Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

The only place I've felt was really my home is my cabin up north. There's something in the water there that connects me to that place. There's also this sense of isolation and loneliness about it that I've never been able to shake.

The new light above my table is a great improvement. With all this darkness around me I feel less alone. (Pause.) In a way. (Pause.) I love to get up and move about in it, then back here to... (hesitates) ...me. (Pause.)

There was just one moon. That familiar, yellow, solitary moon. The same moon that silently floated over fields of pampas grass, the moon that rose--a gleaming, round saucer--over the calm surface of lakes, that tranquilly beamed down on the rooftops of fast-asleep houses. The same moon that brought the high tide to shore, that softly shone on the fur of animals and enveloped and protected travelers at night. The moon that, as a crescent, shaved slivers from the soul--or, as a new moon, silently bathed the earth in its own loneliness. THAT moon.

I am no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself. What company has that lonely lake,I pray?

The moon is a friend for the lonesome to talk to.

I've been in that angst of loneliness, where you're really alone in the universe, except for the dog.

Even Echo speaks not on these radiant moors.

It is wonderful to be in the country in a glass house, because no matter what happens out there, you're nice and safe, you know, cuddled in your little bed, and there it is, raging storms, snowing - wonderful.

Solitude has its own very strange beauty to it.

My favourite country is Finland because once you get to a certain point, you can drive for hours without seeing a single person. I love peace and quiet - something I don't get very often.

There's something about the water - that solitary kind of peaceful feeling. You're on Earth but not quite.

It was night and I could see a large and calm lake, reflecting the moon. Black mountains rose around it. I arrived from between two of these mountains, I looked at the lake and the moon, and that was it, nothing else happened.

Don't go away. I don't want to be alone. I can't stand being alone.

I did a film once in the Sahara. It was pretty awe-inspiring. I remember sitting up on the roof of our hotel, watching the sun go down, and all around me, for 360 degrees, was nothing but sand. It took your breath away but also made you feel tiny.

There is such a peace out in the middle of the desert. There's nothing like it.

I'm happiest walking through fields, on beaches, and over riverbanks. Nature is my surrogate mother.

There are some nights when you just want to know there's someone else besides you in this wide world.

Poets knew that isolation in nature, far from people and things man-made, was good for the soul, and he'd always identified with poets.

I preferred to look at the sea, which said nothing and never made you feel alone.

The grey nurse resumed her knitting as Peter Walsh, on the hot seat beside her, began snoring. In her grey dress, moving her hands indefatigably yet quietly, she seemed like the champion of the rights of sleepers, like one of those spectral presences which rise in twilight in woods made of sky and branches. The solitary traveler, haunter of lanes, disturber of ferns, and devastator of hemlock plants, looking up, suddenly sees the giant figure at the end of the ride.

A falcon hovers at the edge of the sky.Two gulls drift slowly up the river.Vulnerable while they ride the wind,they coast and glide with ease.Dew is heavy on the grass below,the spider's web is ready.Heaven's ways include the human:among a thousand sorrows, I stand alone.

At last, in the dead of the night, when the street was very still indeed, Little Dorrit laid the heavy head upon her bosom, and soothed her to sleep. And thus she sat at the gate, as it were alone; looking up at the stars, and seeing the clouds pass over them in their wild flight-which was the dance at Little Dorrit's party.

What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows! Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.

And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.