solitude & silence6 quotes

“Nothing seemed to happen except what always happened, at its regular time and in its regular way. The traffic got heavy and then it got lighter. The day was hot and now it was cooler. The shadows hid underground and now they oozed up and spread everywhere like spilled oil. It was summer but soon it would be fall. The sun would set and the horizon would glow red and orange like embers. Even Clemons’s crimes and wanderings fit into the fixed order. One broken life did nothing to disturb the workings of the world.

Everything the same even in its changes. Every scrap of matter, every last acorn or spot of sunlight changing just as it should, blending into its opposite or morphing into a being wholly unlike it. In all movement and bustle and chaos and noise there was a profound stillness and silence, something abiding yet unknowable.”

“With a nearly desperate sense of isolation and a growing suspicion that I lived in an alien land, I took to the open road in search of places where change did not mean ruin, and where time and men and deeds connected.”

“O, What a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet nothing at all—what is it?”

“When evening comes, I return home and go into my study. On the threshold I strip off my muddy, sweaty, workday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born. And there I make bold to speak to them and ask the motives of their actions, and they, in their humanity, reply to me. And for the space of four hours I forget the world, remember no vexation, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death: I pass indeed into their world.”

“There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rain-storm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.”

“It is when one is alone that one begins to observe Nature and to love her.”