Solitary Quotes

Music written by teams makes the authorship of a piece indistinct. Could it be that when hearing a song written by a team, a listener can sense that they aren't hearing an expression of a solitary individual's pain or joy, but that of a virtual conjoined person? Can we tell that an individual singer might actually represent a collective, that he might have multiple identities? Does that make the sentiments expressed more poetically universal? Dan eliminating some portion of the authorial voice make a piece of music more accessible and the singer more empathetic? ~ David Byrne

Runners exalt the marathon as a public test of private will, when months or years of solitary training, early mornings, lost weekends, rain and pain mature into triumph or surrender. That's one reason the race-day crowds matter, the friends who come to cheer and stomp and flap their signs and push the runners on. ~ Nancy Gibbs

You don't believe that your friend could ever do anything great. You despise yourself in secret, even – no, especially – when you stand on your dignity; and since you despise yourself, you are unable to respect your friend. You can't bring yourself to believe that anyone you have sat at table with, or shared a house with, is capable of great achievement. That is why all great men have been solitary. It is hard to think in your company, little man. One can only think 'about' you, or 'for your benefit', not 'with' you, for you stifle all big, generous ideas. ~ Wilhelm Reich

Freedom isn't worth a single solitary shit if it isn't shared. ~ Alix E. Harrow

She wonders sometimes if it's a sort of flaw or lack in her - the inability to lose herself in someone else ... she's never quite understood how people could trade in quiet spaces and solitary gardens and courtyards, thoughtful walks and the delicious rhythms of work, for the fearful tumult of falling in love. ~ Diana Abu-Jaber

Writing is such a solitary thing, so it's nice, when I'm discouraged, to see people still have such faith in fiction. ~ Robert Boswell

In the silence, while awaiting the distant footsteps of death he heard someone weeping! O God, was that you? ~ Preeth Nambiar

When one speaks of solitaries, one always takes too much for granted. One supposes that people know what one is talking about. No, they do not. They have never seen a solitary, they have simply hated him without knowing him. They have been his neighbors who used him up, and the voices in the next room that tempted him. They have incited things against him, so that they made a great noise and drowned him out. Children were in league against him, when he was tender and a child, and with every growth he grew up against the grown-ups. They tracked him to his hiding place, like a beast to be hunted, and his long youth had no closed season. And when he refused to be worn out and got away, they cried out upon that which emanated from him, and called it ugly and cast suspicion upon it. And when he would not listen, they became more distinct and ate away his food and breathed out his air and spat into his poverty so that it became repugnant to him. They brought down disrepute upon him as upon an infectious person and cast stones at him to make him go away more quickly. And they were right in their ancient instinct: for he was indeed their foe.

But then, when he did not raise his eyes, they began to reflect. They suspected that with all this they had done what he wanted; that they had fortified him in his solitude and helped him to separate himself from them for ever. And now they changed about and, resorting to the final, the extreme, used that other resistance: fame. And a ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

These groups followed some solitary passer-by, hurrying his steps; one after another the doors were closed, one after ~ Alexandre Dumas

I do not drink from this jug every day. But sometimes at night when the wind blows and I am alone and feeling very solitary, it is my only friend and comfort. Right, Pancho? ~ Rick Skwiot

There are in this world human beings in solitary places who have answered the Lord's call to make of their lives a little flame, always bright, always attentive to His Presence. ~ Conrad De Meester

Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places. ~ Henry Beston

The famous soft watches are nothing else than the tender, extravagant, solitary, paranoic-critical camembert oftime and space. ~ Salvador Dali

Are there things about yourself which you have never told anyone? Way back upon the creaky floors of your childhood, in your solitude, the shadows of your private mind, the things you've done and said and thought that compound and contain you: shameful things, sexual things, often solitary acts, but sometimes not, sometimes agonizing stabs of cruelty you've inflicted on people you love, or the moments where reality itself seemed to tear as they looked into your eyes and told you 'you are nothing'. And for a moment you stand there adjusting to the pain, the pain that someone could say that to you, and what that must mean about who you are. ~ Russell Brand

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

I am afraid I interrupt your solitary ramble, my dear sister,' said he, as he joined her.
'You certainly do,' she replied with a smile; 'but it does not follow that the interruption must be unwelcome. ~ Jane Austen

He did not feel as if he were inside a Pillar of Darkness in the middle of Yorkshire; he felt more as if the rest of the world had fallen away and he and Strange were left alone upon a solitary island or promontory. The idea distressed him a great deal less than one might have supposed. He had never much cared for the world and he bore its loss philosophically. ~ Susanna Clarke

But here in the open air, this naked, solitary fiddle began a rhythm that played havoc with time, making patterns that set you to moving and told your heart it had been beating the wrong way all your misspent life. ~ Kristen D. Randle

I always thought I'd make a good parent, but I was single and led a solitary life for many, many years. Then I met David, and he had experience with kids and wanted to have a family, too. ~ Neil Patrick Harris

In the case of the solitary, his seclusion, even when it is absolute and ends only with life itself, has often as its primary cause a disordered love of the crowd, which so far overruled every other feeling that, not being able to win, when he goes out, the admiration of his hall-porter, of the passers-by, of the cabman whom he hails, he prefers not to be seen by them at all, and with that object abandons every activity that would oblige him to go out of doors. ~ Marcel Proust

It was Jamie's fear that he would lose her - that she would go, swing out into a dark and solitary space without him, unless he could somehow bind her to him, keep her with him. But, Christ, what a risk to take - with a woman so shocked and brutalized, how could he risk it? ~ Diana Gabaldon

You make me burn with life, and yearn to set aside my cold and distant, solitary ways. ~ Stacy Reid

Various stars. Various kings.
Various sunsets, signs, cursory insights.
Many minute attentions, many knowledgeable watchers,
Much cold, much overbearing darkness.

Various long midwinter Glooms.
Various Solitary and Terrible Stars.
Many Frosty Nights, many previously Unseen Sky-flowers.
Many people setting out (some of them kings) all clutching at stars.

...

Various people coming home (some of them kings). Various headlights.
Two or three children standing or sitting on the low wall.
Various winds, the Sea Wind, the sound-laden Winds of Evening
Blowing the stars toward them, bringing snow. ~ Alice Oswald

Forgetting: that, too, was the heart's slow way of healing, but it could only be done alone. Love and loss turns us into the most solitary of creatures, their mysteries can never entirely be shared. ~ Eric Gamalinda

To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary. ~ Walter Benjamin

In the other room Rateau was looking at the canvas, completely blank, in the center of which Jonas had merely written in very small letters a word that could be made out, but without any certainty as to whether it should be read solitary or solidary. ~ Albert Camus

They discovered only a small asteroid inhabited by a solitary old man who claimed repeatedly that nothing was true, though he was later discovered to be lying. ~ Douglas Adams

I would rather die than do a play - 10 years in solitary instead. ~ Alan Arkin

You wrong me. You wrong me, Mole. I loathe and despise this human trait of hounding smaller creatures to death, with large numbers opposed against one solitary animal. But, don't you see, it's the law of the wild. This poor fox is sacrificed today to the humans' cruelty. ~ Colin Dann

It's all still there in heart and soul. The walk, the hills, the sky, the solitary pain and pleasure-they will grow larger, sweeter, lovelier in the days and years to come. ~ Edward Abbey

There was something so unreal about her, sitting there. I couldn't even see her face; couldn't discern the outline of her figure. Even then she fascinated me. That she could seem so calm, so still. She would sit in one place for hours at a time, unmoving, and I always wondered where she was in her mind, what she might be thinking, how she could possibly exist in that solitary world. More than anything else, I wanted to hear her speak.
I was desperate to hear her voice. ~ Tahereh Mafi

I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past-can't be restored. ~ Mark Twain

Ants - the pious insect, Randolph called them: they fill me with oh so much admiration and ah oh so much gloom: such puritan spirit in their mindless march of Godly industry, but can so anti-individual a government admit the poetry of what is past understanding? Certainly the man who refused to carry his crumb would find assassins on his trail, and doom in every smile. As for me, I prefer the solitary mole: he is no rose dependent upon thorn and root, nor ant whose time of being is organized by the analterable herd: sightless, he goes his separate way, knowing truth and freedom are attitudes of the spirit. ~ Truman Capote

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

And yet on that bench at Jacobacci, I was glad I had left everyone else behind. Although this was a town with a main street and a railway station, and people with dogs and electric lights it was near enough to the end of the earth to give me the impression that I was a solitary explorer in a strange land. That illusion (which was an illusion in the South Pole and at the headwaters of the Nile) was enough of a satisfaction to me to make me want to go forward. ~ Paul Theroux

Tis not for golden eloquence I pray,
A godlike tongue to move a stony heart
Methinks it were full well to be apart
In solitary uplands far away,
Betwixt the blossoms of a rosy spray,
Dreaming upon the wonderful sweet face
Of Nature, in a wild and pathless place. ~ Frederick Tennyson

Consciousness is a born hermit. ~ George Santayana

It's never one solitary event that has changed my life. It's a bunch of little pieces that built and built up to where I am now. ~ Tinashe

The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also. ~ Seamus Heaney

I will say that my days are spent solitary and somewhat lost in thought, and every single time I inadvertently wear my shirt inside out in public, I bump into my sister-in-law at the grocery store. ~ Douglas Coupland

Who are you?' one soldier asked in wonder after listening to him play for hours. 'Are you man or angel?' He laughed quietly. 'I'm both,' he said. 'I'm man because I live in a cold solitary cell. I'm an angel because I live above my circumstances.' The ~ Odafe Atogun

'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

For Jascha, artistic creation was the most private activity in the world: the soul's sacred and solitary communion with itself. (p. 244) ~ Rebecca Goldstein

Septimus has been working too hard - that was all she could say to her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she thought. ~ Virginia Woolf

Do you know what sorrow the rain can inspire?

.

Do you know how gutters weep when it pours down?

.

Do you know how lost a solitary person feels in the rain? ~ Badr Shakir Sayyab

It turned out plant collecting was a solitary occupation. In the past Robert had enjoyed being alone, or so he thought. Actually he had rarely been alone for long: working in hotels, in stables, on ranches and farms, and as a miner, he had always been around others. Now, out in the woods or up in the hills or out on the flat central plain, he could go for days without speaking to anyone. His throat seemed to close up and he had to keep clearing it, singing songs aloud or reciting the Latin names of plants, just to check that he still had a voice. 'Araucaria imbricata. Sequoia sempervirens. Pinus lambertiana. Abies magnifica'. He was surprised at how much he missed people.. ~ Tracy Chevalier

The Solitary

As one who has sailed across an unknown sea,
among this rooted folk I am alone;
the full days on their tables are their own,
to me the distant is reality.

A new world reaches to my very eyes,
a place perhaps unpeopled as the moon;
their slightest feelings they must analyze,
and all their words have got the common tune.

The things I brought with me from far away,
compared with theirs, look strangely not the same:
in their great country they were living things,
but here they hold their breath, as if for shame. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

She was left to beg for mercy only to burn in torment again the next day. She was a weed struggling through cracks of concrete, unwanted, undesired, crushed and abused under trampling feet. She would never see the sun. She would never be free. She would always be a solitary candle in the dark, cold without a flame to warm it, forever peering out at the world through a laminated sheet of glass too thick to penetrate. When she died, if she was ever allowed, no one would ever know. She would pass a faded ghost of a girl abandoned by all. ~ Airicka Phoenix

Novel writing is solitary work. ~ Mohsin Hamid

It was I, no less solitary than he but having made the lesser use of the morning, who was to be pitied. ~ Teju Cole

Characters may lend the action a certain colouring, but it is what happens that comes first. To overlook this while watching a tragedy would be like treating a football game simply as the acts of a set of solitary individuals, or as chance for each of them to display 'personality'. The fact that some players behave as though this is precisely what football games are about should not distract us from this point. ~ Terry Eagleton

Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

Thrice happy he, who by some shady grove, Far from the clamorous world; doth live his own; Though solitary, who is not alone, But doth converse with that eternal love. ~ William Drummond

To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility; it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. Oh vast gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death! Why was the living banished thither companionless, conscious? Why, if there is no Devil; nay, unless the Devil is your God? ~ Thomas Carlyle

The novels of Daniel Defoe are fundamental to eighteenth-century ways of thinking. They range from the quasi-factual A Journal of the Plague Year, an almost journalistic (but fictional) account of London between 1664 and 1665 (when the author was a very young child), to Robinson Crusoe, one of the most enduring fables of Western culture. If the philosophy of the time asserted that life was, in Hobbes's words, 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short', novels showed ways of coping with 'brutish' reality (the plague; solitude on a desert island) and making the best of it. There was no questioning of authority as there had been throughout the Renaissance.
Instead, there was an interest in establishing and accepting authority, and in the ways of 'society' as a newly ordered whole.

Thus, Defoe's best-known heroine, Moll Flanders, can titillate her readers with her first-person narration of a dissolute life as thief, prostitute, and incestuous wife, all the time telling her story from the vantage point of one who has been accepted back into society and improved her behaviour. ~ Ronald Carter

When we can stand in the solitary presence of something magnificent, the obligation of sharing the experience evaporates, and we are free to truly be a part of it. ~ Josh Gates

What woman lives on her own with a goat and a low roof of drying herbs? What woman keeps company with the birds and the creatures that belonged to the dappled places? What woman finds contentment in such a solitary life, has no need of children or the comfort of a man? One who has been chosen to walk the boundaries. One who somehow has an understanding of the mysteries of the world and who sees in the clawing briars God's own handwriting. ~ Hannah Kent

Writing is such a solitary occupation that it takes a long time to build up a group of professional peers with whom you genuinely identify. ~ Sara Sheridan

Solitary people make the best travellers ~ Paul Theroux

The temple of Ceres should be in a solitary spot out of the city, to which the public are not necessarily led but for the purpose of sacrificing to her. ~ Vitruvius

I left Beijing because I wanted to be alone and to forge my own path, but I know now that no path is solitary, we all tread across other people's beginnings and ends. ~ Ma Jian

One day, putting my finger on a spot in the very middle of the then white heart of Africa, I declared that some day I would go there ... It is a fact that, about eighteen years afterwards, a wretched little stern-wheel steamboat I commanded lay moored to the bank of an African river.

Everything was dark under the stars. Every other white man on board was asleep. I was glad to be alone on deck, smoking the pipe of peace after an anxious day. The subdued thundering mutter of the Stanley Falls hung in the heavy night air of the last navigable reach of the Upper Congo ... Away in the middle of the stream, on a little island nestling all black in the foam of the broken water, a solitary little light glimmered feebly, and I said to myself with awe, 'This is the very spot of my boyish boast.'

A great melancholy descended on me. Yes, this was the very spot. But there was no shadowy friend to stand by my side in the night of the enormous wilderness, no great haunting memory, but only the ... distasteful knowledge of the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration. What an end to the idealised realities of a boy's daydreams!... Still, the fact remains that I have smoked a pipe of peace at midnight in the very heart of the African continent, and felt very lonely there. ~ Joseph Conrad

The walls around her heart were weak now, indeed. "I want to believe you. So much. But I know your nature is solitary. How can I be sure you won't tire of me and toss me aside like a Carcel lamp?"
"I would never toss aside a Carcel lamp. ~ Theresa Romain

The passage into mystery always refreshes. If, when we work, we can look once a day upon the face of mystery, then our labor satisfies. We are lightened when our gifts rise from pools we cannot fathom. Then we know they are not a solitary egotism and they are inexhaustible. ~ Lewis Hyde

All art is solitary and the studio is a torture area. ~ Alexander Liberman

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

We would follow Arthur to the very gates of Hell and beyond if he asked it. And that is the solitary truth. ~ Stephen R. Lawhead

Louisa asked these questions with a strong, wild, wandering interest peculiar to her; and interest gone astray like a banished creature, and hiding in solitary places. ~ Charles Dickens

Once more I realize that solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people (all naturally solitary people must feel this) precludes awareness of one's self, so after a while the self no longer knows that it exists. ~ May Sarton

All thoughtful men are solitary and original in themselves. ~ James Russell Lowell

In Udi's vocabulary, Jewish was equated with the ills of exile: rootless parasitic, superstitious. Yet here, in the Western Wall's solitary dignity, was beauty. In this world of stone, he felt softness; in this quarry of memory, peace. ~ Yossi Klein Halevi

They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late their happy seat,
Waved over by that flaming brand, the gate
With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms:
Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide;
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way. ~ John Milton

Virtue is not a solitary, uncomplicated thing. ~ Ann Leckie

I would be content with any job, however thankless, in any quarter, however remote, if I had the chance of making a corner of the desert blossom and a solitary place glad. ~ John Buchan

No one can become a new man except by entering the Church, and becoming a member of the body of Christ. It is impossible to become a new man as a solitary individual. The new man means more than the individual believer after he has been justified and sanctified. It means the Church, the Body of Christ, in fact it means Christ himself. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Yet after all there is nothing so deceptive as one's outward appearance. The reason of this is that as soon as childhood is past, we are always pretending to be what we are not
and thus, with constant practice from our youth up, we manage to make our physical frames complete disguises for our actual selves. It is really wise and clever of us
for hence each individual is so much flesh-wall through which neither friend nor enemy can spy. Every man is a solitary soul imprisoned in a self-made den
when he is quite alone he knows and frequently hates himself
sometimes he even gets afraid of the gaunt and murderous monster he keeps hidden behind his outwardly pleasant body-mask, and hastens to forget its frightful existence in drink and debauchery. ~ Marie Corelli

For Blitz, meanwhile, an almost tragic dilemma had begun. As time passed, he and Giuseppe understood each other better and better, conversing and playing together on the floor with immense amusement, and so he found himself madly in love also with Giuseppe, as well as Nino. But Nino was always out, and Giuseppe always at home: thus it was impossible for him to live constantly in the company of both his loves, as he would have wished. And in consequence, with either one, he was always tortured by regret: and if he was with one, the mere mention of the others name or a smell that recalled him was enough for his homesickness to stream behind him, like a banner against the wind. At times, while he was on sentry duty outside Ninos school, suddenly, as if at a message brought him by a cloud, he would begin to sniff the sky with a mournful whimper, recalling the incarcerated Giuseppe. For a few minutes, a dissension would rend him, drawing him in two opposite directions at the same time; but finally, having overcome his hesitation, he would dash toward the San Lorenzo house, his long nose cleaving the wind like a prow. But at his destination, unfortunately, he found the door barred; and all his cries, mortified by the muzzle, passionately calling for Giuseppe, were in vain; for Giuseppe, though hearing him and suffering in his solitary room, longing to let him in, was unable to do so. Then, resigning himself to his destiny of waiting outside doors, Blitz would stretch out there on t ~ Elsa Morante

New ideas, fragile as spring flowers, easily bruised by the tread of the multitude, may yet be cherished by the solitary wanderer. ~ Fred Hoyle

Only a man of genius can bare a solitary life. ~ Heather McGowan

I felt deeply in my heart both the sorrow of one that goes and the grief of one that remains, just as a solitary bird separated from his flock in dark clouds, and wrote in answer:
From this day forth, alas,
The dew-drops shall wash away
The letters on my hat
Saying 'A party of two'. ~ Matsuo Basho

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 walked on in silence, the solitary sound of his footsteps echoing in his head, as in a deserted street, at dawn. His solitude was so complete, beneath a lovely sky as mellow and serene as a good conscience, amid that busy throng, that he was amazed at his own existence; he must be somebody else's nightmare, and whoever it was would certainly awaken soon. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

To me, art is not a solitary delight. It is a means of stirring the greatest number of men by providing them with a privileged image of our common joys and woes. ~ Albert Camus

Perhaps it's easier: being alone. Building walls. A solitary life with no one to lose. No one to break your heart. ~ Shea Ernshaw

Should you happen to be possessed of a certain verbal acuity coupled with a relentless, hair-trigger humor and surface cheer spackling over a chronic melancholia and loneliness - a grotesquely caricatured version of your deepest self, which you trot out at the slightest provocation to endearing and glib comic effect, thus rendering you the kind of fellow who is beloved by all yet loved by none, all of it to distract, however fleetingly, from the cold and dead-faced truth that with each passing year you face the unavoidable certainty of a solitary future in which you will perish one day while vainly attempting the Heimlich maneuver on yourself over the back of a kitchen chair - then this confirmation that you have triumphed again and managed to gull yet another mark, except this time it was the one person you'd hoped might be immune to your ever-creakier, puddle-shallow, sideshow-barker variation on adorable, even though you'd been launching this campaign weekly with a single-minded concentration from day one - well, it conjures up feelings that are best described as mixed, to say the least. ~ David Rakoff

I think we need to consider a radical rewrite of any form of patriotism that serves the individual at the expense of the community, as that is nothing more than patriotism to one's own small and solitary cause. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

They moved silently in each other's orbits, solitary planets in a lonely galaxy. ~ Amy Harmon

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

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

O you singer, solitary, singing by yourself - projecting me;
O solitary me, listening - nevermore shall I cease perpetuating you;
Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations,
Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me,
Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what there, in the night,
By the sea, under the yellow and sagging moon,
The messenger there arous'd - the fire, the sweet hell within,
The unknown want, the destiny of me. ~ Walt Whitman

I think there are a lot of really positive aspects to social media for novelists. Even though our work is pretty solitary, through Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook and Instagram and blogging in general, we're better able to connect directly with readers. ~ Holly Black

All rebel thought, as we
have seen, is expressed either in rhetoric or in a closed universe. The rhetoric of ramparts in Lucretius, the
convents and isolated castles of Sade, the island or the lonely rock of the romantics, the solitary heights of
Nietzsche, the primeval seas of Lautreamont, the parapets of Rimbaud, the terrifying castles of the
surrealists, which spring up in a storm of flowers, the prison, the nation behind barbed wire, the
concentration camps, the empire of free slaves, all illustrate, after their own fashion, the same need for
coherence and unity. In these sealed worlds, man can reign and have knowledge at last. ~ Albert Camus

It is possible to be solitary in one's mind while living in a crowd, and it is possible for one who is solitary to live in the crowd of his own thoughts. ~ Syncletica Of Alexandria

Her eyes weren't blinking. There was still something almost dead in them, something very far away. She seemed to be seeing all the way through to the back of him and beyond, out into the cold space of the future in which they would both soon be dead, out into the nothingness that Lalitha and his mother and his father had already passed into, and yet she was looking straight into his eyes, and he could feel her getting warmer by the minute. And so he stopped looking at her eyes and started looking into them, returning their look before it was too late, before this connection between life and what came after life was lost, and let her see all the vileness inside him, all the hatreds of two thousand solitary nights, while the two of them were still with the void in which the sum of everything they'd ever said or done, every pain they'd inflicted, every joy they'd shared, would weigh less than the smallest feather on the wind. ~ Jonathan Franzen

How much more respectable is the life of the solitary pioneer or settler in these, or any woods - having real difficulties, not of his own creation, drawing his subsistence directly from nature - than that of the helpless multitudes in the towns who depend on gratifying the extremely artificial wants of society and are thrown out of employment by hard times! ~ Henry David Thoreau

In an old family album
Ever again you return, Melancholy,
O meekness of the solitary soul.
A golden day glows and expires.
Humbly the patient man surrenders to pain
Ringing with melodious sound and soft madness.
Look! There's the twilight.
Night returns once more and a mortal thing laments
And another suffers in sympathy.
Shuddering under autumn stars
Yearly the head is bowed deeper.
-Georg Trakl (1887-1914) ~ Georg Trakl

You want to be there for me but an anxiety attack is a solitary activity. ~ R. YS Perez

A lot of people assume that creating software is purely a solitary activity where you sit in an office with the door closed all day and write lots of code. ~ Bill Gates

We were now arrived at the close of our solitary journeyings along the St. Joseph's trail. ~ Francis Parkman

Collaboration is a nice change of pace from the often solitary nature of the writer's craft. ~ Edward M. Lerner