Urban Solitude Quotes

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.

When you go to the big city - you're in New York, Boston, you're in L.A. - you walk in the streets, and nobody says anything to you. It becomes so impersonal because there's so many people.

If you go into an underground train in London - probably anywhere, but chiefly in London - there's that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension. People are very still and quiet; they don't exchange many pleasantries.

My world of human beings had perished. I was utterly alone in the world and for friends I had the streets, and the streets spoke to me in that sad, bitter language compounded of human misery, yearning, regret, failure, wasted effort

I walk a lot in New York, not for the exercise but to get from place to place, and because it's the way of having the least contact with human beings.

I walked down Paseo del Prado, losing myself to the sights, sounds, and dense magic of the city. There's something weirdly calming about being alone in a big city. It made me feel like the universe was hugely generous, and that my species was so damn smart to have constructed such a beautiful city.

I miss the anonymity that comes with New York because everyone around you is so immersed in their own journey.

Now the windows, blinded by the glare of the empty square, had fallen asleep. The balconies declared their emptiness to heaven; the open doorways smelt of coolness and wine.

in the big city nobody has time to make friends. The big city is a big solitude.

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion; in order to serve others better, one has to hold them at a distance for a time. But where can one find the solitude necessary to vigor, the deep breath in which the mind collects itself and courage gauges its strength? There remain big cities.

I become a hermit when I am in Los Angeles and I don't leave my apartment at all from Monday through Thursday unless I have to and I don't get much sleep.

I don't sleep very well when I travel. And as a result, I tend to be awake in cities when everyone else is asleep.

London perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play and a story and a poem, without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the streets... To walk alone through London is the greatest rest.

The city can be the loneliest place of all.

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whit- man, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon. In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!

I prayed for the city to be cleared of people, for the gift of being alone—a-l-o-n-e: which is the one New York prayer that rarely gets lost or delayed in channels, and in no time at all everything I touched turned to solid loneliness.

Cats and their owners are on a private, exclusive loop of affection. Thus cats have become symbolic of a community eschewed and a hyper-engagement with oneself. They represent the profound danger of growing so independent in New York that it's not merely that you don't need anyone - it's that you don't know how to need anyone.

Loneliness... has very little to do with location. It's a state of mind. In the centre of every city are some of the loneliest people in the world... because our whole planet was just outside the window, I felt even more... connected to the seven billion other people.

In the Big City a man will disappear with the suddenness and completeness of the flame of a candle that is blown out.

I hated London; I was so lonely.

I was in the black silence of a medieval street, and blindly I followed its sharp turns, comforted by the height of its narrow tenements, which seemed at any moment capable of falling together, closing this alleyway under indifferent stars like a seam.

I stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes, my rage, forgetting everything, I walk by, going through office buildings and orthopedic shops, and courtyards with washing hanging from the line: underwear, towels and shirts from which slow dirty tears are falling.

She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.

I once spent an entire night in a hotel in New York looking across the way into someone's apartment where nothing was happening but daily life, a phone call, television watching, staring into the fridge. Seeing how those strangers lived over that small distance and in absolute silence moved me deeply.

New York has more hermits than will be found in all the forests, mountains and deserts of the United States.