Quotes about Solitude

I aint drinkin after no mule, said the hermit. Have you not got no old bucket nor nothin?

He heard the fireman clank shut the door and leave and he poured the coffee and stirred in milk from a can and sipped and blew and read of wildness and violence across the cup's rim. As it was then, is now and ever shall.

The old man lay dim and bleared in his brass bed. Suttree leaned back in the chair and pushed at his eyes with the back of his hand. The day had grown dusk, the rain eased. Pigeons flapped up overhead and preened and crooned. The keeper of this brief vigil said that he'd guessed something of the workings in the wings, the ropes and sand-bags and the houselight toggles. Heard dimly a shuffling and coughing beyond the painted drop of the world.

That's the place to get to—nowhere. One wants to wander away from the world's somewheres, into our own nowhere.

He had reached the point where all he wanted on earth was to be alone.

The army leaves me time to think, and saves me from the battle of life.

I'd rather be at Wragby, where I can go about and be still, and not stare at anything or do any performing of any sort. This tourist performance of enjoying oneself is too hopelessly humiliating: it's such a failure.

Nobody knocks here, and the unexpected sounds ominous.

In the end, the soul is alone brooding on the face of the uncreated flux, as a bird on a dark sea...

He had no future in the world: of that he was conscious. He had no future in this life. Even if he lived on, it would only be a kind of enduring. But he felt the after-life belonged to him. Future in the world he could not give her. Life in the world he had not to offer her. Better go on alone. Surely better go on alone.

Shake out carols! Solitary here, the night's carols! Carols of lonesome love! death's carols! Carols under that lagging, yellow, waning moon! O under that moon where she droops almost down into the sea! O reckless despairing carols.

In the swamp, in secluded recesses, A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song. Solitary, the thrush, The hermit, withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements, Sings by himself a song.