solitude

Living alone,' November whispered, 'is a skill, like running long distance or programming old computers. You have to know parameters, protocols. You have to learn them so well that they become like a language: to have music always so that the silence doesn't overwhelm you, to perform your work exquisitely well so that your time is filled. You have to allow yourself to open up until you are the exact size of the place you live, no more or else you get restless. No less, or else you drown. There are rules; there are ways of being and not being.

The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.

Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude, and the society of thyself.

When I returned to partial life my face was wet with tears. How long that state of insensibility had lasted I cannot say. I had no means now of taking account of time. Never was solitude equal to this, never had any living being been so utterly forsaken.

We are the puzzle pieces who seldom fit with other puzzle pieces. We inhabit singledom as our natural resting state...Secretly, we are romantics, romantics of the highest order. We want a miracle. Out of millions we have to find the one who will understand. For the quirkyalone, there is no patience for dating just for the sake of not being alone. On a fine but by no means transcendent date, we dream of going home to watch television. We would prfer to be alone with our own thoughts than with a less than perfect fit...but when the quirkyalone collides with another, ooh la la. The earth quakes.

We need solitude, because when we're alone, we're free from obligations, we don't need to put on a show, and we can hear our own thoughts.

Solitude is a chosen separation for refining your soul. Isolation is what you crave when you neglect the first.

Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.

Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.

The moon in all her immaculate purity hung in the sky, laughing at this world of dust. She congratulated me for my carefully considered maneuvers and invited me to share in her eternal solitude.

She frowned at him. 'You are in love with solitude.''Is there a better cure for the world than solitude?

My heart almost died within me; miserable longings strained its chords. How long were the September days! How silent, how lifeless!

All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit quiet in a room alone.

We are familiar with people who seek out solitude: penitents, failures, saints, or prophets. They retreat to deserts, preferably, where they live on locusts and honey. Others, however, live in caves or cells on remote islands; some-more spectacularly-squat in cages mounted high atop poles swaying in the breeze. They do this to be nearer God. Their solitude is a self-moritification by which they do penance. They act in the belief that they are living a life pleasing to God. Or they wait months, years, for their solitude to be broken by some divine message that they hope then speedily to broadcast among mankind.Grenouille's case was nothing of the sort. There was not the least notion of God in his head. He was not doing penance or wating for some supernatural inspiration. He had withdrawn solely for his own pleasure, only to be near to himself. No longer distracted by anything external, he basked in his own existence and found it splendid. He lay in his stony crypt like his own corpse, hardly breathing, his heart hardly beating-and yet lived as intensively and dissolutely as ever a rake lived in the wide world outside.

He had escaped the abhorrent taint! He was truly completely alone! He was the only human being in the world!

I like it where it gets dark at night, and if you want noise, you have to make it yourself.

There was something lacking _ in him, he thought, not in the place. He was not up to it. He was not strong enough to take what was so generously offered. He felt himself dry and arid, like a desert plant, in this beautiful oasis. Life on Anarres had sealed him, closed off his soul; the waters of life welled all around him, and yet he could not drink.

To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.