as long as there are
human beings about
there is never going to be
any peace
for any individual
upon this earth (or
anywhere else
they might
escape to).
all you can do
is maybe grab
ten lucky minutes
here
or maybe an hour
there.
something
is working toward you
right now, and
I mean you
and nobody but
you. Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense
I was alone with myself. And disgusting as I was it was better than being with somebody else, anybody else, all of them out there doing their pitiful little tricks and handsprings. Charles Bukowski
If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery – isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is. Charles Bukowski, Factotum
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 1798
We are rarely proud when we are alone. Voltaire
It’s hard for people to accept that we’re alone. Colin McGinn
Quite alone. Just the silence of God. The Borgias s1e1: The Poisoned Chalice, Rodrigo, Showtime 2011
You must help me interpret the great silence of God. ibid. Rodrigo to Cesare
We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being. Hermann Hesse
To be adult is to be alone. Jean Rostand, 1954
I want to be alone. Grand Hotel 1932 starring Greta Garbo & John Barrymore & Joan Crawford & Wallace Beery & Lionel Barrymore & Lewis Stone & Jean Hersholt & Robert McWade & Purnell Pratt & Ferdinand Gottschalk et al, director Edmund Goulding, Garbo as Grusinskaya
cf.
I never said, ‘I want to be alone.’ I only said, ‘I want to be let alone!’ There is all the difference. Greta Garbo
It’s no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You’ve got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they’ve got to come. You can’t force them. D H Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
63,089. In solitude
What happiness? who can enjoy alone,
Or all enjoying, what contentment find? John Milton, Paradise Lost 8:364
Better Off Alone. Alice DJ, house single
I am myself alone. William Shakespeare, Richard Duke of York V vi 84, Richard of Gloucester to self
For I am best
When least in company. William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night I iv 36-37, Orsino
Oh what can ail thee knight at arms
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake
And no birds sing! John Keats, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, 1820
The very fine line between loneliness and solitude, reflection; being alone always appealed to me when I was a kid. Brad Mehldau
You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming. Emily Carr
All by my own-alone self. Joel Chandler Harris, Nights with Uncle Remus, 1883
Being alone and liking it is, for a woman, an act of treachery, an infidelity far more threatening than adultery. Molly Haskell, Love and Other Infectious Diseases, 1990
You’ll never walk alone. Oscar Hammerstein from Carousel & Gerry & the Pacemakers & Liverpool FC et al
Loneliness is my least favourite thing about life. The thing that I’m most worried about is just being alone without anybody to care for or someone who will care for me. Anne Hathaway
It’s better to be unhappy alone than unhappy with someone – so far. Marilyn Monroe
I restore myself when I’m alone. Marilyn Monroe
It is better to be alone than in bad company. George Washington
A man is born alone and dies alone; and he experiences the good and bad consequences of his karma alone; and he goes alone to hell or the Supreme abode. Chanakya
A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Henry David Thoreau
If you are lonely when you’re alone, you are in bad company. Jean-Paul Sartre
We are alone with no excuses. That is the idea I shall try to convey when I say that man is condemned to be free. Condemned because he did not create himself; yet, in other respects, if free, because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. Jean-Paul Sartre
I have to be alone very often. I’d be quite happy if I spent from Saturday night until Monday morning alone in my apartment. That’s how I refuel. Audrey Hepburn
Life could be wonderful if people would leave you alone. Charlie Chaplin
The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone. Henrik Ibsen
You see, the point is that the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone. Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People
You only grow when you are alone. Paul Newman
It is very easy to love alone. Gertrude Stein
Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body. Virginia Woolf, The Waves
She would not say of any one in the world that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, far out to the sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary. How she had got through life on the few twigs of knowledge Fraulein Daniels gave them she could not think. She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway