Frederic Chopin Quotes

I'll read anything by a guy who spent 40 years in a cave.

One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with one's words.

Solitude may rust your words.

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.

I want to be alone ... I just want to be alone.

I think there is no way to write about being alone. To write is to tell something to somebody to communicate to others. . . . Solitude is noncommunication, the absence of others, the presence of a self sufficient to itself.

There is something about silence and being in the middle of nowhere that is really very attractive.

To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself.

Privacy and loneliness were the traditional luxuries accorded to a skipper.

My Dad used to say that the balance of the world relied on all of the monks who were living outside of society in creative isolation. I don't quite understand the ascetic life or the private life or the monastic private life. But I definitely understand privacy's value.

Loneliness is an aspect of the land.

There would never be a way for me to live comfortably with people. Maybe I'd become a monk. I'd pretend to believe in God and live in a cubicle, play an organ and stay drunk on wine.

Silence was his escape, but silence is rarely a refuge.

Sometimes I go for days without speaking to a soul. I think, “I should make that call", but I put it off. Because there’s something pleasurable about not talking. But then I love talking, so it’s not that. But sometimes it can be nice. It’s not like I sit here philosophizing, because I’ve no talent for that. It’s just this thing about silence that’s so wonderful.

...we can all shut-up and go back to our caves.

I am here, alone, at the end of the world. I reach out and touch nothing.”.

I have done most of my talking by post of late years--as people shut up in dungeons take up with scrawling mottoes on the walls.

The first few months of my life of every year are in total retreat. I don't see anybody except my husband and my dog, I don't talk to anybody, and I just write.

I'm smiled out, talked out, quipped out, socialized so far from any being, I need the weight of mortal silences to get realized back into myself.

I love to write when I feel like everybody else is asleep and when I feel like the world is kind of empty in some ways. I find, oddly enough, that I write about loneliness and isolation a lot.

One of the things I like most of all is being in my study, in my barn, with absolutely no sound anywhere thinking about something. It's extremely important to me.

Let people hide in their homes, caged like chickens. Cowards deserve no better.

I think the silence would be good with me, and not interacting with people would be okay. But not being able to move outside of the space would be hard. Not being able to walk around - the stillness of my body, physically - that would be the challenge.

I'm not trying to be ridiculous or funny, but it was rather pleasant to find yourself in isolation, in solitary.

Sadly I write in my quiet room, alone as I have always been, alone as I will always be. And I wonder if my apparently negligible voice might not embody the essence of thousands of voices, the longing for self expression of thousands of lives, the patience of millions of souls resigned like my own to their daily lot, their useless dreams, and their hopeless hopes.