“The hermit is alone before God. His hut, therefore, is just the opposite of the monastery. And there radiates about this centralized solitude a universe of meditation and prayer, a universe outside the universe. The hut can receive none of the riches of ‘this world.’ It possesses the felicity of intense poverty; indeed, it is one of the glories of poverty; as destitution increases it gives us access to absolute refuge.”

—Gaston Bachelard, from The Poetics of Space, 1958

Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.
Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks (translated by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins)

As a card-carrying introvert, I am one of the many people whose personality confers on them a preference for the inner world of their own mind rather than the outer world of sociability. Depleted by too much external stimulation, we thrive on reflection and solitude. Our psychic opposites, extraverts, prefer schmoozing and social life because such activities boost their mood. They get bored by too much solitude.

… Scientists now know that, while introverts have no special advantage in intelligence, they do seem to process more information than others in any given situation. To digest it, they do best in quiet environments, interacting one on one. Further, their brains are less dependent on external stimuli and rewards to feel good.

As a result, introverts are not driven to seek big hits of positive emotional arousal—they’d rather find meaning than bliss—making them relatively immune to the search for happiness that permeates contemporary American culture. In fact, the cultural emphasis on happiness may actually threaten their mental health. As American life becomes increasingly competitive and aggressive, to say nothing of blindingly fast, the pressures to produce on demand, be a team player, and make snap decisions cut introverts off from their inner power source, leaving them stressed and depleted. Introverts today face one overarching challenge—not to feel like misfits in their own culture.

Laurie Helgoe, Ph.D, “Revenge of the Introvert”, Psychology Today (via approximation)
In her desolation it was her solace,her opium perhaps. ‘Things of the mind and intellect give me intense pleasure; they delight and amuse me as they are in themselves…and sometimes I think, the result has been too large, the harvest too abundant, in inward satisfaction. This is dangerous.’ Thoughts proliferated.
Virginia Woolf,Sara Coleridge. (via fuckyeahvirginiawoolf)
June said yesterday she was looking for someone to be meek for, since Henry was always the meek one (keeping his prerogative for his writing, the right to defame always in retrospection). The writer is the duelist who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers the insult like another curiosity, spreads it afterward on his desk and fights then, alone. Some people call it weakness. I call it postponement. What is a weakness in a man is the glory of the artist, his quality. What I spill in talk or acts rarely is restituted in writing. What is preserved, collected, is what explodes later in propitious solitude. That is why the artist is the loneliest man in the world: because he lives, fights, wars, dies, is reborn alone, and always alone.
Anais Nin in Incest