All Quotes By Tag: Solitude

“… relationships required such vigilance, such attention. You had to hold them together by force of will, and other people took up so much space, demanded so much time. It was exhausting.”

“Sound crazy? It may well be, but it is precisely in relationships of intimacy that your craziness (and mine) will be hardest to conceal. p.215”

“You never walk alone. Even the devil is the lord of flies.”

“At the foundation of the Christian life, there is a kind of sacred individuality, a sort of holy aloneness that cries out to be left alone with God. This isn’t all of the Christian life. It doesn’t erase those parts of a Christian’s experience that happen in the context of relationships, but this sacred solitude needs to be discovered, respected, and protected.It is that place where we most irrefutably hear God tell us that he loves us, and we come to know that, no matter what other people may say about us or do to us, God will not abandon us. That holy solitude is the place where we find God’s Spirit changing our affections and redirecting our identities. It is, for Jesus-followers, holy ground.”

“What’s agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to somebody, that solitude is a mistake. The inner voice doesn’t care about who you find. It just keeps pestering you, tormenting you–if you happen to be me–with homecoming queens first, then girls next door, and finally anybody who might be pleased to see you now and then at the dinner table and in bed on occasion. You look up from reading the newspaper and realize that no one loves you, and no one burns for you.”

“Aloneness is a gift. A beautiful gift to the human soul. True and consistent satisfaction comes from the bond you form with yourself. Nobody else is a constant”

“The best piece of life’s magnificence is your slice of internal peace.”

“Sometimes we find the sweetest solidarity in the midst of solitude.”

“…and since, human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars”

“I am 23 and I am learning what it means to be an artist, for I am not an artist, because it takes life and a life lived well, to the limit, to see the patterns in storms, but I am 23 and I am learning. I am learning shame and solitude, forgiveness and goodbyes. I’m learning persistence and the closing of doors, the way the seasons come and go as I keep walking on these roads, back and forth, to find myself in new time zones, new arms with new phrases and new goals. And it hurts to become, hurts to find out about the poverty and gaps, the widow and the leavers. It hurts to accept that it hurts and it hurts to learn how easy it is for people to not need other people. Or how easy it is to need other people but that you can never build a home in someone’s arms because they will let go one day, and you must build your own.”

“One of the things you could do with your time is to convert it into a treasure and that treasure is called solitude.”

“Solitude is a greater treasure than money.”

“Solitude with God is a place for pregnancy.”

“It is through solitude that you can convert your time into something of value.”

“Solitude is the machine through which time can be converted into products.”