“Both looked back then on the wild revelry… and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude.”

“The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers — stern and wild ones, — and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne book The Scarlet Letter

“My ideas! It is the house for lodging them that costs me so much to build.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

“It was hidden in a wild wood
Of the larch and pine;
It had been unto his childhood
Solitude and shrine, —
There he dream'd the hours away.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

“We must love them both, those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject, for both have labored in the search for truth, and both have helped us in finding it.”

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) Italian Dominican scholastic philosopher of the Roman Catholic Church

“So, so, break off this last lamenting kiss,
Which sucks two souls, and vapors both away.”

John Donne (1572–1631) English poet

“Michael had once read to her how God had cast a man and woman out of paradise. Yet, for all their human faults and failures. God had shown them the way back in.”

Francine Rivers (1947) American writer

“His voice stopped and they looked for a long quiet moment into each other's eyes and between them lay the sunny lost youth that they had so unthinkingly shared.”

Margaret Mitchell (1900–1949) American author and journalist

“Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author

“Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god.”

Aristotle (-384–-321 BC) Classical Greek philosopher, student of Plato and founder of Western philosophy