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"she never liked Christiana’s adventures half as well as Christian’s. For one thing, there was always such a crowd with Christiana. She had not half the fascination of that solitary, intrepid figure who faced all alone the shadows of the Dark Valley and the encounter with Apollyon. Darkness and hobgoblins were nothing when you had plenty of company. But to be alone—ah, Emily shivered with the delicious horror of it!" • L. M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon

I ask myself if there is an irresponsible aspect in relaying thoughts of pain as inspiration, and I wonder whether Housman actually infected the sensitives further, and pulled them back into additional darkness. Surely it is true that everything in the imagination seems worse than it actually is – especially when one is alone and horizontal (in bed, as in the coffin). Housman was always alone – thinking himself to death, with no matronly wife to signal to the watching world that Alfred Edward was now quite alright – for isn’t this at least partly the aim of scoring a partner: to trumpet the mental all-clear to a world where how things seem is far more important than how things are? Now snugly in eternity, Housman still occupies my mind. His best moments were in Art, and not in the cut and thrust of human relationships. Yet he said more about human relationships than those who managed to feast on them. You see, you can’t have it both ways. MORRISSEY • AUTOBIOGRAPHY

It is terrible to be alone.
I don’t mean to live alone –
To be alone, where no one hears you.
Louise Glück

Have you ever directed a film about someone? When I say someone, I mean someone who has been isolated, someone who has been considered on himself, separated from social conditions where he is. Like extracted from society and observed by you. I think there is always something in the self, in you, that society cannot reach, something insurmountable, impenetrable and decisive. • Marguerite Duras

Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone. It has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone. • Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now

Since plurality is one of the basic existential conditions of human life on earth—so that inter homines esse, to be among men, was to the Romans the sign of being alive, aware of the realness of world and self, and inter homines esse desinere, to cease to be among men, a synonym for dying—to be by myself and to have intercourse with myself is the outstanding characteristic of the life of the mind. The mind can be said to have a life of its own only to the extent that it actualizes this intercourse in which, existentially speaking, plurality is reduced to the duality already implied in the fact and the word "consciousness," or syneidenai— to know with myself. I call this existential state in which I keep myself company "solitude" to distinguish it from "loneliness," where I am also alone but now deserted not only by human company but also by the possible company of myself. It is only in loneliness that I feel deprived of human company, and it is only in the acute awareness of such deprivation that men ever exist really in the singular, as it is perhaps only in dreams or in madness that they fully realize the unbearable and "unutterable horror" of this state. • from The Life of The Mind by Hannah Arendt

"The absence of a substantial community and of any connected "special places" makes it such that the life of the stranger, the not-feeling-at-home, the bios xenikos, are unavoidable and lasting experiences."

Two statements from Ancient Rome: inter homines esse, which means that being alive is the same as being amongst other people and inter homines esse desinere, which means that dying is the same as ceasing to be among other people.

A is for dining alone...and so am I, if a choice must be made between most people I know and myself. This misanthropic attitude is one I am not proud of, but it is firmly there, based on my increasing conviction that sharing food with another human being is an intimate act, which should not be indulged in lightly. There are few people alive with whom I care to pray, sleep, dance, sing, and (perhaps most of all, except sleep) share my bread and wine. Of course there are moments when such unholy performances must take place, in order to exist socially, but they are endurable because they need not be the only fashion of self-nourishment. — M.F.K. Fisher • The Art of Eating

The best table in any restaurant, so far as I’m concerned, is in a corner next to a window. From that spot I can be entertained by the infinite variety of the street or the enclosed drama of the restaurant itself. There’s always lots to see. — Colin Harrison • Out To Lunch