Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes

Embrace your solitude and love it. Endure the pain it causes, and try to sing out with it. For those near to you are distant.

My solo music started as a way to really look inwards, and to spend time completely by myself with an instrument, without any outside dialogue.

But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is-solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves.

When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.

The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.

I do say all I've ever written about is being alone. And most people take that as, 'Oh, that's so sad.' And I always say, 'No. No, all I ever write about is being alone, and sometimes that's a beautiful, beautiful thing.'

Most of the characters I'm drawn to, as an actor, are ones that are quite intensely lonely and a bit lost and are looking for some kind of redemptive answer.

Everyone has their moments of solitude, difficulties, and vulnerability.

When a man is extremely lonely, he starts discovering himself.

Me writing 'Black Rainbow' was me alone in a windowless room going insane.

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

It's really hard to do this life - to be a human being alone.

In those first few hours officially single again the world seems like it expands, suddenly bigger and more vast now that you have to get through it alone.

If there is anything good about exile, it is that it teaches one humility. It accelerates one’s drift into isolation, an absolute perspective. Into the condition at which all one is left with is oneself and one’s language, with nobody or nothing in between. Exile brings you overnight where it would normally take a lifetime to go.

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

That's how it is sometimes when we plunge into the depths of our lives. No one can accompany us, not even those who would give up their hearts for our happiness.

In those days, I still thoroughly enjoyed the romance I called "by myself"; I didn't know yet how it gets lonely, picks up a sharp edge later on that ruins a day now and then-- ruins more than that, if you're not careful.

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.

Isolation, but it's a good vulnerability. Humbling. I actually seek out solitude.

Isolation is aloneness that feels forced upon you, like a punishment. Solitude is aloneness you choose and embrace. I think great things can come out of solitude, out of going to a place where all is quiet except the beating of your heart.