Top 100 My Solitude Quotes
#2. There is no other company in the world I've found more pleasurable than my own. For no one else has ever been as accepting of me or as thoroughly entertained by my quirkiness. It is a sweet thing to like yourself.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#3. As hard as the diamonds in your smile,
the wind carries its hammers with no hands
and sustains a moan with no mouth,
seems to cradle solitude in its rough arms like firewood
to be burned in my house as it passes through
and asks, Where does she sparkle from?
B.J. Ward
#4. Solitude that throws the honest rays of perfect euphoria;
Solitude that makes me breathe in the real me;
Solitude I call it - my abode, my self made haven;
Solitude I call it - the sanguine face of Loneliness.
Debatrayee Banerjee
#5. Delicious days ahead for solitude and writing and, oh yes, the holiday meal with family. Live with my characters until term starts in 2012!
Stella Atrium
#6. To seek solitude like a wild animal. That is my only ambition.
Dalai Lama
#7. Then go to my room where solitude gaped whale-jawed wide to swallow me entire.
Maya Angelou
#8. I hate the very noise of troublous man
Who did and does me all the harm he can.
Free from the world I would a prisoner be
And my own shadow all my company.
John Clare
#9. Politically I am neither left nor right! And this kind of political-ethical standpoint
being in the middle
usually brings about seclusion and isolation! But now I do not mind it anymore and, instead, I work more and more in my self-made solitude!
Javad Alizadeh
#10. Go, little Book! From this my solitude
I cast thee on the Waters,
go thy ways:
And if, as I believe, thy vein be good,
The World will find thee after many days.
Be it with thee according to thy worth:
Go, little Book; in faith I send thee forth.
Robert Southey
#11. I was doing well enough until you came along and kicked my stone over, and out I came, all moss and eyes.
Djuna Barnes
#12. I crawled back into myself all alone, just delighted to observe that I was even more miserable than before, because I had brought a new kind of distress and something that resembled true feeling into my solitude.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#13. When your eyes meet my solitude
Silence ripens, a fruit,
And sleep turns into storm.
Forbidden doors fling open
And water learns to suffer.
Joumana Haddad
#14. In the midst of excitement, grief, joy, and solitude, I remind myself every moment that the sole mission of my life is to find 'the ultimate questioner' - that unimaginable who has put me in this madness to answer an unanswerable question.
Kedar Joshi
#15. That was the state of the world when I began to be aware of my family environment, and I cannot evoke it in any other way: sorrows, griefs, uncertainties in the solitude of an immense house.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#16. For the first time in my life, which had for years been sometimes witlessly gregarious, I discovered the pain of unwanted solitude. Like a felon suddenly thrown into solitary confinement, I found myself feeding off the unburned fat of inward resources I barely knew I possessed.
William Styron
#17. I remember when I was a child ... walking into the woods by myself and feeling the solitude around me build like electricity and pass through my body with a jolt that made my hair prickle.
Marilynne Robinson
#18. There's something about the darkness that I find unavoidably intoxicating. The knowledge that other people are sleeping and, therefore, unavailable to ruin my solitude, makes me more peaceful than I am during the day.
Rachel Nichols
#19. For I have hedged me with a thorny hedge,
I live alone, I look to die alone:
Yet sometimes, when a wind sighs through the sedge,
Ghosts of my buried years, and friends come back,
My heart goes sighing after swallows flown
On sometime summer's unreturning track.
Christina Rossetti
#20. My wilderness training was 4 years and 10 months of solitude, search and study.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#21. Our social relationships are limited, most of the time, to gossip and criticizing people's behavior. This observation slowly pushed me to isolate from the so-called social life. My days pass by in solitude.
Ingmar Bergman
#23. It is in deep solitude and silence that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brother and sister.
Thomas Merton
#24. I like silence; I'm a gregarious loner and without the solitude, I lose my gregariousness.
Karen Armstrong
#25. In solitude ... one can think and feel deeply without interruption. I have definitely grown far closer to myself rather than to others because I see my quiltmaking as my experience which has nothing to do with other people.
Nancy Crow
#26. I go into solitude so as not to drink out of everybody's cistern. When I am among the many I live as the many do, and I do not think I really think. After a time it always seems as if they want to banish my self from myself and rob me of my soul.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#28. The moonlight rained down on the beach as if to shine a spotlight on my solitude, and I wanted to cry out at it, 'Why did you take her? You, surrounded by all of your twinkling stars and infinite wonders and darkness. There's already enough beauty where you are.
Rachael Wade
#29. I had to learn - since I'm divorced now and everyone is like, 'Oh my God, you're single, what's going on?' - that if I don't like to spend time with myself, how can I ask someone else to enjoy spending time with me? I'm getting to learn how to enjoy my solitude and have a good time.
Gabrielle Union
#30. My solitude doesn't depend on the presence or absence of people; on the contrary, I hate who steals my solitude without, in exchange, offering me true company.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#31. I have found nothing half so good / As my long-planned half solitude, / Where I can sit up half the night / With some friend that has the wit ...
William Butler Yeats
#32. In my solitude, many miles from men and houses, I am in a childishly happy and carefree state of mind, which you are incapable of understanding unless someone explains it to you.
Knut Hamsun
#33. My story and my stories are all, in one or another, the same, tales of solitude and the grand pursuit of connection, of success and the inevitability of defeat.
Michael Chabon
#34. Sometimes I get so immersed in my own company, if I unexpectedly run into someone I know, it's a bit of a shock and takes me a while to adjust.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#35. I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.
Franz Kafka
#36. I prefer to be left alone with my books.
Alison Weir
#37. Solitude my solace, wrapped around me
like layers of golden hair. Stacks of books
and I can sing as loud as I please all day and night.
[from the poem, Rapunzel: I like the Quiet]
Jeannine Hall Gailey
#38. I'm . . . accustomed to being alone. There are times when alone is the best place to be. I enjoy my own company.
Sara Naveed
#39. I'll read my books and I'll drink coffee and I'll listen to music, and I'll bolt the door.
( A Boy in France : Saturday Evening Post CCXVII, March 31, 1945)
J.D. Salinger
#40. I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer. My bank of wild grass is majestic and full of music. It is a fire that solitude presses against my lips.
Violette Leduc
#41. I have others who rob me of my solitude, and yet do not truly offer me company.
Irvin D. Yalom
#42. In my solitude I have pondered much on the incomprehensible subjects of space, eternity, life and death.
Alfred Russel Wallace
#43. Because I need it to be mine alone while I carve it. I need solitude with it as I shape it. When I'm finished, then the world can have it, but when I work on it, it is to be my vision and mine alone. I wish no one to see it before it is finished.
Terry Goodkind
#44. Long have I dwelt forgotten here
In pining woe and dull despair;
This place of solitude and gloom
Must be my dungeon and my tomb.
Anne Bronte
#46. I do not want to be admired. I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.
Virginia Woolf
#47. My Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have. I hesitate to go out. If you opened the little gate, I would not hop away - but oh how I sing in my gold cage.
A.S. Byatt
#48. Now therefore, that my mind is free from all cares, and that I have obtained for myself assured leisure in peaceful solitude, I shall apply myself seriously and freely to the general destruction of all my former opinions.
Rene Descartes
#50. You think that I am impoverishing myself withdrawing from men, but in my solitude I have woven for myself a silken web or chrysalis, and, nymph-like, shall ere long burst forth a more perfect creature, fitted for a higher society.
Henry David Thoreau
#51. When I was going into one of my first meditation retreats, I asked my father, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, for some advice. He said, "How you act when you're alone affects the rest of your life." Even in solitude, the ruler engages in virtue.
Sakyong Mipham
#52. Nature, take my breath with you; renew it with the wild breeze and fill my being up with so much soul, ego learns to fade away.
Nikki Rowe
#53. I frequently lock myself in my studio. I do not often see the people I love, and in the end I shall suffer for it ... painting is one's private life.
Edgar Degas
#54. Since I realized that he (Picasso) lived in a self-enclosed world and that his solitude was therefore total, I wanted to explore my own solitude.
Francoise Gilot
#55. I can be by myself because I'm never lonely; I'm simply alone, living in my heavily populated solitude, a harum-scarum of infinity and eternity, and Infinity and Eternity seem to take a liking to the likes of me.
Bohumil Hrabal
#56. When I returned to partial life my face was wet with tears. How long that state of insensibility had lasted I cannot say. I had no means now of taking account of time. Never was solitude equal to this, never had any living being been so utterly forsaken.
Jules Verne
#57. Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me. The presence of another person derails my thoughts; I dream of the other's presence with a strange absent-mindedness that no amount of my analytical scrutiny can define.
Fernando Pessoa
#58. I am a stranger in this world, and there is a severe solitude and painful lonesomeness in my exile.
Kahlil Gibran
#59. Imagination, the traitor of the mind, has taken my solitude and slain it.
Robinson Jeffers
#60. I know exactly what my future looks like and I'm okay with it. I'm happy to live in solitude. I'm not afraid of spending the rest of my life in the company of my own person. I do not afraid loneliness.
Tahereh Mafi
#61. In the beginning, when the world was new and nothing had a name, my father took me to see the ice.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#62. I need solitude. I need space. I need air. I need the empty fields round me; and my legs pounding along roads; and sleep; and animal existence.
Virginia Woolf
#63. That's a terrifying prospect for myself, and I'm sure many other people, as well. We leave TVs on in our house. I listen to my record player, constantly, to just hear music. I'm really intrigued by the idea of solitude. I'm excited about that.
Katee Sackhoff
#64. I've discovered it is not sufficient simply to try to take time for quietness but that I must, with all diligence, make time. Whatever keeps me from prayer, solitude, and the Bible, however good it appears, is my enemy if I am to be God's devoted friend and follower.
Tommy Barnett
#65. I only need to close my eyes to find the inner peace within my soul.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#66. I think that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded man that comes in my way. I am naturally no hermit, but might possibly sit out the sturdiest frequenter of the bar-room, if my business called me thither.
Henry David Thoreau
#67. I repose in this quiet and secluded spot not from any natural preference for solitude, but finding other cemeteries limited as to race by charter rules, I have chosen this that I might illustrate in my death the principles which I advocated through a long life: EQUALITY OF MAN BEFORE HIS CREATOR.
Thaddeus Stevens
#68. Much of the time I'm an introvert, by choice spending a lot of time on my own. I suppose liking my solitude is part of a writer's sensibility.
Robyn Davidson
#69. I like my solitude, and I'm a strong-willed person; I'm a very hard-to-be-around person sometimes, I guess.
Bradford Cox
#70. My friends had always come from outside the mainstream. I had always been popular with the fifth column of my peers, those individuals who were princely in their solitude, lords of their own unpraised melancholy.
Pat Conroy
#71. I want my life to be the greatest story.
My very existence will be the greatest poem.
Watch me burn.
Love always, Charlotte
Charlotte Eriksson
#72. The solitude and peace of mind are serving me quite well, not the least of which is due to the excellent and truly enjoyable relationship with my cousin; its stability will be guaranteed by the avoidance of marriage.
Albert Einstein
#73. Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.
Hermann Hesse
#74. I write in order to find out what I truly know and how I really feel about certain things. Writing requires me to go much deeper into my thoughts and memories than conversation does. Writing provides the solitude necessary to reflect on being in this world.
Leslie Marmon Silko
#75. I'm as much my own master as anyone can be, without being the master of others. I can write anywhere - all I need is a couple of hours of solitude and a computer, and I can write a chapter. Since my work is portable, I can live anywhere I like.
Stuart Woods
#76. My wish has always been to write my own story, to create a life that's worth writing about. But is a story worth anything at all if I have no one to tell it to?
Charlotte Eriksson
#78. I live now in solitude and am able to use my time reflecting on the past and preparing for death. I cannot put away the thought of the Indians and in my ambition I fly to the Rockies.
Rose Philippine Duchesne
#80. All my life, I will continue obstinately to write about love, solitude and passion among the kind of people I know. The rest don't interest me.
Francoise Sagan
#81. I have always had a great need for solitude. I require huge swathes of loneliness and when I do not have it, which has been the case for the last five years, my frustration can sometimes become almost panicked, or aggressive.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#82. And to think, there are still places in the world where man has not been, where he has left no footprints, where the mysteries stand secure, untouched by human eyes. I want to go to these places, the quiet, timeless, ageless places, and sit, letting silence and solitude be my teachers.
Evan Tanner
#83. It is a great misfortune to be alone, my friends; and it must be believed that solitude can quickly destroy reason.
Jules Verne
#84. Only lost photographs that were never taken know what my mind speaks of when we are alone together.
Daniel J. Rice
#85. Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say.
Thomas Merton
#86. I feel the same way about solitude as some people feel about the blessing of the church. It's the light of grace for me. I never close my door behind me without the awareness that I am carrying out an act of mercy toward myself.
Peter Hoeg
#87. The moon in all her immaculate purity hung in the sky, laughing at this world of dust. She congratulated me for my carefully considered maneuvers and invited me to share in her eternal solitude.
Shan Sa
#88. An end to my fear of being alone. An end to a soul's solitude, when death at last arrives. There is something in that, something in there, that comforts. Hood,
Steven Erikson
#89. I came here to be for all and with all,
and what I do today in my solitude
will be echoed tomorrow by the multitude.
What I say now with one heart
will be said tomorrow by thousands of hearts ...
Kahlil Gibran
#90. On the one hand we can't be alone, people like us; on the other we can't stand company. We can't stand male company, which bores us to death, or female company either. I gave up male company for years because it's totally unprofitable, and female company gets on my nerves in no time.
Thomas Bernhard
#91. I felt I could turn the earth upside down with my littlest finger. I wanted to dance, to fly in the air and kiss the sun and stars with my singing heart. I, alone with myself, was enjoying myself for the first time as with grandest company.
Anzia Yezierska
#92. Some of my poems indicate that I am writing while living alone after a split with a woman, and I've had many splits with women. I need solitude more often when I'm not writing than when I am.
Charles Bukowski
#93. I would advise you to write, my dear friend, because with your active nature, solitude is simply intolerable to you, and after some time your solitude would become perhaps attractive if you were to people it with creatures of your own fancy.
Wilfrid Laurier
#94. Say you'll share with me one love, one lifetime. Lead me, save me from my solitude. Say you want me with you, here beside you. Anywhere you go, let me go, too. Christine; that's all I ask of you.
Charles Hart
#95. Some nights I'd sneak out and listen to the radio in my Dad's old Chevy - children need solitude - they don't teach that in school ...
John Geddes
#96. I've spent all my life alone. And when you've been alone as long as I have, you realize that solitude means much more than being alone.
Dorian Zari
#97. You get good at being by yourself and you're condemned to a life sentence of solitude. You think, "Wait a minute! I should have been a tap dancer or something". But in my life, I feel like I take my stories to people orally.
Sandra Cisneros
#98. So I lived alone.
The first thing I did was take off my pants. Naturally.
Edward Abbey
#99. I'm still lonely and it's a glorification of something I'm not finished with. I don't want to be distracted from my work by other people, but the absence of it all distracts me from my work and that's why I run towards the city, to get a little glimpse of it.
Charlotte Eriksson
#100. For oft, when on my couch I lie in vacant or in pensive mood they flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude
William Wordsworth
