Solitude Quotes
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Kerouac's books portray a hero and narrator free and easy, confident, sure of his rebellion against the American system. In reality, Jack was torn between Catholicism, Buddhism, and his own demon-driven pursuit of kicks, between spirit and flesh, between mom's house and the Beat coffeehouse, patriotism and subversion, men and women, society and solitude, carousing and meditation, sacred and profane, secular and divine. It's a miracle he survived as long as he did.
Gerald Nicosia
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I usually describe my father as a man given to impenetrable solitude. If I turn the phrase I can apply it to Johnny. Impenetrable happiness. For a long time I couldn't enter his life because his happiness, or appearance of happiness - his unending smiles - locked the door. An ingenious strategy, to surround the thorns with a castle.
Elizabeth Hay
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Our secret thoughts are rarely heard except in secret. No man knows what conscience is until he understands what solitude can teach him concerning it.
Joseph Cook
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Nothing is more dangerous than solitude.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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It is useless to advise solitude for everyone; one must be strong enough to endure it and to work alone.
Paul Gauguin
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Ours is a long marriage, and we have found solitude together.
Carolyn Heilbrun
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What's agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to somebody, that solitude is a mistake. The inner voice doesn't care about who you find. It just keeps pestering you, tormenting you.
Charles Baxter
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Marriage I think For women Is the best of opiates. It kills the thoughts That think about the thoughts, It is the best of opiates. So said Maria. But too long in solitude she'd dwelt, And too long her thoughts had felt Their strength. So when the man drew near, Out popped her thoughts and covered him with fear. Poor Maria! Better that she had kept her thoughts on a chain, For now she's alone again and all in pain; She sighs for the man that went and the thoughts that stay To trouble her dreams by night and her dreams by day.
Stevie Smith
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Leisure, the highest happiness on earth, is seldom enjoyed with perfect satisfaction, except in solitude.
George Zimmerman
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For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go.
Rebecca Solnit
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It's hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check.
Russell Banks
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In the utmost solitudes of nature, the existence of hell seems to me as legibly declared by a thousand spiritual utterances as that of heaven.
John Ruskin