#solitude

There are days when solitude, for someone my age, 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. ↗

— Colette

#age

He walked on in silence, the solitary sound of his footsteps echoing in his head, as in a deserted street, at dawn. His solitude was so complete, beneath a lovely sky as mellow and serene as a good conscience, amid that busy throng, that he was amazed at his own existence; he must be somebody else's nightmare, and whoever it was would certainly awaken soon. ↗

— Jean-Paul Sartre

#philosophy #solitude #age

When we learn to speak, we learn to translate. ↗

— Octavio Paz

#individuality #loneliness #selfhood #solitude #communication

The days passed in a dream. I pictured our reunion again and again, played it out in my mind over and over until I’d almost worn a groove in my thoughts, so deep that it seemed the only thing I could think of was our reunion. Anticipation is a gift. Perhaps there is none greater. Anticipation is born of hope. Indeed it is hope’s finest expression. In hope’s loss, however, is the greatest despair. ↗

— Steven L. Peck

#despair #hope #longing #loss #love

It was the history of the family, written by Melquíades, down to the most trivial details, one hundred yea rs ahead of time. He had written it in Sanskrit, which was his mother tongue, and he had encoded the even lines in the private cipher o f the Emperor Augustus and the odd ones in a La cedemonian military code. ↗

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

#family

Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger. ↗

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#danger #him #idleness #intercourse #into

Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it. ↗

— Thomas Merton

#find #future #hope #look #must

Michael wasn't on the pool deck, which was hard for me. None of my old Coral Springs teammates were around. Still, that old plane of cement felt like home. I folded my clothes and put them on the bench. I placed my water bottle under my starting block, and I dove in. Once again, I felt that ultimate state of transition, my feet no longer on the ground, my hands not yet in the water. ↗

— Dara Torres

#home #peace #solitude #swimming #age

He was a master in the art of spreading boredom and playing the clumsy fool-though never so egregiously that people might enjoy making fun of him or use him as the butt of some crude practical joke inside the guild. He succeeded in being considered totally uninteresting. People left him alone. And that was all he wanted. ↗

— Patrick Süskind

#art

Seriously, I think it is a grave fault in life that so much time is wasted in social matters, because it not only takes up time when you might be doing individual private things, but it prevents you storing up the psychic energy that can then be released to create art or whatever it is. It's terrible the way we scotch silence & solitude at every turn, quite suicidal. ↗

— Philip Larkin

#silence #solitude #art