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...