“Solitude never hurt anyone. Emily Dickinson lived alone, and she wrote some of the most beautiful poetry the world has ever known… then went crazy as a loon."

Lisa Simpson”

“Counter to the avalanche of messages from our culture, I recognize celibacy not as negation but as a joyous turning inward. “Inebriate of air am I, / And debauchee of dew,” wrote Emily Dickinson, most promiscuous of celibates. “Opulence in asceticism,” Marianne Moore wrote, a phrase that celebrates the solitary life even as it provides a sound bite for saving the planet.”

Fenton Johnson (1953) American novelist

“In solitude she lived,
And in solitude built her nest;
And in solitude, alone
Hath the Beloved guided her,
In solitude also wounded with love. ~ 35”

John of the Cross (1542–1591) Spanish mystic and Roman Catholic saint

“Sappho is a great poet because she is a lesbian, which gives her erotic access to the Muse. Sappho and the homosexual-tending Emily Dickinson stand alone above women poets, because poetry's mystical energies are ruled by a hierach requiring the sexual subordination of her petitioners. Women have achieved more as novelists than as poets because the social novel operates outside the ancient marriage of myth and eroticism.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

“She is one of the most brilliant poets ever and has inspired thousands to write poetry on the level of the Vogons and cause widespread fear of such good poetry.”

Minnie Haskins (1875–1957) British poet and sociologist

“I am the funniest woman that you've ever known.
I am the dullest woman that you've ever known.
I'm the most gorgeous woman that you've ever known and you've never met anyone
Who is as everything as I am sometimes.”

Alanis Morissette (1974) Canadian-American singer-songwriter

“Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.”

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate

“Some may never live, but the crazy never die.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

“Because of the distrust that has grown from our experience, we are very careful whom we welcome. We are selective in our companions, we look suspiciously those who sit beside us in a bar and start talking to us: “is he crazy? What’s he up to?” we wonder. The city becomes a desert. With groups of friends who are nobody else’s friends. As Emily Dickinson, the reclusive poet, once wrote: “The soul selects its own society, then shuts the door.””

Michael Elmore-Meegan (1959) British humanitarian

“they simply never understand,
do they,
that sometimes solitude
is
one of the most beautiful
things
on earth?”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer