#Solitude

"Some people can't stand being alone. I love solitude and silence. But when I come out of it, I'm a regular talking machine. It's all or nothing for me."

"If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company."

"I want my own will, and I wantsimply to be with my will,as it goes toward action.And in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times,when something is coming near,I want to be with those who knowsecret things or else alone...I want to unfold.I don’t want to be folded anywhere,because where I am folded,there I am a lie."

"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."

"I’ll read my books and I’ll drink coffee and I’ll listen to music, and I’ll bolt the door."( A Boy in France : Saturday Evening Post CCXVII, March 31, 1945)"

"You read and write and sing and experience, thinking that one day these things will build the character you admire to live as. You love and lose and bleed best you can, to the extreme, hoping that one day the world will read you like the poem you want to be."

"I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man."

"I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything."

"Solitude is the house of peace."

"You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts."

"I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted."

"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."

"Closed in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is missing out."

"I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society."

"My imagination functions much better when I don't have to speak to people."

"Silent solitude makes true speech possible and personal. If I am not in touch with my own belovedness, then I cannot touch the sacredness of others. If I am estranged from myself, I am likewise a stranger to others."