cloistered

Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife
Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;
Along the cool sequester'd vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

Thomas Gray (1716 - 1771




I was never less alone than when by myself.

Edward Gibbon (1737 - 1794)







My dreams were all my own;
I accounted for them to nobody;
they were my refuge when annoyed—my dearest pleasure when free.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797 - 1851)




Nobody can have the soul of me.
My mother has had it, and nobody can have it again.
Nobody can come into my very self again, and breathe me like an atmosphere.

D. H. Lawrence (1885 - 1930)

We must reserve a little back-shop, all our own, entirely free,

wherein to establish our true liberty and principal retreat and solitude.

Attributed to Michel de Montaigne (1533 - 1592)

And I was taught to feel, perhaps too much,

The self-sufficing power of Solitude.

William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850)

I stood Among them,

but not of them; in a shroud Of thoughts

which were not their thoughts

I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs: A palace and a prison on each hand.
Lord Byron (1788 - 1824)