If you want to know anything about community, you have to realize that the contemplative side is essential. Community without retreating and quiet time never survives.
I'm a complete coward in real life.
I think there's a danger, for me at least, in retreating and going inward and depression. I have to stay diligent against that tendency.
I could have become a soldier if I had waited; I knew more about retreating than the man who invented retreating.
I totally alienated some reporters as I retreated.
We can't solve modern problems by going back in time. Retreating to the safety of the familiar is an understandable response, but God has called us to a life of faith. And faith requires us to face the unknown while trusting Him completely.
It is the act of reading itself that I miss, the opportunity to retreat further and further from the world until I have found some space, some air that isn't stale, that hasn't been breathed by my family a thousand times already.
I tend to really duck down and make myself smaller than I already am.
I simply don't shine in company. Mostly I prefer to retreat with a book.
I always had a hard time communicating my emotions. I'd retreat into my bedroom and listen to music. And when you're a teenager, you're dealing with all these hormones. It's like, 'What are these?'
I have a very bad habit of just retreating from any given altercation.
A man must know when to retreat from a woman, but a wise man knows that sometimes he must stand and face her.
If a band or artist isn't tweeting or writing posts on Facebook every day, there can be this kind of mystique built about them, and I find myself retreating from the spotlight more and more.
As with ships, so with men; he who turns his back to his foe gives him an advantage.
I actually think I'm more of a turtle than Verne is. Where Verne is up on two legs and moving at full speed and doesn't pull his head into the shell very often, I in reality was five or ten minutes later to every recording session.
I was so shy, it almost paralyzed me in social settings. And as shy people know, that can become a vicious cycle: The more uncomfortable you feel around people, the more you retreat, and the more shy you get.
We live in a world where we think the mysterious is retreating farther and farther from our lives and eventually we will know all there is to know. I love the idea that somehow, there are still things that can be magical.
A glacier will frequently move forward one foot while retreating three feet... Which reminds me a lot of myself!
There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.
He who retreats lives longer.
