Colm Toibin Quotes

The thing that I love, especially after sound check, is when I'm in that stadium alone. It's complete silence. I love that.

How sweet, how passing sweet, is solitude!

I sat up, sliding them off, and the quiet around me did not, for once, seem empty and vast. Instead, for the first time in a while, it felt like it already was full.

Silence is best.

With Jackson there was quiet solitude. Just to sit and look at the landscape. An inner quietness. After dinner, to sit on the back porch and look at the light. No need for talking. For any kind of communication.

There are few places you can find silence. Air travel could be the last fortress of solitude.

In fact at home I sometimes like to be quiet and hear the sounds of the world outside.

Solitude has its own very strange beauty to it.

At home, I love reaching out into that absolute silence, when you can hear the owl or the wind.

The surest sign of age is loneliness.

I've shut myself inside these walls, and I'm going to be a very lonely old lady if I'm not careful.

In cities no one is quiet but many are lonely; in the country, people are quiet but few are lonely.

Listen to the sound of silence.

My kitchen linoleum is so black and shiny that I waltz while I wait for the kettle to boil. This pleasure is for the old who live alone.

I wouldn't like to grow old alone.

There is something joyous about not talking.

Each found her greatest safety in silence.

I love tranquil solitude.

The loudest noise in the world is silence.

n OthI n g can s urPas s the m y SteR y of s tilLnes s

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.

A large, still book is a piece of quietness, succulent and nourishing in a noisy world, which I approach and imbibe with "a sort of greedy enjoyment," as Marcel Proust said of those rooms of his old home whose air was "saturated with the bouquet of silence."

I have always had plenty of friends, and now at age sixty, I face four walls as a common prisoner.

No one should be alone in their old age, he thought.