Kate

“How good it feels to be completely alone! To be able to talk to ourselves out loud, to walk around without being looked at, to lean back in an undisturbed reverie! Every house becomes an open field, every room has the breadth of a farm.

The usual sounds are all strange, as if they belonged to a nearby but independent universe. We are kings at last. This is what we all truly long to be, and the most plebeian among us perhaps more ardently than those full of false gold. For a moment we are the universe’s pensioners, recipients of a steady income, with no needs and no worries.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“One may be strengthened & fed without the aid of Joy, & no one knows it better than I do; & I believe I know the only cure, which is to make one’s center of life inside of one’s self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity—to decorate one’s inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome anyone who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same when one is inevitably alone.”
― Edith Wharton, The Letters of Edith Wharton

“Solitude makes it possible for us to literally enjoy ourselves.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“I always had to pretend back then," he said. "Trying to act the way I was supposed to, to understand what people wanted from me. Alone is not synonymous with lonely. Out in the world, everyone tells you to just be yourself but then punishes you if you are. And yet they are right. Alone I can be myself.”
― Maria Romasco Moore, I Am the Ghost in Your House