“The lecturing is not so bad but the lonely travelling is awful. Anyhow the money is good which is the main thing.”

Balancing an honest admission of loneliness with practical good humour · Letter to George Robertson from Launceston, circa 1900

• Fame
• Solitude

“Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself.”

Elevating solitude over company · Play, An Ideal Husband

• Self
• Society
• Solitude

“Cease to build up your personality with the ejections of irrelevant minds.”

Advocating an identity formed from within rather than borrowed opinions · Aphorisms on Futurism, 1914

• Solitude
• Truth

“No matter where the body is, the mind is free to go elsewhere.”

A tramp-poet's reminder that confinement of place need not confine the imagination · Memoir prose (collected in The True Traveller: A Reader)

• Hope
• Solitude

“I suddenly became conscious of myself as a solitary and wayward person.”

Marks the moment he first claimed a poet's isolation · Recollection of beginning to write in France, 1896

• Identity
• Solitude
• Youth

“I travelled alone, in spite of the civilities of other tramps, who desired company, so as to allow no strange voice to disturb my dreams.”

Presenting solitude as a necessary shelter for imagination · Autobiography, The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp

• Hope
• Solitude

“I am not a poet, and I never wanted to be a poet.”

Expressing his reluctance to adopt the identity of a poet · Letters and autobiographical remarks

• Poetry
• Solitude

“In towns the furthest we see is the other side of the street; but here there is no limit to one’s prospect—Perseus is as visible as Boötes—and one’s thought grows as space increases.”

Suggesting that physical horizons can enlarge the horizons of thought · Mearing Stones, Space

• Imagination
• Nature
• Solitude

“This time of the year makes one so long for the far away — do not you think so?”

Connecting the changing season with longing for distant places and people · Letter fragment, familiar correspondence

• Memory
• Nature
• Solitude

“I had thus a private interest apart from success, and was indeed possessed of a mystery, as it were.”

Finding an inward source of meaning independent of worldly success · Autobiographical Notes, Vol. I, Prologue

• Fame
• Solitude

“I have got enough of it. I want to get away as soon as I can and lay up my heels and do nothing but read story-books.”

A wonderfully candid declaration of his desire to escape public obligations and simply read · Letter, The Victim of Correspondents

• Reading
• Rest
• Solitude

“The beauty of the natural world has been my consolation in hours when human companionship could not reach me.”

Finding consolation in nature during periods of emotional isolation. · Journal

• Consolation
• Nature
• Solitude

“There is no there there.”

A haunting expression of displacement, absence, and the loss of a familiar place · Memoir

• Memory
• Solitude

“I have got tired of appearing on public occasions.”

A frank statement of his growing preference for private life over public appearances · Letter, The Victim of Correspondents

• Independence
• Privacy
• Solitude

“Leave off looking to men to find out what you are not—seek within yourselves to find out what you are.”

An enduring appeal for self-definition rather than identity through comparison · Feminist Manifesto, 1914

• Solitude
• Truth

“It was his decision that his life had to be lived off-stage, behind the scenes, out of view.”

Expressing his lifelong preference for privacy over literary celebrity · Autobiographical essay, Ushant (1952)

• Fame
• Solitude

“It is the plague of epistolatory correspondence, that ever and anon it brings to mind the sad recollection of your absence.”

Observing how correspondence can sharpen rather than relieve absence · Letter to George May Coleridge, 3 January 1820

• Friendship
• Memory
• Solitude

“I could sit for hours listening to the “bubbling” of the strand-bird; but that’s because I am melancholy.”

Connecting an attraction to natural sounds with his own melancholy temperament · Mearing Stones, The Strand-Bird

• Despair
• Nature
• Solitude

“If I believed in a guardian angel — what ought I to pray? 'Protect me from appealing to anybody's pity.”

Expresses his determination to preserve dignity rather than solicit sympathy · Diary, 1932

• Faith
• Solitude

“Books are my only refuge, which I seek not from choice but from necessity, and I try to allay a burning breast with hard intellectual labour.”

Describing reading and intellectual work as a refuge from emotional isolation · Letter to Laurence Binyon, March 1889

• Books
• Solitude
• Work

“When in these fresh mornings I go into my garden before anyone is awake, I go for the time being into perfect happiness.”

Describing the quiet bliss of early solitude among flowers · An Island Garden

• Happiness
• Nature
• Solitude

“The first minister of state has not so much business in public as a wise man has in private.”

Prioritizing inner reflection and intellectual work over public ambitions · Essay, Of Solitude

• Mind
• Solitude
• Wisdom

“Do not give my address to anyone. My family, M. Istace and Nouveau are the only ones who know my present Thebaid. Absolute silence, even to old comrades.”

Original: Ne communique mon adresse à personne. Ma famille, M. Istace et Nouveau sont les seuls à connaître mon actuelle Thébaïde. Donc motus, même aux anciens camarades. — Reflects his deliberate withdrawal and need for limited friendship. · Letter from Rethel to Edmond Lepelletier (French)

• Friendship
• Privacy
• Solitude

“How dreary the state and rank of your second-best great poet, enthroned in dismal glory on the less frequented slopes of Parnassus!”

Observing that formal reputation may bring less affection than intimate readership · Preface to her Collected Poems (1902)

• Fame
• Poetry
• Solitude