Solitary Quotes - Page 27

• Theater going is a communal act, movie going a solitary one.

  Robert Brustein

  Theatre, Theater

  47 Copy quote

• And now I was lonelier, I supposed, than anyone else in the world. Even Defoe's creation, Robinson Crusoe, the prototype of the ideal solitary, could hope to meet another human being. Crusoe cheered himself by thinking that such a thing could happen any day, and it kept him going. But if any of the people now around me came near I would need to run for it and hide in mortal terror. I had to be alone, entirely alone, if I wanted to live.

  Wladyslaw Szpilman

  Running, Thinking, People

  Wladyslaw Szpilman (2011). “The Pianist”, p.145, Hachette UK

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• To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.

  John Ruskin

  Book, Knowledge And Power, Sight

  William Makepeace Thackeray, John Henry Newman, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, Walter Bagehot (1910). “Essays, English and American: With Introductions and Notes”

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• Neurotic identity crises come when our defense mechanisms have been too successful and we're encapsulated in the fortress we have constructed with nothing to refresh us in our solitary confinement. So we play the old movies with their stale fears and their unrealistic hopes until we become bored enough to risk disarmament and engagement.

  Sam Keen

  Successful, Play, Bored

  Sam Keen (1980). “What to do when you're bored and blue”

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• I see Edward Snowden as someone who has chosen, at best, exile from the country he loves-with a serious risk of his assassination by agents of his government or life in prison (in solitary confinement)-to awaken us to the danger of our loss of democracy to a total-surveilla nce state

  Daniel Ellsberg

  Country, Loss, Government

  26 Copy quote

• Repentance and faith are distasteful to the unregenerate; they would sooner repeat a thousand formal prayers than shed a solitary tear of true repentance.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Prayer, Tears, Repentance

  Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1963). “Sermons on Sin, Salvation, and Service”

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• Art is exalted above religion and race. Not a single solitary soul these days believes in the religions of the Assyrians, the Egyptians and the Greeks... Only their art, whenever it was beautiful, stands proud and exalted, rising above all time.

  Emil Nolde

  Beautiful, Art, Believe

  33 Copy quote

• Hold your hands out over the earth as over a flame. To all who love her, who open to her the doors of their veins, she gives of her strength, sustaining them with her own measureless tremor of dark life. Touch the earth, love the earth, honor the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places. For the gifts of life are the earth's and they are given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and dawn seen over ocean from the beach.

  Henry Beston

  Song, Beach, Ocean

  Henry Beston, Elizabeth Jane Coatsworth (2001). “The Best of Beston: A Selection from the Natural World of Henry Beston from Cape Cod to the St. Lawrence”, p.38, David R. Godine Publisher

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• I come to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Nature, Home, Woodland Creatures

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “Thoreau's Book of Quotations”, p.114, Courier Corporation

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• The true solitary ... will feel that he is himself only when he is alone; when he is in company he will feel that he perjures himself, prostitutes himself to the exactions of others; he will feel that time spent in company is time lost; he will be conscious only of his impatience to get back to his true life.

  Vita Sackville-West

  True Life, Solitude, Impatience

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• The misanthrope, as an essentially solitary man, is not a man at all: he must be a beast or a god.

  Aristotle

  Men, Misanthrope, Beast

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• 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

  Book, Reading, People

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• I think the act of reading imbues the reader with a sensitivity toward the outside world that people who don't read can sometimes lack. I know it seems like a contradiction in terms; after all reading is such a solitary, internalizing act that it appears to represent a disengagement from day-to-day life. But reading, and particularly the reading of fiction, encourages us to view the world in new and challenging ways...It allows us to inhabit the consciousness of another which is a precursor to empathy, and empathy is, for me, one of the marks of a decent human being.

  John Connolly

  Reading, Thinking, Views

  John Connolly (2006). “The Book of Lost Things: A Novel”, p.345, Simon and Schuster

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• The small things of life were often so much bigger than the great things . . . the trivial pleasure like cooking, one's home, little poems especially sad ones, solitary walks, funny things seen and overheard.

  Barbara Pym

  Home, Funny Things, Cooking

  Barbara Pym (1982). “Less than angels”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• Have you ever been lonely? No, neither have I. Solitary, yes. Alone, certainly. But lonely means minding about being on your own. I've never minded about it.

  Sebastian Faulks

  Lonely, Mean

  FaceBook post by Sebastian Faulks from Oct 23, 2016

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• Writing fiction is a solitary occupation but not really a lonely one. The writer's head is mobbed with characters, images and language, making the creative process something like eavesdropping at a party for which you've had the fun of drawing up the guest list. Loneliness usually doesn't set in until the work is finished, and all the partygoers and their imagined universe have disappeared.

  Hilma Wolitzer

  Lonely, Fun, Loneliness

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• 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

  Faces, Looks, Mystery

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• Precedents deliberately established by wise men are entitled to great weight. They are evidence of truth, but only evidence...But a solitary precedent...which has never been reexamined, cannot be conclusive.

  Henry Clay

  Wise, Men, Weight

  Speech, Senate, February 18, 1835.

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• The work saved me. I clung to it like flotsam in a boiling sea. It was the only solitary sport that I ever played, or was any good at. It felt natural to sit at my computer and type and type some more. For entire minutes, while writing, I could forget the godawful thing that had happened. I could forget that nothing really mattered anymore. Perhaps, if I set my sights low, I could care again about some small thing. I would type a word. One word. Then another. I started to care about the words, then entire sentences.

  Rheta Grimsley Johnson

  Sports, Writing, Sea

  Rheta Grimsley Johnson (2010). “Enchanted Evening Barbie and the Second Coming: A Memoir”, p.190, NewSouth Books

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• The artist after all is a solitary being.

  Virginia Woolf

  Artist

  Virginia Woolf (1967). “Collected essays”

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• The BIBLE - banned, burned, beloved.  More widely read, more frequently attacked than any other book in history. Generations of intellectuals have attempted to discredit it,  dictators of every age have outlawed it and executed those who read it.  Yet soldiers carry it into battle believing it more powerful than their weapons.  Fragments of it smuggled into solitary prison cells have transformed ruthless killers into gentle saints

  Charles Colson

  Powerful, Believe, Book

  Charles Colson (1997). “Loving God”, p.55, Zondervan

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• 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

  Sky, Silence, Solitude

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• Some minds seem almost to create themselves, springing up under every disadvantage and working their solitary but irresistible way through a thousand obstacles.

  Washington Irving

  Inspirational, Motivational, Wisdom

  Washington Irving (2015). “The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. – The Complete Collection: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle, The Voyage, Roscoe, A Royal Poet, A Sunday in London and many more (Illustrated)”, p.23, e-artnow

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• 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

  Coffee, Sea, Knives

  Virginia Woolf (2005). “The Waves”, p.253, Collector's Library

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• 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

  Love, Sea, Valleys

  Henry Beston (1956). “The Outermost House”

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