…, and so made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else.
― Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone around the World

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I care for myself. The more solitary, …
…the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself. ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

To Solitude
O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell, Let it not be among the jumbled heap Of murky buildings; climb with me the steep,— Nature’s observatory—whence the dell, Its flowery slopes, its river’s crystal swell, May seem a span; let me thy vigils keep ’Mongst boughs pavillion’d, where the deer’s swift leap Startles the wild…

In the world of the dreamer
… there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the…

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods
… There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar: I love not man the less, but Nature more” ― George Gordon Byron

There are times when
… I can find myself in a book, too, for two or three hours. But afterward I have such an urge to go out and reach for other people. Very often they’re not around. There’s also a metaphysical loneliness. We all feel it. The burden of living one’s own life is experiencing sensations that no one…

…and children are still the way you were
…as a child, sad and happy in just the same way and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children, and the grownups are nothing, and their dignity has no value. ― Rainer Maria Rilke
