Solitude

Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.

Where solitude endeth, there beginneth the market-place; and where the market-place beginneth, there beginneth also the noise of the great actors, and the buzzing of the poison-flies.

Still am I the richest and most to be envied - I, the lonesomest one!

Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.

To do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife , it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity.

Weeded and worn the ancient thatch Upon the lonely moated grange. 1

 

O Solitude! where are the charms That sages have seen in thy face?

We live in an old chaos of the sun, Or old dependency of day and night, Or island solitude, unsponsored, free, Of that wide water, inescapable. Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness; And, in the isolation of the sky, At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

We perished, each alone:

My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced freedom from the need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities.

I lived in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in maturity.

Loneliness comes about when I am alone without being able . . . to keep myself company.

NO MAN IS LONELY WHILE EATING SPAGHETTI: IT REQUIRES SO MUCH ATTENTION.

Who hears music, feels his solitude Peopled at once.

There are days when solitude, for someone my age, is a heady wine which 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.

We cannot confront solitude without moral resources.

In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.

We all have forests on our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.

She dwelt among the untrodden ways Beside the springs of Dove, A maid whom there were none to praise And very few to love: 2 A violet by a mossy stone Half hidden from the eye! —Fair as a star, when only one Is shining in the sky. She lived unknown, and few could know When Lucy ceased to be; But she is in her grave, and, oh, The difference to me!

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made: Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

I cannot live with You— It would be Life— And Life is over there— Behind the Shelf.

None but the lonely heart

Le commencement et le déclin de l’amour se font sentir par l’embarras où l’on est de se trouver seuls.

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.