“A cold winter night. I’m warm enough, yet I’m alone. And I realize that I’ll have to get used to existing quite naturally within this solitude, functioning there, working there, accompanied by, fastened to the ‘presence of absence.'”

Roland Barthes

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“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.”

Cheryl Strayed

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“I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a humble-bee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house.”

Henry David Thoreau

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“Certain springs are tapped only when we are alone.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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“Everyone is ‘extremely nice’—and yet I feel entirely alone. (‘Abandonitis’).”

Roland Barthes

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“I think almost the last straw here though is the hairdresser, a nice big hearty Maine girl who asks me questions I don’t even know the answers to. She told me: 1, that my hair ‘don’t feel like hair at all.’ 2, I was turning gray practically ‘under her eyes.’ And when I’d said yes, I was an orphan, she said ‘Kind of awful, ain’t it, ploughing through life alone.’ So now I can’t walk downstairs in the morning or upstairs at night without feeling like I’m ploughing. There’s no place like New England.”

Elizabeth Bishop

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