“Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn’t now, I couldn’t give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached.”— Ralph Ellison, amazon.com
“If you cannot find peace within yourself, you will never find it anywhere else.”— Marvin Gaye, amazon.com
“Solitude and depression are like swimming and drowning. In school many years ago, I learned that flowers sometimes unfold inside themselves.”— Simon Van Booy, amazon.com
“Remember the quiet wonders. The world has more need of them than it has for warriors.”— Charles de Lint, amazon.com
“I’m very shy really. I spend a lot of time in my room alone reading or writing or watching television.”— Johnny Cash, www1.cbn.com
“Make an island of yourself, make yourself your refuge; there is no other refuge. Make truth your island, make truth your refuge; there is no other refuge.”— Buddha, amazon.com
“There comes a time when the world gets quiet and the only thing left is your own heart. So you’d better learn the sound of it. Otherwise you’ll never understand what it’s saying.”— Sarah Dessen, amazon.com
“I lay on the bed and lost myself in stories. I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyways.”— Neil Gaiman, amazon.com
“We like companionship, see, but we can’t stand to be around people for very long. So we go get ourselves lost, come back for a while, then get the hell out again.”— Jon Krakauer, amazon.com
“In this world, there are things you can only do alone, and things you can only do with somebody else. It’s important to combine the two in just the right amount.”— Haruki Murakami, amazon.com
“I came to a point where I needed solitude and just stop the machine of thinking and enjoying what they call living, I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds.”— Jack Kerouac, amazon.com
“I think a person needs to learn from childhood to find himself alone. It means to not be bored when you’re by yourself, because a person who finds himself bored when alone – as it seems to me – is in danger.”— Andrei Tarkovsky, brainpickings.org
“Being an old soul can be an isolating existence at times. You need your solitude to sit and reflect on life and to recharge when you’ve completely exhausted yourself but sometimes this can be frustrating to your friends and family. They love you and they want to be around you.”— Koty Neelis, thoughtcatalog.com
“I've earned $47 in 20 years of writing and I think that $2 a year (omitting stamps, paper, envelopes, ribbons, divorces, and a typewriter) entitles one to the special privacy of a special insanity and if I need hold hands with paper gods to promote a little scurvy rhyme, I'll take the encyst and par…”— Charles Bukowski, amazon.com
“I read till all hours if I want to. If I get up at five and I can't sleep and I want to work, I go out and I go to work. So I work, I'm on call. I'm like a doctor and it's an emergency. And I'm the emergency.”— Phillip Roth, newyorker.com