Solitary Confinement Quotes

There's a big difference between being alone and being lonely. And I'm guessing that once you've discovered this distinction you can't go back to solitary confinement without serious emotional repercussions. ~ Tiffanie DeBartolo

Damn it!" I rubbed my eyes. My head hurt from staring at the laptop screen the whole day. "I've got to put this down for a while."
"Yes, put it down. Social networking is for the anti-social, yes?," Eat'em shut my laptop and stood on it as I slid it onto the cluttered coffee table. "Keystrokes are a sign of the solipsistic lonely sort. Self-imposed solitary confinement, yes! You can't rip all them ones and twos from the screen, Jacob. ~ Chase Webster

You're used to being the smartest guy in the room. Solitary confinement will do that. ~ Jarod Kintz

We fight for territory. We see it in our Congress, we see it in our political systems, we see it in our ways of life, how separated we are. When we moved out of the cities and we lost all of the memory that was in cities, and we - one of the highest achievements in our culture is to be able to segregate yourself from everyone else, and the deep thing is the deepest punishment is solitary confinement. ~ Wynton Marsalis

The deep secret of the brain is that not only the spinal cord but the entire central nervous system works this way: internally generated activity is modulated by sensory input. In this view, the difference between being awake and being asleep is merely that the data coming in from the eyes anchors the perception. Asleep vision (dreaming) is perception that is not tied down to anything in the real world; waking perception is something like dreaming with a little more commitment to what´s in front of you. Other examples of unanchored perception are found in prisoners in pitch-park solitary confinement, or in people in sensory deprivation chambers. Both of these situations quickly lead to hallucinations. ~ David Eagleman

The Holy Spirit showed me that when I put up walls to keep others out I also wall myself into solitary place of confinement. ~ Joyce Meyer

Solitary confinement is too terrible a punishment to inflict on any human being, no matter what his crime. Hardened criminals in the men's prisons, it is said, often beg for the lash instead. ~ Emmeline Pankhurst

This was what is was to be alone. No wonder solitary confinement was considered such a severe punishment. Being locked away from everyone you loved was infinitely cruel. Still, solitary would only work perfectly if you first stripped the prisoner of his hopes and dreams. There must be no future on which to focus. ~ Sara Steger

[Solitary confinement] is terrible. That is terrible. You're in a grave. You can't do anything. Everything's brought to you and you're in a room all day, except to come out of the showers. So when I would come out, I would entertain myself by singing, doing little mock concerts. And then when I was in the room, I would develop a routine. Like I have a lot of hair under here, so I would take my hair down and take all day to braid it on purpose. Stretch the hours out. Then I might write. And I would clean the floor. And I would look out the window. And then I'd devote a whole day to just reading. I was Christian then, trying to be. So I would read the whole Bible. I would break it down into sections. You're in a grave and you're trying to live. That's how to best describe it: trying to live in a grave. You're trying to live 'cause you're not dead yet, but nobody hears you when you call out, 'Hey, I'm alive! ~ Megan Sweeney

People aren't wired to be alone. Even in the stressful population of prison, solitary confinement is still considered a cruel punishment. ~ Richard Paul Evans

It's not the physical things that you're without that make it so hard to be incarcerated for life. It's the fact that you're helpless to take care of your family when they're sick, to raise your children, to help in their times of struggle, and to give back to your community. Instead you're a burden, a charity case, someone to pity. It strips you of your self-esteem and your self-respect. ~ Jean Casella

I have spent 11 horrific years in solitary confinement in a 6-square-meter dungeon three floors underground without sunlight or fresh air. But I endured my hardships because I was merely living my convictions. ~ Samir Geagea

I don't think there's any loneliness greater than the loneliness to be found in a bad marriage. In solitary confinement, everyone knows you're lonely and feels sorry for you. In a bad marriage loneliness is your darkest secret, one you dare not even share with your spouse. ~ Daniel Quinn

In a universe devoid of life, any life at all would be immensely meaningful. We ARE that meaning. "And what we see, "says the poet Mary Oliver, "is the world that cannot cherish us, but which we cherish." As though life itself is the great, universal, unrequited love of all time. But there is even more to this. Deep mystery. We are the universe aware of itself. We let the miracle get lost in distractions. On a planet so rich with living companions, much of humanity sentences itself to solitary confinement. Late at night, I used to lie in my boat listening to radio calls from ships to families ashore. There was only one conversation, and it boils down to, "I love you and I miss you: come home safe." Connections make us individuals. Ironic, isn't it? The more connected, the more unique our life becomes ... ~ Carl Safina

Maybe the real issue here is that we were not created to do life by ourselves. We were not given a sentence of solitary confinement and placed in a world of isolation, but from the moment we entered this human experience, it was clear there was a world waiting to be discovered, creatures which were there for our interaction.

And the spark inside us often has to be spoken to, to be touched by the soul of another. It's as if the spark is only visible through the lens of night vision, a set of goggles which only another human being can hand to us. ~ Stephen Lovegrove

There is a story about a prisoner at Alcatraz who spent his nights in solitary confinement dropping a button on the floor then trying to find it again in the dark. Each night, in this manner, he passed the hours until dawn. I do not have a button. In all other respects, my nights are the same. ~ Jenny Offill

I found solitary confinement the most forbidding aspect of prison life. There is no end and no beginning; there is only one's mind, which can begin to play tricks. Was that a dream or did it really happen? One begins to question everything. ~ Nelson Mandela

But the thing is, slavery's not a new invention. And solitary confinement - did you know, in America we've got more than twenty-five thousand prisoners in isolation cells? ~ Emma Donoghue

Correction officers struck adolescents in the head and face at "an alarming rate" as punishment, even when inmates posed no threat; officers took inmates to isolated areas for beatings out of view of video cameras; and many inmates were so afraid of the violence that they asked, for their own protection, to go to solitary confinement, the report said. ~ Anonymous

It's strange when they near your cell. You lose all your strength and you are like this. You lose all your strength as if a rope is dragging it out of you. Then the footsteps stop in front of another solitary confinement cell and when you hear the sound of the key turning you feel relieved. ~ Sakae Menda

Incessant company is as bad as solitary confinement. ~ Virginia Woolf

When Private Bradley [aka Chelsea] Manning put his conscience ahead of his personal well-being by allegedly releasing important information to the world's public via WikiLeaks, he was put into an inhumane solitary confinement and is now facing charges that carry the possibility of him spending the rest of his life in prison. ~ Ray McGovern

What were they thinking?' we ask about our ancestors, but we know that, a century hence, our descendents will ask the same thing about us. Who knows what will strike them as strangest? The United States incarcerates 1 percent of its population and subjects many thousands of inmates to years of solitary confinement. In Saudi Arabia, women are forbidden to drive. There are countries today in which homosexuality is punishable by life in prison or by death. Then there's the sequestered reality of factory farming, in which hundreds of millions of mammals, and billions of birds, live a squalid brief existence. Or the toleration of extreme poverty, inside and outside the developed world. One day, people will find themselves thinking not just that an old practice was wrong and a new one right but that there was something shameful in the old ways. In the course of the transition, many will change what they do because they are shamed out of an old way of doing things. So it is perhaps not too much to hope that if we can find the proper place for honor now, we can make the world better. ~ Kwame Anthony Appiah

He could have had his choice of any woman in the district. And he chose solitude. Not solitude – that sounds too peaceful. More like solitary confinement. ~ Suzanne Collins

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life. ~ Tennessee Williams

Each man is his own prisoner, in solitary confinement for life. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

Life is a solitary confinement ,
Every second is a punishment
- of a crime , that was never committed ,
Or perhaps,
- the biggest crime of my age , is the silence of the soul.

You suffer silently
- as a sacrificial lamb to be slaughtered
- for a cause that is greater than your own existence !
They label you as a hero ,
- a super human with super human strength .

Yes , indeed .
The wars you fight every day
- every moment with your demons , and of course the price of being a hero !
Solitude ,
- A gift from god
- A curse on your own self. ~ BinYamin Gulzar

If you spit in my face and smack me in the mouth and throw me into solitary confinement for nothing ... what do you think's gonna happen when i get out of here? ~ Charles Manson

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

Anyone who has ever tried to write a novel knows what an arduous task it is, undoubtedly one of the worst ways of occupying oneself. You have to remain within yourself all the time, in solitary confinement. It's a controlled psychosis, an obsessive paranoia manacled to work completely lacking in the feather pens and bustles and Venetian masks we would ordinarily associate with it, clothed instead in a butcher's apron and rubber boots, eviscerating knife in hand. You can only barely see from that writerly cellar the feet of passers-by, hear the rapping of their heels. Every so often someone stops and bends down and glances in through the window, and then you get a glimpse of a human face, maybe even exchange a few words. But ultimately the mind is so occupied with its own act, a play staged by the self ofr the self in a hasty, makeshift cabinet of curiosities peopled by author and character, narrator and reader, the person describing and the person described, that feet, shoes, heels, and faces become, sooner or later, mere components of that act. ~ Olga Tokarczuk

Do you realize what a beacon you've become?"

"A - I beg your pardon?"

"A beacon of hope," says the woman, smiling. "As soon as we announced we'd be doing this interview, our viewers started calling in, e-mails, text messages, telling us you're an angel, a talisman of goodness . . ."

Ma makes a face. "All I did was I survived, and I did a pretty good job of raising Jack. A good enough job."

"You're very modest."

"No, what I am is irritated, actually."

The puffy-hair woman blinks twice.

"All this reverential - I'm not a saint." Ma's voice is getting loud again. "I wish people would stop treating us like we're the only ones who ever lived through something terrible. I've been finding stuff on the Internet you wouldn't believe."

"Other cases like yours?"

"Yeah, but not just - I mean, of course when I woke up in that shed, I thought nobody'd ever had it as bad as me. But the thing is, slavery's not a new invention. And solitary confinement - did you know, in America we've got more than twenty-five thousand prisoners in isolation cells? Some of them for more than twenty years." Her hand is pointing at the puffy-hair woman. "As for kids - there's places where babies lie in orphanages five to a cot with pacifiers taped into their mouths, kids getting raped by Daddy every night, kids in prisons, whatever, making carpets till they go blind - ~ Emma Donoghue

Research and writing are lonely occupations. It is easy to become discouraged in solitary confinement. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

We met three years prior, in 2003, when I created the first-ever Shakespeare program in a solitary confinement unit, and we spent three years working together in that unit. Now we have received unprecedented permission to work together, alone, unsupervised, to create a series of Shakespeare workbooks for prisoners. Newton is gesticulating so animatedly that it draws the attention of an officer walking by our little classroom. He pops his head inside. "Everything okay in here?" he asks. "Just reading Shakespeare," I reply. He shakes his head and walks on. "That is crazy!" Newton repeats, his head still in the book. A record ten and a half consecutive years in solitary confinement, and he's not crazy, he's not dangerous - he's reading Shakespeare. And maybe, just maybe, it is because he's reading Shakespeare that he is not crazy, or dangerous. ~ Laura Bates

In American prisons, which are extraordinarily violent places, the most vicious form of punishment is simply to lock a person in an empty room for years with absolutely nothing to do. This emptying of any possibility of communication or meaning is the real essence of what violence really is or does. ~ David Graeber

They got it wrong when they called it "the closet." This was a prison. Solitary confinement. I was locked inside, inside myself, dark and afraid and alone. (Chapter. 23) ~ Julie Anne Peters

During the days I felt myself slipping into a kind of madness. Solitary confinement has an astonishing effect on the mind. The trip was to stay calm and keep myself occupied. I spent hours working out how to break free. But trying to escape would have been instant suicide. ~ Tahir Shah

Silence comes in two varieties: One that nourishes and comforts; another that chokes, smothers, and isolates. Solitary confinement is the worst kind of imprisonment we can inflict on fellow humans, and if you are forced to keep silent about some dark secret, you live in solitary confinement. Without the bridge of communication connecting you to other human beings, you can't share your burdens, can't receive comfort, can't confirm that you still belong. Silence is the abyss that separates you from hope. ~ Martha Beck

Imagine someone sitting alone in a room without television, radio, computer or phone and with the door closed and the blinds down. This person must be a dangerous lunatic or a prisoner sentenced to solitary confinement. If a free agent, then a panty-sniffing loser shunned by society, or a psycho planning to return to college with an automatic weapon and a backpack full of ammo. ~ Michael Foley

That was one of the things that always happened to me after long periods of solitary confinement: i would forget how to talk. ~ Assata Shakur

It is a human characteristic, which has been richly exploited in every era, that while hope of survival is still alive in a man, while he still believes his troubles will have a favorable outcome, and while he still has the chance to unmask treason or to save someone else by sacrificing himself, he continues to cling to the pitiful remnants of comfort and remains silent and submissive. When he has been taken and destroyed, when he has nothing more to lose, and is, in consequence, ready and eager for heroic action, his belated rage can only spend itself against the stone walls of solitary confinement. Or the breath of the death sentence makes him indifferent to earthly affairs. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

If you ever meet someone who cannot understand why solitary confinement is considered punishment, you have met a misanthrope. ~ Florence King

Most of them were murderers. But when I went there to talk, they were the nicest people. I did a reading. I said, "Thank you," and then they said to me, "Could you talk some more?" And I said, "Why?" and they answered, "Most of us are in solitary confinement, so the moment you finish talking, they take us back to our cells. We like hanging out here together." ~ Etgar Keret

A prisoner lived in solitary confinement for years. He saw and spoke to no one and his meals were served through an opening in the wall. One day an ant came into his cell. The man contemplated it in fascination as it crawled around the room. He held it in the palm of his hand the better to observe it, gave it a grain or two, and kept it under his tin cup at night. One day it suddenly struck him that it had taken him ten long years of solitary confinement to open his eyes to the loveliness of an ant. ~ Anthony De Mello

I have a nice little office, with a nice little window in it, but I do basically spend huge amounts of time in what you could consider solitary confinement. ~ Mary Roach

The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement - if you can't deal with this, you needn't apply. ~ Will Self

The next four weeks of solitary confinement were among the happiest of Paul's life ... It was so exhilarating, he found, never to have to make any decision on any subject, to be wholly relieved from the smallest consideration of time, meas, or clothes, to have no anxiety ever about what kind of impression he was making; in fact, to be free. ~ Evelyn Waugh

Acquittal. The kourtroom broke into a loud cheer. The judge just gave up calling for order. He had to wait for the shouting to die down. It was a long time coming. All the spectators were jumping around hugging each other. The marshals led me out of the courtroom and handcuffed me. They brought me back to Rikers Island where i was put into solitary confinement. ~ Assata Shakur

I worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week for years. Being a comic book artist is like sentencing yourself to life imprisonment at hard labor in solitary confinement. I don't think I'd do it again. ~ Wally Wood

Our libraries are so to speak prisons where we've locked up our intellectual giants, naturally Kant has been put in solitary confinement, like Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer, like Pascal, like Voltaire, like Montaigne, all the real giants have been put in solitary confinement, all the others in mass confinement, but everyone for ever and ever, my friend, for all time and unto eternity, that's the truth. ~ Thomas Bernhard

Something in our nature cries out to be loved by another. Isolation is devastating to the human psyche. That is why solitary confinement is considered the cruelest of punishments. ~ Gary Chapman

We're all mad, the whole damned race. We're wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we're all mad and in solitary confinement. ~ William Golding

I don't think we ever get away from the fear of labels and being different. It's human nature to want to be part of a community. That's why excommunication and solitary confinement are such brutal forms of punishment. ~ Matte Bach

If you're living completely on your own, break out of solitary confinement. Seek to understand others, and help them understand you. ~ Martha Beck

Solitary confinement is rock bottom, it's absolute unfreedom. ~ Arthur Koestler

In this country, don't forget, a habit is no damn private hell. There's no solitary confinement outside of jail. A habit is hell for those you love. And in this country it's the worst kind of hell for those who love you. ~ Billie Holiday

For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. ~ Aldous Huxley

Every writer must acknowledge and be able to handle the unalterable fact that he has, in effect, given himself a life sentence in solitary confinement. ~ Peter Straub

We now dwelt in a very large prison, without walls, bounded by Canada, Mexico and two oceans. There were the jailers, the turnkeys, the informers, and somewhere in the Midwest the solitary confinement of the special internment camps. Most people did not appear to notice. Since there were no literal walls or barbed wire, since they had committed no crimes, had not been arrested or taken to court, they did not grasp the change, the dread transformation, of their situation. It was the classic case of a man kidnapped while standing still. Since they had been taken nowhere and since they themselves had voted the new tyranny into power, they could see nothing wrong. Anywho, a good third of them, had they known, would have thought it a good idea…Their freedom to do as they were told had been preserved. ~ Philip K. Dick

Solitary confinement has been used extensively, it always has. I was in prison for 44 years; it was a normal part of life - the practice of it. They put you in solitary confinement for disciplinary reasons, they put you in solitary confinement to protect you from violence or whatever, and they also put you in solitary confinement just to show you who has got the power ... It's not something new; it's just something that nobody really cared about in the past. ~ Wilbert Rideau

Mo and the staff talk about captivity like it's the best thing a dolphin can hope for, but that kind of talk just makes me think of Carlito and all the years he spent trapped by the routines of prison life in a six-by-nine-foot prison cell, the size of a parking space, and what Dr. Joe used to say about inmates like my brother who were also sentenced to solitary confinement: 'It doesn't have to be violent for it to be torture. ~ Patricia Engel

Bradley Manning has been imprisoned without charge, under torture, which is what solitary confinement is. ~ Noam Chomsky

But a punishment like forced labour or even imprisonment – mere loss of liberty – has never functioned without a certain additional element of punishment that certainly concerns the body itself: rationing of food, sexual deprivation, corporal punishment, solitary confinement … There remains, therefore, a trace of 'torture' in the modern mechanisms of criminal justice – a trace that has not been entirely overcome, but which is enveloped, increasingly, by the non-corporal nature of the penal system ~ Michel Foucault

The Truth is in the prolouge.
Death to the romantic fool.,
the expert in solitary confinement. ~ Pablo Neruda

Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Should a seeker not find a companion who is better or equal, let him resolutely pursue a solitary course; there is no fellowship with the fool. ~ Gautama Buddha

Everything I write tends to turn into a superhero team, even if I didn't mean for it to. I always start off wanting to be solitary, because a) it's simpler, and b) that isolation is something that I relate to as a storyteller. And then no matter what, I always end up with a team. ~ Joss Whedon

He became a solitary, belonging to that tragic class of active men prematurely deprived of activity; swimmers barred from the water or actors banished from the stage. ~ John Le Carre

Ivan Lendl is a robot, a solitary, mechanical man who lives with his dogs behind towering walls at his estate in Connecticut. A man who so badly wants to have a more human image that he's having surgery to remove the bolts from his neck. ~ Tony Kornheiser

The man who is unable to people his solitude is equally unable to be alone in a bustling crowd. The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself or some one else, as he chooses. [ ... ] The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. [ ... ] What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire ... to the unexpected as it comes along, the stranger as he passes. ~ Charles Baudelaire

A second major illusion on which the school system rests is that most learning is the result of teaching. Teaching, it is true, may contribute to certain kinds of learning under certain circumstances. But most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school, and in school only insofar as school, in a few rich countries, has become their place of confinement during an increasing part of their lives. ~ Ivan Illich

Lonely and isolated people who feel their solitude more intensely within the busy life of the streets. They are what George Gissing called the anchorites of daily life, who return unhappy to their solitary rooms. ~ Peter Ackroyd

Consciousness and revolt, these rejections are the contrary of renunciation. Everything that is indomitable and passionate in a human heart quickens them, on the contrary, with its own life. It is essential to die unreconciled and not of one's own free will. Suicide is a repudiation. The absurd man can only drain everything to the bitter end, and deplete himself. The absurd is his extreme tension, which he maintains constantly by solitary effort, for he knows that in that consciousness and in that day-to-day revolt he gives proof of his only truth, which is defiance. ~ Albert Camus

Just suppose that the dead do revisit the living. That something approximately to be described as Jim can return to see how George is making out. Would this be at all satisfactory? Would it even be worthwhile? At best, surely, it would be like the brief visit of an observer from another country who is permitted to peep in for a moment from the vast outdoors of his freedom and see, at a distance, through glass, this figure who sits solitary at the small table in the narrow room, eating his poached eggs humbly and dully, a prisoner for life. ~ Christopher Isherwood

Looking up, I observed one solitary leaf that remained on a spindly branch of an old oak tree. And as winter's frigid winds blew against it twisting it this way and that, I thought that it was either committed to holding on as long as it could or it was afraid to let go. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

A solitary Christian who thinks he can live independently of the church functions about as well as a thumb severed from its hand. ~ Jen Pollock Michel

I tutored myself in the art of solemnity, kept my euphoria private, and adopted a serious demeanour in keeping with everyone else and the general ambience of the house. I continued my solitary daily walks about the estate, carefully choreographing scenes and conversations yet to happen. I returned to those places of our clandestine moments together, replaying them in my head, languishing in his treasured words . . . and sometimes adding more. I stood under frosty sunsets, my warm breath mingling with the cold evening air as I watched the silent flight of birds across the sky. And even in those twilit autumnal days I felt a light shine down upon my path. For though he was no longer at Deyning, no longer in England, the fact that he lived and breathed had already altered my vision; and nothing, not even a war, could quell my faith in the inevitability of his presence in my life. ~ Judith Kinghorn

Let me get this straight. You have no intention of telling me what's wrong. You don't want to talk about whatever is wrong. And you're going to let me continue to believe I've done something horrible before you'll open up. Even if, say, I restrain you? Force it out of you?"
"The only thing you are going to force out of me under the confinement of restraints is an orgasm."
Finally! "So, you'd be open to my restraining you for my own sexual pleasure?"
"Wide open."
"And, it would be something you'd enjoy?"
"Who wouldn't? ~ Darynda Jones

Serafim now had the liberty to go anywhere in the world, do anything. He had no land, no ties, no home to return to. He was unbound, floating illimitable; yet he had never felt so burdened in his life. What if we choose confinement, he contemplated; what if we actually seek to settle into the security of some type of bondage? A person certainly never has to worry about their bearings, or who and what they are, when held in place by a few simple, even token, chains. Rendering oneself a captive liberates one from all the squeamish dilemmas of free will. ~ Mark Lavorato

I don't need money, or, better, it's not money that I need; it's not even power; I need only what is obtained by power and simply cannot be obtained without power: the solitary and calm awareness of strength! That is the fullest definition of freedom, which the world so struggles over! ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Writing begins as a solitary obsession and ends up as communication. ~ Marty Rubin

This was the way we loved, until the night became a silent day. And as I lay there with her I could see how important physical love was, how necessary it was for us to be in each other's arms, giving and taking. The universe was exploding, each particle away from the next, hurtling us into dark and lonely space, eternally tearing us away from each other - child out of the womb, friend away from friend, moving from each other, each through his own pathway toward the goal-box of solitary death.
But this was the counterweight, the act of binding and holding. As when men to keep from being swept overboard in the storm clutch at each other's hands to resist being torn apart, so our bodies fused a link in the human chain that kept us from being swept into nothing. ~ Daniel Keyes

...Plato conceived of philosophy as necessarily gregarious rather than solitary. The exposure of presumptions is best done in company, the more argumentative the better. This is why discussion around the table is so essential. This is why philosophy must be argumentative. It proceeds by way of arguments, and the arguments are argued over. Everything is aired in the bracing dialectic wind stirred by many clashing viewpoints. Only in this way can intuitions that have their source in societal or personal idiosyncrasies be exposed and questioned. ... There can be nothing like "Well, that's what I was brought up to believe," or "I just feel that it's right," or "I am privy to an authoritative voice whispering in my ear," or "I'm demonstrably smarter than all of you, so just accept that I know better here." The discussion around the seminar table countenances only the sorts of arguments and considerations that can, in principle, make a claim on everyone who signs on to the project of reason: appealing to, evaluating, and being persuaded by reasons. (pp. 38-39) ~ Rebecca Goldstein

Contemporary art and manga - what is the same about them? Nothing, right? The manga industry has a lot of talented people, but contemporary art works on more of a solitary model. No one embarks on collaboration in contemporary art in order to make money. But in the manga world, everyone is invested in collaboration. The most important point is that the manga industry constantly encourages new creations and creators. ~ Takashi Murakami

As if femininity were measured by the art of 'shrinking' ... women are held in a kind of invisible enclosure (of which the veil is only the visible manifestation) circumscribing the space allowed for the movements and postures of their bodies (whereas men occupy more space, especially in public places). This symbolic confinement is secured practically by their clothing by their clothing which (as was even more visible in former times) has the effect not only of masking the body but of continuously calling it to order. ~ Pierre Bourdieu

Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such a day - very much such a sweetness as this - I struck my first whale - a boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty - forty - forty years ago! - ago! Forty years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and peril, and storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not spent three ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without - oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command! - when I think of all this; only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me before - and how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare - fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soul - when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the world's fresh bread to my mouldy crusts - away, whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow - wife? wife? - rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ah ~ Herman Melville

'The Creative Habit' is basically about how you work alone, how you survive as a solitary artist. 'The Collaborative Habit' is obviously about surviving with other people. ~ Twyla Tharp

A common observation, that few are mended by imprisonment, and that he, whose crimes have made confinement necessary, seldom makes any other use of his enlargement, than to do, with greater cunning, what he did before with less. ~ Samuel Johnson

Moreover, during his wife's confinement, something had happened that seemed extraordinary to him. He, an unbeliever, had fallen into praying, and at the moment he prayed, he believed. But that moment had passed, and he could not make his state of mind at that moment fit into the rest of his life. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Unfortunately the hostility that the European displayed toward the native cultures he encountered he carried even further into his relations with the land. The immense open spaces of the American continents, with all their unexploited or thinly utilized resources, were treated as a challenge to unrelenting war, destruction, and conquest. The forests were there to be cut down, the prairie to be plowed up, the marshes to be filled, the wildlife to be killed for empty sport, even if not utilized for food or clothing.

In the act of 'conquering nature' our ancestors too often treated the earth as contemptuously and as brutally as they treated its original inhabitants, wiping out great animal species like the bison and the passenger pigeon, mining the soils instead of annually replenishing them, and even, in the present day, invading the last wilderness areas, precious just because they are still wildernesses, homes for wildlife and solitary human souls. Instead we are surrendering them to six-lane highways, gas stations, amusement parks, and the lumber interests, as in the redwood groves, or Yosemite, and Lake Tahoe-though these primeval areas, once desecrated, can never be fully restored or replaced. ~ Lewis Mumford

Writing is always a solitary experience, but living, if you're lucky, is not. ~ Beth Harbison

Let's just enjoy it for ourselves. Dawn is such a private hour, don't you think? Such a solitary hour. One always hears that said of midnight, but I think of midnight as remarkably companionable - everyone together, sleeping in the dark.'
'I am afraid I am interrupting your solitude,' Anna said.
'No, no,' the boy said. 'Oh, no. Solitude is best enjoyed in company.' He grinned at her, quickly, and Anna smiled back. 'Especially the company of one other soul,' he added, turning back to the sea. 'It's dreadful to feel alone and really be alone. But I love to enjoy the feeling when I'm not. ~ Eleanor Catton

It seemed to us that his sadness was that of a boy, the voluptuous heedless melancholy of a boy who has still not come down to earth, and moves in the arid, solitary world of dreams. ~ Natalia Ginzburg

Before I knew you, my angel, I was solitary and as it were asleep, and scarcely alive. They said, the spiteful creatures, that even my appearance was unseemly, and so I began to be disgusted with myself; they said I was stupid and I really thought that I was stupid. When you came to me, you lighted up my dark life, so that my heart and my soul were filled with light and I gained peace at heart, and knew that I was no worse than others; that I have no polish or style about me, but I am still a man, in heart and mind a man. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

For most people, what is so painful about reading is that you read something and you don't have anybody to share it with. In part what the book club opens up is that people can read a book and then have someone else to talk about it with. Then they see that a book can lead to the pleasure of conversation, that the solitary act of reading can actually be a part of the path to communion and community. ~ Bell Hooks

I am very fond of the modest manner of life of those solitary owners of remote villages, who in Little Russia are commonly called "old-fashioned," who are like tumbledown picturesque little houses, delightful in their simplicity and complete unlikeness to the new smooth buildings whose walls have not yet been discolored by the rain, whose roofs are not yet covered with green lichen, and whose porch does not display its bricks through the peeling stucco. ~ Nikolai Gogol

A solitary eyebrow inched up Perry's forehead. "Your lust for meat never ceases to amaze me."
"Don't judge," Dita said around a mouthful of bacon. ~ Staci Hart

The worth of a life is not determined by a single failure or a solitary success. ~ Kevin Kline

It's the same thing in a way, although writing a book is a very solitary thing. ~ Neil Jordan

How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself. ~ Virginia Woolf

The physical contact with people who struck and trampled and killed one another seemed far worse to him than a solitary death in the purity of the waters. ~ Milan Kundera