solitude

At life's most significant moments, we are always alone

Sometimes the stage terrifies me,_ I confessed. __ut being here alone like this, it__ freeing.__olitude can be freeing,_ he said.

I place solitude in a frame on my desk and call it, the one I love.

Solitude became, for me, an interesting mosaic of broken pieces, a place where the neglected parts of myself get collected__or better and for worse, sometimes barely tolerated and sometimes arranged into lovely patterns.

If one sets aside timefor a business appointment, a trip to the hairdresser, a social engagement or a shopping expedition,that time is accepted as inviolable. But if one says: I cannot come because that is my hour to be alone,one is considered rude, egotistical or strange. What a commentary on our civilization, when beingalone is considered suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that onepractices it__ike a secret vice!

There is no greater isolation a man may experience than to be lonely in a crowd.

A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.

In a soulmate we find not company, but a completed solitude.

A man thinking or working will always be alone, let him be where he will.

For the first time after so many years I come back to cry aloud in the desert. Because this is the mission of the intellectual who is truly a prophet__o cry in the desert. The greatest of the prophets, Isaiah, made it notable, of course, when he spoke of himself as the voice of one "crying in the wilderness." Because the mission of the intellectual is to be the man who, from his desert, his basic solitude__nd man is only man amid his truth, only himself when he is alone__ries aloud to others and invites them to each into his own solitude.

All geniuses are peculiarly inclined to solitude, to which they are driven as much by their difference from others as the inner wealth with which they are quipped, since among humans, among diamonds, only the uncommonly great are suited as solitaires: the ordinary ones must be set in clusters to produce any effect.

Solitude is a condition best enjoyed in company.

Souls are like stars. There are thousands upon thousands around us yet we only see a few hundred. We know the names of only a handful of them even though we see them every day. They are just there, they are constant. Some change over the years but some stay exactly the same. We can see that some are in pairs and their whole world revolves around each other. Yet there are stars that exist in solitude. They are alone in the big black vastness of space and they have no hope of reaching others in their lifetime. They burn bright; maybe brighter than most but they are alone. They might have a few things around them but those are insignificant and invisible to the outsider. Sometimes when two stars get closer to each other, they affect the other's course, they become brighter for each other but as time passes they get further and further from one another until they blend into the rest, they become strangers again. But the affect remains and their future will never be the same from then on.

Solitude is a virtue for us, since it is a sublime inclination and impulse to cleanliness which shows that contact between people, __ociety_, inevitably makes things unclean. Somewhere, sometime, every community makes people___ase.

I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough.

Only a few have learned to savor the significance of solitude. Those who can glory in being alone on occasion are the saint or poet or explorer.

In a culture in which interpersonal relationships are generally considered to provide the answer to every form of distress, it is sometimes difficult to persuade well-meaning helpers that solitude can be as therapeutic as emotional support.

Still, how I nearly felt. In the midst of all that looking.