Solitary Quotes - Page 18

• 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. The ordinary world of work is closed to him - and that if he's lucky!

  Peter Straub

  Writing, Ordinary World, Lucky

  10 Copy quote

• Françoise could not help taking a surreptitious glance at Xavière: she gave a start of amazement. Xavière was no longer watching, her head was lowered. Françoise barely suppressed a scream. The girl was pressing the lighted end against her skin, a bitter smile curling her lips. It was an intimate, solitary smile, like that of a half-wit; the voluptuous, tortured smile of a woman possessed of some secret pleasure.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Girl, Secret, Skins

  4 Copy quote

• But should we continue to linger amid a scene so featureless and wild, or venture adown some yawning opening into the abyss beneath, where all is fiery and yet dark,-a solitary hell, without suffering or sin,-we would do well to commit ourselves to the guidance of a living poet of the true faculty,-Thomas Aird and see with his eyes.

  Hugh Miller

  Eye, Dark, Yawning

  Hugh Miller, Harriet Myrtle (1859). “Popular Geology: A Series of Lectures Read Before the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh, with Descriptive Sketches from a Geologist's Portfolio”, p.298

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• What can I do now? What am I to become? How can I live in this world I'm condemned to but can't endure? They couldn't stand it either, so they made a world of their own. Well, they have each other's company, and they are heroes, whereas I'm quite alone, and have none of the qualities essential to heroism - the spirit, the toughness, the dedication. I'm back where I was as a child, solitary, helpless, unwanted, frightened.

  Anna Kavan

  Children, Hero, Dedication

  8 Copy quote

• They do not signify, these landscapes of the mind, with their shocking instants of awareness. They merely resonate, like the chemistry of lovers, throughout our solitary lives

  Jim Perrin

  Climbing, Solitary Life, Mind

  4 Copy quote

• In the mythic tradition, the Mountain is the bond between Earth and Sky. Its solitary summit reaches the sphere of eternity, and its base spreads out in manifold foothills into the world of mortals. It is the way by which man can raise himself to the divine and by which the divine can reveal itself to man.

  Rene Daumal

  Men, Sky, Mountain

  15 Copy quote

• Children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way-and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Children, Thinking, Sad And Happy

  Rainer Maria Rilke (2001). “Letters to a Young Poet”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

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

  Francis Parkman

  Trails, Walking

  Francis Parkman (2016). “The Oregon Trail: Juvenile History - - American”, p.38, VM eBooks

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Wall, Taken, Eye

  12 Copy quote

• I’m not a true vegan. I dabble in sustainable fish and dawdle in the consumption of eggs. Steak doesn’t speak to me, and tempeh is so-so. I’ll savor a solitary apricot that’s been kissed by
  my baby.

  Anthony Kiedis

  Baby, Eggs, Apricots

  8 Copy quote

• A bottle of wine begs to be shared; I have never met a miserly wine lover. The social emotions it generates are equidistant from the philatelist's solitary gloating and the football fan's gregarious hysteria.

  Clifton Fadiman

  Football, Wine, Hysteria

  Clifton Fadiman, Sam Jay Aaron, Darlene Geis (1977). “Wine Buyers Guide”, Harry N Abrams Incorporated

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion.

  Paul Theroux

  Travel, Lines, Vanishing

  Paul Theroux (2011). “To the Ends of the Earth: The Selected Travels of Paul Theroux”, p.83, Ivy Books

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• The more I see of life the more I perceive that only through solitary communion with nature can one gain an idea of its richness and meaning.

  Cyril Connolly

  Nature, Ideas, Gains

  4 Copy quote

• A spiritual retreat is medicine for soul starvation. Through silence, solitary practice, and simple living, we begin to fill the empty reservoir. This lifts the veils, dissolves the masks, and creates space within for the feelings of forgiveness, compassion, and loving kindness that are so often blocked.

  David A. Cooper

  Spiritual, Kindness, Simple

  4 Copy quote

• A solitary traveler can sleep from state to state, from day to night, from day to day, in the long womb of its controlled interior. It is the cradle that never stops rocking after the lullaby is over. It is the biggest sleeping tablet in the world, and no one need ever swallow the pill, for it swallows them.

  Lisa St. Aubin de Terán

  Travel, Sleep, Night

  7 Copy quote

• Writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy and freedom.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Loneliness, Writing, Hazards

  "A Widow’s Story" by Joyce Carol Oates, www.newyorker.com. December 13, 2010.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• My first name - I have no middle name - was chosen by my father, as he told me, on that solitary walk in the forested hills. He selected it from a verse of the seventh chapter of Isaiah; there was no Immanuel among our ancestors known to him.

  Immanuel Velikovsky

  Father, Names, Firsts

  8 Copy quote

• The mission of men there seems to be, like so many busy demons, to drive the forest all out of the country, from every solitary beaver swamp and mountain-side, as soon as possible.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Country, Men, Mountain

  Henry David Thoreau (2009). “The Maine Woods”, p.5, Cosimo, Inc.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• In order to get one of the greatest inventions of the modern age, in other words, we thought we needed the solitary genius. But if Alexander Graham Bell had fallen into the Grand River and drowned that day back in Brantford, the world would still have had the telephone, the only difference being that the telephone company would have been nicknamed Ma Gray, not Ma Bell.

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Order, Ideas, Rivers

  "In the Air" by Malcolm Gladwell, www.newyorker.com. May 12, 2008.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• In the firm expectation that when London shall be a habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul and Westminster Abbey shall stand shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh, when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, some Transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges and their historians.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Bridges, Broken, Expectations

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (2008). “The Narrative Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley”, p.136, Wildside Press LLC

  52 Copy quote

  Show source

• By self-interest, Man has become gregarious, but in instinct he has remained to a great extent solitary; hence the need of religion and morality to reinforce self-interest.

  Bertrand Russell

  Men, Self, Needs

  Bertrand Russell (2008). “History of Western Philosophy”, p.681, Simon and Schuster

  52 Copy quote

  Show source

• Writers may be solitary but they also tend to flock together: they like being solitary together.

  Neil Gaiman

  Solitude, Together, May

  Interview with Linda L. Richards, januarymagazine.com. August 2001.

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Solitude without togetherness deteriorates into loneliness. One needs strong roots in togetherness to be solitary rather than lonely when one is alone.

  David Steindl-Rast

  Lonely, Strong, Loneliness

  David Steindl-Rast (1983). “A listening heart: the art of contemplative living”, Crossroad Pub Co

  31 Copy quote

  Show source

• The artist's task is to become a successful eccentric, a strange but wise duck able to venture out of solitary confinement and mingle among society.

  Eric Maisel

  Wise, Successful, Artist

  Eric Maisel (1996). “Affirmations for Artists”, Tarcher

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Maybe there is a single spot, just one, where living organisms are holed up. Maybe so, but if so this would be the strangest thing of all, absolutely incomprehensible. For we are not familiar with this kind of living. We do not have solitary, isolated creatures. It is beyond our imagination to conceive of a single form of life that exists alone and independent, unattached to other forms.

  Lewis Thomas

  Independent, Imagination, Would Be

  "The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher" by Lewis Thomas, (p. 13), 1979.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source