#solitude

It did not occur to me that absence of human companionship does not assure solitude. It may, on the contrary, plunge one into an environment compared with which New York or London would appear deserts. For we take memory and imagination with us. The seabirds that scream overhead or waddle along the margins of the surf; the grotesque forms of twisted cedars; the rustle of sea-grass in the wind; the interminable percussion of the breakers; the dead infinity of the sand itself - there can be no solitude, in the sense of freedom from disturbances of thought, in the presence of such things. They draw us back into the maelstrom. ("Absolute Evil") ↗

— Julian Hawthorne

#solitary #solitude #freedom

The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of. He adopts as his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers. ↗

— Charles Baudelaire

#solitude #love

In that Macondo forgotten even by the birds, where the dust and the heat had become so strong that it was difficult to breathe, secluded by solitude and love and by the solitude of love in a house where it was almost impossible to sleep because of the noise of the red ants, Aureliano, and Amaranta Úrsula were the only happy beings, and the most happy on the face of the earth. ↗

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

#love

The observations and encounters of a man of solitude and few words are at once more nebulous and more intense than those of a gregarious man, his thoughts more ponderable, more bizarre and never without a hint of sadness. Images and perceptions that might easily be dismissed with a glance, a laugh, an exchange of opinions occupy him unduly; they are heightened in the silence, gain in significance, turn into experience, adventure, emotion. Solitude begets originality, bold and disconcerting beauty, poetry. But solitude can also beget perversity, disparity, the absurd and the forbidden. ↗

— Thomas Mann

#solitude #beauty

People who do a job that claims to be creative have to be alone to recharge their batteries. You can’t live 24 hours a day in the spotlight and remain creative. For people like me, solitude is a victory. ↗

— Karl Lagerfeld

#charge #creativity #designer #energy #fame

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. ↗

— Fernando Pessoa

#reading #solitude #life

Who hears music, feels his solitude Peopled at once. ↗

— Robert Browning

#power-of-music #solitude #music

You need to establish a degree of privacy and solitude in order to write ↗

— Pamela Glass Kelly

#solitude #write #inspirational

Septimus has been working too hard" - that was all she could say to her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she thought. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#love #philosophy #solitude #love

The lover`s discourse was of an extreme solitude. The solitude was extreme because it wasn`t physical. It was extreme because you felt it while in the company of the person you loved. It was extreme because it was in your head, the most solitary of places. ↗

— Jeffrey Eugenides

#solitude #love