#solitude

The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this. ↗

— Paul Auster

#writing #solitude

Everybody is a stranger, but that's the danger in going my own way. ↗

— John Mayer

#solitude #solitude

You could concentrate much more deeply when you were alone with agony. ↗

— William Goldman

#sorrow #solitude

The scholar only knows how dear these silent, yet eloquent, companions of pure thoughts and innocent hours become in the season of adversity. When all that is worldly turns to dross around us, these only retain their steady value. ↗

— Washington Irving

#solitude #thoughts #adversity

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

Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end. ↗

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

#garcía #hundred #márquez #of #one

And this that you call solitude is in fact a big crowd. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#crowds #dejan-stojanovic #literature #literature-quotes #poems

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 more she thought about it, the more Madeleine understood that extreme solitude didn't just describe the way she was feeling about Leonard. It explained how she'd always felt when she was in love. It explained what love was like and, just maybe, what was wrong with it. ↗

— Jeffrey Eugenides

#solitude #love