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"I knew this feeling, the 2 a.m. loneliness that I'd practically invented."
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Personal Development

"That illusion of a world so shaped that it echoes every groan, of human beings so tied together by common needs and fears that a twitch at one wrist jerks another, where however strange your experience other people have had it too, where however far you travel in your own mind someone has been there before you - - is all an illusion. We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds' feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable."
Author Name
Personal Development

"One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude."
Author Name
Personal Development

"I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough."
Author Name
Personal Development

"You become a house where the wind blows straight through, because no one bothers the crack in the window or lock on the door, and you're the house where people come and go as they please, because you're simply too unimpressed to care. You let people in who you really shouldn't let in, and you let them walk around for a while, use your bed and use your books, and await the day when they simply get bored and leave. You're still not bothered, though you knew they shouldn't have been let in in the first place, but still you just sit there, apathetic like a beggar in the desert."
Author Name
Personal Development

"I've learnt that solitude is sometimes a path that leads to peace."
Author Name
Personal Development

"He could have had his choice of any woman in the district. And he chose solitude. Not solitude " that sounds too peaceful. More like solitary confinement."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Debt . . . . that peculiar nexus where money, narrative or story, and religious belief intersect, often with explosive force."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well ordered mind than a man's ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company."
Author Name
Personal Development

"It is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and thinner until there is none at all. We are not the less to aim at the summits though the multitude does not ascend them."
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Personal Development
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"Are you thankful for not being young?''Yes, sir. If I was young, it would all have to be gone through again, and the end would be a weary way off, don't you see?..."
Wisdom

"A display of indifference to all the actions and passions of mankind was not supposed to be such a distinguished quality at that time, I think, as I have observed it to be considered since. I have known it very fashionable indeed. I have seen it displayed with such success, that I have encountered some fine ladies and gentlemen who might as well have been born caterpillars."
Social

"And who among the company at Monseigneur's reception in that seventeen hundred and eightieth year of our Lord, could possibly doubt, that a system rooted in a frizzled hangman, powdered, gold-laced, pumped, and white-silk stockinged, would see the very stars out!"
Society

"They had an ugly look to one as prone to disgust and fear as the changes of a few hours had made me."
Emotion

"There was a long hard time when I kept far from me the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth."
Memory

"Cows are my passion. What I have ever sighed for has been to retreat to a Swiss farm, and live entirely surrounded by cows - and china."
Nature

"I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round -- apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that -- as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys."
Tradition

"Secret and self-contained and solitary as an oyster."
Solitude

"I laboured hard at my book, without allowing it to interfere with the punctual discharge of my newspaper duties; and it came out and was very successful. I was not stunned by the praise which sounded in my ears, notwithstanding that I was keenly alive to it, and thought better of my own performance, I have little doubt, than anybody else did. It has always been in my observation of human nature, that a man who has any good reason to believe in himself never flourishes himself before the faces of other people in order that they may believe in him. For this reason, I retained my modesty in very self-respect; and the more praise I got, the more I tried to deserve."
Humility

"Regrets are the natural property of grey hairs."
Wisdom
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