solitude

The soul that knows suffering, understand the grace of solitude.

And suddenly solitude fell across his heart like a dusty reflection. He closed his eyes. The dark doors within him opened and he entered. The next performance in the theater of Grenouille's soul was beginning.

Sometimes callers from a distance invade my solitude, and it is on these occasions that I realize how absolutely alone each individual is, and how far away from his neighbour; and while they talk (generally about babies, past, present, and to come), I fall to wondering at the vast and impassable distance that separates one's own soul from the soul of the person sitting in the next chair.

How can you hear your soul if everyone is talking?

The sweetness of adversity: we develop the sanity of solitude.

In the moment of quietness, my strength re-energized

If man will understand the real essence of staying in the solitude with his Maker alone, he will never spend all his time with the crowd always

The question haunted me, and the real answer came, as answers often do, not in the canyon but at an unlikely time and in an unexpected place, flying over the canyon at thirty thousand feet on my way to be a grandmother. My mind on other things, intending only to glance out, the exquisite smallness and delicacy of the river took me completely by surprise. In the hazy light of early morning, the canyon lay shrouded, the river flecked with glints of silver, reduced to a thin line of memory, blurred by a sudden realization that clouded my vision. The astonishing sense of connection with that river and canyon caught me completely unaware, and in a breath I understood the intense, protective loyalty so many people feel for the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. It has to do with truth and beauty and love of this earth, the artifacts of a lifetime and the descant of a canyon wren at dawn.

I prefer the saddle to the streetcar and star-sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail leading into the unknown to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bread by cities... it is enough that I am surrounded by beauty.

The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

We ask no sympathy from others in the anxiety and agony of a __roken friendship or shattered love. When death sunders our nearest_ ties, alone we sit in the shadow of our affliction. Alike mid the greatest __riumphs and darkest tragedies of life we walk alone. On the divine __eights of human attainments, eulogized and worshiped as a hero or __aint, we stand alone. In ignorance, poverty, and vice, as a pauper or __riminal, alone we starve or steal; alone we suffer the sneers and rebuffs__f our fellows; alone we are hunted and hounded through dark courts__nd alleys, in by-ways and highways; alone we stand in the judgment_ seat; alone in the prison cell we lament our crimes and misfortunes; alone we expiate them on the gallows. In hours like these we realize the __wful solitude of individual life, its pains, its penalties, its responsibilities; hours in which the youngest and most helpless are thrown on their own resources for guidance and consolation. Seeing then that life must ever be a march and a battle, that each soldier must be equipped for his own protection, it is the height of cruelty to rob the individual of a single natural right.

We ask no sympathy from others in the anxiety and agony of a __roken friendship or shattered love. When death sunders our nearest_ ties, alone we sit in the shadow of our affliction. Alike mid the greatest __riumphs and darkest tragedies of life we walk alone. On the divine __eights of human attainments, eulogized and worshiped as a hero or __aint, we stand alone. In ignorance, poverty, and vice, as a pauper or__riminal, alone we starve or steal; alone we suffer the sneers and rebuffs__f our fellows; alone we are hunted and hounded through dark courts__nd alleys, in by-ways and highways; alone we stand in the judgment__eat; alone in the prison cell we lament our crimes and misfortunes; alone we expiate them on the gallows. In hours like these we realize the__wful solitude of individual life, its pains, its penalties, its responsibilities; hours in which the youngest and most helpless are thrown on their own resources for guidance and consolation. Seeing then that life must ever be a march and a battle, that each soldier must be equipped for his own protection, it is the height of cruelty to rob the individual of a single natural right.

Solitude is where I place my chaos to rest and awaken my inner peace.

All I have is me, myself and I and we are all getting really tired of each other.

Company, you see - company is - is - it's a very different thing from solitude - an't it?

space and silence are necessary because it is only when the mind is alone, uninfluenced, untrained, not held by infinite varieties of experience, that it can come upon something totally new.

He loved Shevek, but he could not show him what freedom is, that recognition of each person's solitude which alone transcends it.