There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge and to maintain balance within it a precarious business. But I must not forget that, for me, being with people or even with one beloved person for any length of time without solitude is even worse. I lose my center. I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces. I must have time alone in which to mull over any encounter, and to extract its juice, its essence, to understand what has really happened to me as a consequence of it.

—May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

I feel myself sucked down into the quicksand that isolation sometimes creates, a sense of drowning, of being literally engulfed. When it comes to the important things one is always alone, and it may be that the virtue or possible insight I get from being so obviously alone—being physically and in every way absolutely alone much of the time—is a way into the universal state of man. The way in which one handles this absolute aloneness is the way in which one grows up, is the great psychic journey of everyman.

—May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

It occurs to me that boredom and panic are the two devils the solitary must combat. When I lay down this afternoon, I could not rest and finally got up because I was in a sweat of panic, panic for no definable reason, a panic of solitude, I presume.

—May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

But I feel tired. Before a lecture trip I always go way down. When the time comes, I don’t want to uproot, however much I may complain about the loneliness here.

—May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

For a little while it is as if my nakedness were clothed in love. But then, when I come back, I shiver in my isolation, and must face again and try to tame the loneliness. The house is no friend when I walk in. Only Punch gives a welcoming scream; there are no flowers. A smell of stale tobacco, unopened windows, my life waiting for me somewhere, asking to be created again.

—May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

Now it threatens to wreck what I care for most—to drive me back into a solitude that has, since I have been in love for a year and a half, ceased to be fruitful, become loneliness instead.

—May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

Battling the feeling of loneliness will allow you to lean on Him for the comfort no human can provide.

—Lilyan Andrews, Waiting & Dating

…and it was true that a long-term unemployed person inevitably turned into a little mute and huddled being

—Michel Houellebecq, Serotonin: A Novel

She was slight, but she possessed will and also a terrifying loneliness.

—James Salter, Light Years