Herman Melville Quotes

In my deepest troubles, I frequently would wrench myself from the persons around me and retire to some secluded part of our noble forests.

At sea, I feel comfortable and I come to rest.

To escape and sit quietly on the beach - that's my idea of paradise.

Oh, why can't we break away from all this, just you and I, and lodge with my fleas in the hills? I mean flee to my lodge in the hills.

She turned her face seaward to gather in an impression of space and solitude, which the vast expanse of water, meeting and melting with the moonlit sky, conveyed to her excited fancy. As she swam she seemed to be reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself.

Beach is a place where a man can feel he's the only soul in the world that's real.

It was so much easier to be alone, if one could find just the right location.

I've been able to carve out spaces for myself. At Sundance, I'm in the mountains - my property is private. I get on a horse and ride for three, four hours. Sometimes five. I get lost. But when I'm in, I'm in.

I really feel that my body craves to be in the mountains or by the ocean or in the countryside.

If I had my will I would live in a ship on the sea, and never come nearer to humanity than that!

When I was growing up, the place I felt least alone was when I was reading.

Short of taking monastic vows or trekking into the Kalahari, a freighter passage might just offer what our relentlessly connected age has made difficult, if not impossible: splendid isolation.

The very pointlessness of a sea walk is it's attractiveness to me.

I spent my whole childhood trying to find places to be on my own. I used to sit on the water tank in the attic or in the dog's kennel. I was quite a strange child.

I eventually want to come back to Canada, to disappear, have nobody know me, and just be a writer and do what I want to do.

He would go somewhere no one knew him, and he would sit in a library all day and read books and listen to people breathing.

I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come.

Action is limited and relative. Unlimited and absolute is the vision of him who sits at ease and watches, who walks in loneliness and dreams.

Their leaving made me melancholy, though I also felt something like relief when they disappeared into the dark trees. I hadn't needed to get anything from my pack; I'd only wanted to be alone. Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.

It is best to meet in a cul-de-sac, A palace of velvet With windows of mirrors. There one is safe, There are no family photographs, No rings through the nose, no cries.

So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.

How in the world was I alone? Because I wanted to be. That's all I can say. It's all that makes sense to me.

I am what I am,' Salander said 'I ran away from everything and everybody. I should have said goodbye.

I haven't found one place in the world yet where I could disappear.