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"There is only one solitude, and it is great and is not easy to bear, and to almost everyone there come hours when they would gladly exchange it for some kind of communion, however banal and cheap, for the appearance of some slight harmony with the most easily available, with the most undeserving. But perhaps those are just the hours when solitude grows; for its growing is painful like the growing of boys and sad like the beginning of Spring."
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"She walked in somber seclusion, unable to connect with women despite her heart's desire to do so while being shadowed by men who hungered for the indefinable; and while she yearned for friendship, they yearned for something more and what she had been in search of remained removed from her, and the more she erected barriers, the more they crossed them and each time they did, she turned from them and hid."
"Nico knew something about ghosts. Letting them get inside your head was dangerous. He wanted to help Reyna, but since his own strategy was to deal with his problems alone, spurning anyone who tried to get close, he couldn't exactly criticize Reyna for doing the same thing."
"Their drift away from others produced a selfish privacy and they had lost the refuge and the consolation of a clan. Baptists, Presbyterians, tribe, army, family, some encircling outside thing was needed. Pride, she thought. Pride alone made them think that they needed only themselves, could shape life that way, like Adam and Eve, like gods from nowhere beholden to nothing except their own creations. She should have warned them, but her devotion cautioned against impertinence. As long as Sir was alive it was easy to veil the truth: that they were not a family-not even a like-minded group. They were orphans, each and all."
"Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man."
"All along - not only since she left, but for a decade before - I had been imagining her without listening, without knowing that she made as a poor a window as I did. And so I could not imagine her as a person who could feel fear, who could feel isolated in a roomful of people, who could be shy about her record collection because it was too personal to share. Someone who might have read travel books to escape having to live in the town that so many people escape to. Someone who - because no one thought she was a person - had no one to really talk to."
"Up here on the Ice each of us is singular, isolate, I as cut off from those like me, from my society, and its rules, as he from his."
"All I'd ever thought I wanted was to be left alone. Until I was."
"The people who had turned their heads turned them again as the service proceeded; and at last observing her they whispered to each other. She knew what their whispers were about, grew sick at heart, and felt that she could come to church no more."
"When I was going on one day in the car about not having any close friends - using my favourite metaphor: the cage of glass between me and the rest of the world - she just laughed. 'You like it,' she said. 'You say you're isolated, boyo, but you really think you're different."
Explore more quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke
"If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable."
"There is only one solitude, and it is great and is not easy to bear, and to almost everyone there come hours when they would gladly exchange it for some kind of communion, however banal and cheap, for the appearance of some slight harmony with the most easily available, with the most undeserving. But perhaps those are just the hours when solitude grows; for its growing is painful like the growing of boys and sad like the beginning of Spring."
"There are a large number of people in the room, but one is unaware of them. They are in the books. At times they move among the pages, like sleepers turning over between two dreams. Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading."
"Now we wake up with our memoryand fix our gazes on that which was;whispering sweetness, which once coursed through us,sits silently beside us with loosened hair."
"You darkness, that I come from,I love you more than all the firesthat fence in the world,for the fire makesa circle of light for everyone,and then no one outside learns of you.But the darkness pulls in everything:shapes and fires, animals and myself,how easily it gathers them! -powers and people -and it is possible a great energyis moving near me.I have faith in nights."
"There is only one way: Go within. Search for the cause, find the impetus that bids you write. Put it to this test: Does it stretch out its roots in the deepest place of your heart? Can you avow that you would die if you were forbidden to write? Above all, in the most silent hour of your night, ask yourself this: Must I write? Dig deep into yourself for a true answer. And if it should ring its assent, if you can confidently meet this serious question with a simple, "I must, then build your life upon it. It has become your necessity. Your life, in even the most mundane and least significant hour, must become a sign, a testimony to this urge."
"Fame is finally only the sum total of all the misunderstanding that can gather around a new name."
"Whoever has no house now, will never have one. Whoever is alone will stay alone, will sit, read, write long letters through the evening, and wander on the boulevards, up and down, restlessly, while dry leaves are blowing."
"That is fundamentally the only courage which is demanded of us: to be brave in the face of the strangest, most singular and most inexplicable things that can befall us."
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