Quotes about Solitude

The snow whispered down in the stillness and the sparks rose and dimmed and died in the eternal blackness.

When he reached the fence he stopped for a moment to look back at the road and then he went on, crossing into a field of rank weeds that heeled with harsh dip and clash under the wind as if fled through by something unseen.

Lastly he looked at the face so caved and drawn among the folds of funeral cloth, the yellowed moustache, the eyelids paper thin. That was not sleeping. That was not sleeping.

Forty minutes later he saw her and stopped and sat the horse and watched. She was riding along a red dirt ridge to the south sitting with her hands crossed on the pommel, looking toward the last of the sun, the horse slogging slowly through the loose sandy dirt, the red stain of it following them in the still air. That's my heart yonder, he told the horse. It always was.

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.