Garth Stein Quotes

People think being alone is a luxury, but it's crucial: Whatever you're not down with about yourself gets loud and in your face.

Of all the conditions we experience, solitude is perhaps the most misunderstood.

Solitude never hurt anyone. Emily Dickinson lived alone, and she wrote some of the most beautiful poetry the world has ever known... then went crazy as a loon." Lisa Simpson

Language... has created the word 'loneliness' to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word 'solitude' to express the glory of being alone.

Loneliness is such an omnipotent and painful threat to many persons that they have little conception of the positive values of solitude and even, at times, are frightened at the prospect of being alone.

There's a difference between loneliness and solitude. You pursue solitude, I think. But loneliness is a completely different isolating thing.

All great and precious things are lonely.

Solitude does not pull us away from our fellow human beings but instead makes real fellowship possible.

The great omission in American life is solitude; not loneliness, for this is an alienation that thrives most in the midst of crowds, but that zone of time and space, free from the outside pressures, which is the incubator of the spirit.

I am lonely, sometimes, but I dare say it's good for me.

In certain areas of my life, I actively seek out solitude. Especially for someone in my line of work, solitude is, more or less, an inevitable circumstance. Sometimes, however, this sense of isolation, like acid spilling out of a bottle, can unconsciously eat away at a person's heart and dissolve it. You could see it, too, as a kind of double-edged sword. It protects me, but at the same time steadily cuts away at me from the inside.

Woe unto him that is never alone, and cannot bear to be alone.

On the whole, the longing for solitude is a sign that there still is spirit in a person and is a measure of what spirit there is.

I am ready to be alone.

The kind of solitude that refreshes and restores is very important, not just for children, not just for adolescents, but for all of us. If you don't teach your children how to be alone they will only be able to be lonely.

People who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger.

Isolation must precede true society.

Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end. Every choice is a world made new for the chosen.

Study requires solitude, and solitude is a state dangerous to those who are too much accustomed to sink into themselves

He liked the loneliness of inner space, the sense of being forgotten by the world.

Being alone can be good. It's easy to find peace alone. But sometimes, being alone is a king of death.

Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony.

Solitude either develops the mental power, or renders men dull and vicious.

We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.