Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner…

…sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right. ― Charles Bukowski, Women

… and to maintain balance within it a precarious business. But I must not forget that, for me, being with people or even with one beloved person for any length of time without solitude is even worse. I lose my center. I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces. I must have time alone in which to…

… 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…

I’m simply alone, living in my heavily populated solitude, a harum-scarum of infinity and eternity, and Infinity and Eternity seem to take a liking to the likes of me. ― Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude

… you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen, in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing oneself to excess; that utmost of self-revelation and surrender, in which a human being, when involved with others, would feel he was losing himself, and from which, therefore, he will always…

…and yet not alone enough to make every moment holy. I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough just to lie before you like a thing, shrewd and secretive. I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will, as it goes toward action; and in those quiet,…