“Light is good company, when alone; I took my comfort where I found it, and the warmest yellow bulb in the living-room lamp had become a kind of radiant babysitter all its own.”

“I had a good-talking candle last night in my bedroom. I was very tired but I wanted somebody to be with me, so I lit a candle and listened to its comfortable voice of light until I was asleep.”

Richard Brautigan (1935–1984) American novelist, poet, and short story writer

“I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else.”

Joshua Slocum (1844–1909) American navigator and maritime writer

“When I was a beggarly boy,
And lived in a cellar damp,
I had not a friend nor a toy,
But I had Aladdin's lamp.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

“Smoking had become my favorite thing in the world to do. It was like having instant comfort, no matter where or when.”

Augusten Burroughs book Running with Scissors

“A truth was being revealed to me: that I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I had never had any light of my own. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow.”

Zadie Smith book Swing Time

“Keep a good head and always carry a light bulb.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

“There’s a part of you that insists reality follow the same parameters it always has, even here. That attachment to the way things work in the living world precludes this kind of manipulation. I, on the other hand, had the privilege of spending a good portion of time, when I was alive, in the paroxysms of my own insanity. Rather liberating, in its own way.”

Lawrence M. Schoen (1959) American writer and klingonist

“I wasn't a misanthrope and I wasn't a misogynist but I liked being alone. It felt good to sit alone in a small space and smoke and drink. I had always been good company for myself.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

“We are all such a waste of our potential, like three-way lamps using one-way bulbs.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist