Loneliness is different than isolation and solitude. Loneliness is a subjective feeling where the connections we need are greater than the connections we have. In the gap, we experience loneliness. It’s distinct from the objective state of isolation, which is determined by the number of people around you.
When you hear a solo piano, there’s a solitude about just one instrument playing. It can be beautiful; it can be sad.
One can’t live in solitude. To survive as a single family unit is not possible.
Being solitary is being alone well: being alone luxuriously immersed in doings of your own choice, aware of the fullness of your won presence rather than of the absence of others. Because solitude is an achievement.
Silence and solitude are more distracting to me than chatter and commotion.
Remember that although the distinction can be difficult to draw, loneliness and solitude are different.
How would Jonathan Lethem have obtained such a stellar endorsement for ‘The Fortress of Solitude’ from Michael Chabon, if not for the years they spent ghostwriting ‘MAD’ magazine fold-ins together?
I was thinking, too, of Superman and his fortress of solitude.
I try to factor solitude into my life because more and more, that’s becoming a very precious and rare commodity.
As I’ve gotten older I’ve occasionally found myself nostalgic for earlier periods of solitude, though I realize that’s also likely a false nostalgia, as I know there was nothing I wanted more during those periods than to not be alone, whatever that means.
I use solitude as a judge and as a person – a lot.
In solitude we become aware that we were together before we came together and that life is not a creation of our will but rather an obedient response to the reality of our being united.
Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world alone and leave it alone.
Highest of heights, I climb this mountain and feel one with the rock and grit and solitude echoing back at me.
What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.
‘A Perfect Place’ is character-driven. The director for that wanted a couple of identifiable themes with a bunch of variations. That is what I did. The director for ‘The Solitude of Prime Numbers’ did not want that at all.
Solitude is un-American.
But I think there’s something wonderful and extraordinary about climbing on your own and just that kind of relationship to the environment. I’m very addicted to the mountains. You know, so, I do like that solitude.
I have a sort of Catholic-slash-Calvinist view of human nature, but every day I meet somebody who is doing cool things. So people get you out of your solitude and do things that exceed your expectations every day.
Solitude terrifies the soul at twenty.
I don’t like being able to be reached. I enjoy my solitude. Even people having my phone number seems like too much.
I really do work in solitude.
You can’t write an image, a metaphor, a story, a phrase, without leaning a little further into the shared world, without recognizing that your supposed solitude is at every point of its perimeter touching some other.
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.
Solitude is the place of purification.
But in the end, in the end one is alone. We are all of us alone. I mean I’m told these days we have to consider ourselves as being in society… but in the end one knows one is alone, that one lives at the heart of a solitude.
What I like is the idea of a group, even if it’s just two people – the idea of solitude within a group.
I needed to be in the bush. There I find solitude and beauty and purity and focus. That’s where my heart lies.
My favorite books are actually very complicated – ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’, ‘Ulysses’.
Man is alone everywhere. But the solitude of the Mexican, under the great stone night of the high plateau that is still inhabited by insatiable gods, is very different from that of the North American, who wanders in an abstract world of machines, fellow citizens and moral precepts.
Nothing is more capable of troubling our reason, and consuming our health, than secret notions of jealousy in solitude.
My music is very personal. I’ve created it in solitude. I face a white wall and beller. I like that sound – the expression of loneliness. That’s what it’s all about.
It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.
Growing up a lonely only child prepared me for the years of solitude spent as a writer; years spent in the company of people who don’t exist, imaginary people you have conversations with. It’s a paid form of madness, this writing stuff.
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.
But the delights of solitude don’t only consist of dreaming. Next in enjoyment, I think, comes planning.
I have to say that I have no regrets about my decision to become a priest or about the major directions my ministry has taken me… I have been and am happy as a priest, and I have never been lonely… I could have used a bit more solitude.
I’m learning not to hold on so tightly to my solitude. It’s not an economical way to work. A driver would call it ‘white-knuckling.’ If you’re holding on to the wheel so tightly, it’s gonna lock up your driving. Releasing myself from trying to control everything has been part of growing up.
Certain springs are tapped only when we are alone. Women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves; that firm strand which will be the indispensable center of a whole web of human relationships.
A great reader seldom recognizes his solitude.
I sort of came from a big family – eight kids – and I guess I always, more than most people, really revel in privacy and solitude sometimes.
As a model, I didn’t have an identity; I was a chameleon, a silent actress. I was an amorphous thing. I wasn’t full of personality, I was full of solitude and solemnity. I wasn’t a cover-girl type.
Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous – to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
I suppose a lot of people don’t understand that one of the things that drew me to hunting was the peace and the solitude, the mushy spiritual stuff, strangely enough. The quiet away from 75,000 roaring fans. The fans, that’s very wonderful – I get a great charge from that.
A man can be himself only so long as he is alone, and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom, for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.
It’s an interesting combination: Having a great fear of being alone, and having a desperate need for solitude and the solitary experience. That’s always been a tug of war for me.
Friendship needs no words – it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.
In religions which have lost their creative spark, the gods eventually become no more than poetic motifs or ornaments for decorating human solitude and walls.
I’ve always loved the woods, and I’ve always loved gardening and a lot of solitude and quiet.
Language… has created the word ‘loneliness’ to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word ‘solitude’ to express the glory of being alone.
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.
African-Americans assume I’m named after the notorious Soledad prison or Mount Soledad in California. Latinos want to know if I’m lonely. That doesn’t fit, because I grew up with five siblings, and I have four kids of my own, so I’m not lonely at all, though I do often seek solitude, the actual meaning of my name.
A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.
I’ve never minded solitude. For a writer, it’s a natural condition. But caring for a dementia sufferer leads to a peculiar kind of loneliness.
God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.
With Jackson there was quiet solitude. Just to sit and look at the landscape. An inner quietness. After dinner, to sit on the back porch and look at the light. No need for talking. For any kind of communication.
I love hotels for their solitude and comfort, but I believe a seedy one can have as much promise as a plush one.
Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude.
I can write best in the silence and solitude of the night, when everyone has retired.
Writing is a tribute to solitude. It is choosing introversion over extroversion, lonely hours/days/weeks/years over fun and sociability.
I didn’t choose solitude.
