that the rhythm was too orderly, too harmonious, too perfect to be a product of blind chance — that, therefore, there must be purpose in the whole and that man was part of that whole and not an accidental offshoot. It was a feeling that transcended reason; that went to the heart of man's despair and found it groundless. The universe was a cosmos, not a chaos; man was rightfully a part of that cosmos as were the day and night. ↗

— Richard Evelyn Byrd

#peace #solitude #music