February 2012
12 posts
2 tags
“He would swing wildly, in those last years — not so much from sobriety to drink but from calmness to depression. But he was shy, he didn’t want anyone else to be troubled by it, so he would be quiet most of the time. That was his only defence. To keep it within so the fear would not hurt others.
I keep thinking of the lines from Goethe … ‘Oh, who will heal the sufferings / Of the man whose balm...
2 tags
“We are slightly drunk with this place — the beautiful house, the animals which are appearing now, and this tough cold rain turning the hard-baked earth into red mud. All of us are in our solitude. Not really concerned about the others, just revelling in a private pleasure. It is like communal sleep.”
— Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family (via hours)
3 tags
“Sometimes I think, were I just a little rougher made, I would go altogether to the woods—to my work entirely, and solitude, a few friends, books, my dogs, all things peaceful, ready for meditation and industry—if for no other reason than to escape the heart-jamming damages and discouragements of the world’s mean spirits. But, no use. Even the most solitudinous of us is communal by...
2 tags
“[D]uring the time he worked on the bridge, he was seen as a recluse. He would begin sentences in his new language, mutter, and walk away. He became a vault of secrets and memories. Privacy was the only weight he carried. None of his cohorts really knew him. This man, awkward in groups, would walk off and leave strange clues about himself, like a dog’s footprints on the snowed roof of a garage.”
...
2 tags
“[N]o [one] truly feels free unless he or she is inwardly alone.”
— Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why
3 tags
“Loneliness might be the hardest cross we bear. Why else would we have come up with solitary confinement as a form of punishment? We are relational to the core.”
— John Eldredge, Epic: The Story God Is Telling and the Role That Is Yours to Play (via hours)
5 tags
“[W]e are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.”
— Carson McCullers, “Look Homeward, Americans,” The Mortgaged Heart: Selected Writings (edited by Margarita G. Smith) (via youngfolksociety)
2 tags
“People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, ‘If you keep a lot of rules I’ll reward you, and if you don’t I’ll do the other thing.’ I do not think that is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it...
2 tags
“[S]he sat on the verandah working on the interminable shawl of her solitude.”
— Salman Rushdie, Shame (via hours)
2 tags
“‘If I was murdered here, the news would never leave the estate.’ Rani is uncertain whether or not she has spoken aloud. Her thoughts, loosened by solitude, often burst these days through her unconscious lips; and often contradict one another, because the very next notion to form in her mind as she sits on the heavy-eaved verandah is this: ‘I love the house.’”
— Salman Rushdie, Shame (via hours)
2 tags
“Only rarely can poetry aid us in communing with others; that is a beautiful idealism, except at certain strange moments, like the instant of falling in love. Solitude is the more frequent mark of our condition; how shall we people that solitude? Poems can help us to speak to ourselves more clearly and more fully, and to overhearthat speaking. Shakespeare is the largest master of such...
January 2012
12 posts
2 tags
“I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among...
2 tags
“Along this street of loss and love, I drift from coffee to coffee, wondering what to do with my life. Should I throw in my lot with this brotherhood of dropouts and don the badge of peace? Should I put the brakes on and take the absolutes of family and work for a saving grace? Is it wise to reject the nimbus of the nine-to-five man, and go on blundering in a dense cloud of solitude, earthed...
will i ever get used to this?
2 tags
“In the dark I drift on your tunes, your voice traversing the mournful range of loss, at home in the music, reminding I am not at home anywhere, I will lose your songs down the road.”
— Boey Kim Cheng, “Blue Note”
2 tags
“Today the chef has lost his nerves. He sits with no guests to rouse his spirit to orchestration of utensils and food.
The plates are mirrors of absence, the bowls hollow, no laughter tinkling them to life; asunder the chopsticks lie, and the forks and spoons have lost the hands and each other. Time now for dining with ghosts, no songs to stir the table-talk.
Only the silence of one before...
2 tags
“ over long and strong coffees on Bleecker Street, we looked as one at others, pained voyeurs happy in the lives of others, blowing blue riffs of smoke-talk, small talk, comparing lifelines, the distances between, improvising around the eternal melody of loneliness.”
— Boey Kim Cheng, “Strangely Coupled”
2 tags
“Even the solitude, I’ve actually grown to quite like. That’s not to say I’m not looking forward to a bit more companionship come the end of the year when I’m finished with all of this. But I do like the feeling of getting into my little car, knowing for the next couple of hours I’ll have only the roads, the big grey sky and my daydreams for company. And if...
2 tags
“[S]olitude is a crucial (and underrated) ingredient for creativity.”
— Susan Cain, The Power of Introverts: A Manifesto for Quiet Brilliance (an interview with Susan Cain by Gareth Cook), Scientific American
2 tags
“Solitude can also be found in the reading of poetry, in listening to music, in looking at pictures, and in sincere thoughtfulness. We are alone, perhaps in the midst of multitudes, but we are not lonely. Solitude protects us without isolating us. But life calls us back to its empty talk and the unavoidable demands of daily routine. It calls us back to its loneliness and the cover that it,...
3 tags
“Rick watched [Joy] with bewilderment and admiration, trying to fathom what it was in her with which what he knew was in Hugh must make contact. Somewhere in this healthy girl were guarded depths of understanding, another Joy, the antithesis of all the girls Rick danced with and talked with, resenting their blank incuriosity. Or perhaps Hugh made no contact with her at all at that level;...
2 tags
“[E]very evening would bring its familiar strangeness, and crickets would sing the whole night long, under her windows and in every part of the black wilderness that stretched away from Fingerbone on every side. And she would feel that sharp loneliness she had felt every long evening since she was a child. It was the kind of loneliness that made clocks seem slow and loud and made voices...
honestly, this loneliness.
3 tags
“tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow”
December 2011
6 posts
2 tags
“[I]t’s only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it.”
— Pico Iyer, The Joy of Quiet, The New York Times
4 tags
“Exile is never the state of being satisfied, placid, or secure. Exile, in the words of Wallace Stevens, is ‘a mind of winter’ in which the pathos of summer and autumn as much as the potential of spring are nearby but unobtainable. Perhaps this is another way of saying that a life of exile moves according to a different calendar, and is less seasonal and settled than life at...
1 tag
2 tags
“[Writing matters b]ecause of the spirit, I say. Because of the heart. Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing...
yes, yes, happy christmas, and all that jazz. sigh.
4 tags
“Now I know what loneliness is, I think. Momentary loneliness, anyway. It comes from a vague core of the self—like a disease of the blood, dispersed throughout the body so that one cannot locate the matrix, the spot of contagion… . This loneliness will blur and diminish, no doubt, when tomorrow I plunge again into classes, into the necessity of studying for exams. But now, that false...
November 2011
2 posts
2 tags
“Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends, or in those who may become friends. Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness.”
— Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why
October 2011
11 posts
2 tags
Morning
by: Yannis Ritsos translated by: Nikos Strangos
She opened the shutters. She hung the sheets over the sill. She saw the day. A bird looked at her straight in the eyes. “I am alone,” she whispered. “I am alive.” She entered the room. The mirror too is a window. If I jump from it I will fall into my arms.
2 tags
“We live, as we dream—alone.”
— Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
2 tags
Broken, Unbroken
by: Mary Oliver from: Evidence
The lonely stand in the dark corners of their hearts.
I have seen them in cities, and in my own neighborhood,
nor could I touch them with the magic that they crave
to be unbroken. Then, I myself, lonely,
said hello to good fortune. Someone
came along and lingered and little by little
became everything that makes the difference. Oh, I wish such good luck
to...
3 tags
JESSE: Love is like this escape for people who haven’t learned to be alone or to make something of themselves. People think love is this unselfish or totally giving thing. But if you think about it, there’s probably nothing more selfish.
— Richard Linklater and Kim Krizan, Before Sunrise
2 tags
“I think if you’ve ever had that feeling of loneliness, of being an outsider, it never quite leaves you. You can be happy or successful or whatever, but that thing still stays within you.”
— Tim Burton, quoted in Tim Burton: Boyhood traumas of a director by The Independent
dear God, such loneliness that besets me, behind and before. such loneliness that has laid its hand upon me. it has become my closest friend.
3 tags
5 tags
“We are lonesome animals. We spend all life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say—and to feel—
‘Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought.’”
— John Steinbeck, letter to Peter Benchley, Sag Harbor, 1956, Steinbeck: A Life in Letters...
2 tags
我给思念买了十分保险
by: 黄浩威
为了不让思念四处流荡 我给他买了十份保险 再把他禁锢在家里 我的寂寞是一条看门狗 门外挂着 “小心恶犬” 的微笑
为了长远的人生规划 我给思念买了十份保险 为了能让他在我年老时 滋养我的孤独 折回不曾受伤的利息
有一天, 思念在酣睡时中风 从此以后, 瘫痪在床 我把思念轻轻折叠 堆放在轮椅上
推开大门, 我带思念到海边去 我们欣赏着陡峭的夕阳 直到夜色渐冷 我才静静地把轮椅推下山崖
September 2011
11 posts
2 tags
“Night and everything so quiet, as if there were no one, not even myself. I cannot hear the sea, which on other nights rumbles and growls, now near and grating, now afar and faint. I do not want to be alone like this.”
— John Banville, The Sea
is it actually possible to experience a feverish kind of loneliness? fever of loneliness.
3 tags
My Eyes So Soft
by: Hafiz from: The Gift translated by: Daniel Ladinsky
Don’t Surrender Your loneliness so quickly. Let it cut more Deep.
Let it ferment and season you As few human Or even divine ingredients can.
Something missing in my heart tonight Has made my eyes so soft, My voice so Tender,
My need of God Absolutely Clear.
4 tags
“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a letter to Sheilah Graham, 1938, quoted in Beloved Infidel by Sheilah Graham and Gerold Frank
4 tags
“The port from which I set out was, I think, that of the essential loneliness of my life—and it seems to be the port also, in sooth to which my course again finally directs itself! This loneliness, (since I mention it!)—what is it still but the deepest thing about one? Deeper about me, at any rate, than anything else: deeper than my ‘genius,’ deeper than my...
2 tags
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe,...