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Book Quotes About Solitude

By Lucy Levine · Updated November 3, 2026

The best book quotes about solitude are rarely about loneliness. Thoreau, Dickinson, Montaigne and Charlotte Brontë write about being alone as something chosen, defended, even enjoyed, while Defoe, Mary Shelley and Melville show what happens when it is forced on someone. Below are twelve lines on both kinds, each copied from the full text and cited to the chapter, with a note on the scene it comes from.

One habit is worth keeping in mind as you read them. A line about solitude almost always has a crowd just out of frame: the neighbours who ask Thoreau if he is lonesome, the visitors Dickinson’s soul refuses, the footprint on Crusoe’s beach. The company is what gives the solitude its shape.

Book quotes about solitude as a choice

1. Thoreau, on the best companion

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

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Henry David Thoreau, Walden, chapter “Solitude”

This is the most quoted sentence in Walden, and the joke in it is easy to miss: companionable is a word for people, and Thoreau gives it to an absence. The lines that follow are sharper still. He argues that a student in a crowded college can be as solitary as a hermit, and that loneliness is not a matter of distance at all.

2. Thoreau, on visitors

I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when nobody calls.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, chapter “Solitude”

A deadpan line that reads like a complaint until you reach the end of it. The company he means is the pond, the loon and the weather, and he goes on to say he is no more lonely than the loon that laughs on the water. It is a good corrective to the idea that Thoreau was grim about being alone. He is having fun.

3. Montaigne’s back shop

we must reserve a backshop, wholly our own and entirely free, wherein to settle our true liberty, our principal solitude and retreat.

Michel de Montaigne, Essays, Book I, chapter XXXVIII, “Of Solitude” (Charles Cotton translation)

Montaigne’s image is commercial, not spiritual. The shop at the front is where you deal with wife, children and goods; the room behind it belongs to you alone. His point, made a sentence later, is practical: keep that room furnished, so that if you ever lose the rest, being without it will be no new thing. It is solitude as insurance.

4. Dickinson shuts the door

The soul selects her own society, / Then shuts the door; / On her divine majority / Obtrude no more.

Emily Dickinson, Poems, First Series, “Life” XIII

The Gutenberg edition prints this poem under the editors’ title Exclusion, which is blunter than anything in it. The verbs do the work: the soul selects, then shuts. In the next stanza an emperor kneels on her mat and she is unmoved. Solitude here is not a retreat from the world but a verdict on it.

5. Dickinson, nobody

I’m nobody! Who are you? / Are you nobody, too?

Emily Dickinson, Poems, Second Series, “Life” I

The companion poem, and a funnier one. Being nobody turns out to be a club with two members, and the second stanza mocks the alternative: being somebody is How public, like a frog, croaking your name to an admiring bog. Few poems about privacy are this cheerful.

6. Jane Eyre refuses

I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, chapter XXVII

Jane says this to herself on the night she learns Rochester has a living wife. An inner voice has just asked who in the world cares for her, and this is her answer. The line turns solitude into a moral position: she will leave the only home she has had precisely because staying would cost her that self-respect. Before dawn she leaves with a parcel of linen and a purse of twenty shillings, all the money she has.

When solitude is a sentence

7. Lockwood’s mistake

In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society. A perfect misanthropist’s Heaven

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, chapter I

The narrator of Wuthering Heights arrives in Yorkshire pleased to have found somewhere lonely, and assumes his landlord, Heathcliff, is the same sort of man. He is badly wrong. Lockwood’s solitude is a pose he can afford; Heathcliff’s is grief and rage. The whole novel sits in the gap between the two.

8. Crusoe’s parrot

Robin, Robin, Robin Crusoe: poor Robin Crusoe! Where are you, Robin Crusoe? Where are you? Where have you been?

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, chapter X

Crusoe wakes to a voice calling his name and is terrified, until he realises it is Poll, his parrot. The bird is repeating the bemoaning language Crusoe used to teach it. It is the strangest moment of company in the book: the only voice on the island is his own self-pity, played back to him.

9. The footprint

I was exceedingly surprised with the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen on the sand. I stood like one thunderstruck, or as if I had seen an apparition.

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, chapter XI

After years of wishing for company, Crusoe finds evidence of it and is frightened out of his wits. Defoe’s insight is that long solitude does not make a person hungry for others so much as afraid of them. He runs back to his fortification, mistaking every bush and tree for a man, and calls it his castle from then on, worse off than when he was sure he was alone.

10. The creature’s complaint

Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, chapter 10

Spoken by the creature to Victor on the glacier below Mont Blanc, at their first real meeting. It is an argument, and a good one: his violence is the product of exclusion, not its cause. Later he puts the same case in five words, I am alone and miserable, and asks Victor to make him a companion. Our reading of Frankenstein looks at how much better the creature talks than his maker.

11. Pip in the open sea

But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it?

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter 93, “The Castaway”

Pip, the youngest hand on the Pequod, jumps from a whaleboat and is left floating while the crew chases a whale. The ship itself picks him up, By the merest chance, but his mind does not come back with him. Melville’s phrase, concentration of self, is the precise horror: alone in that much water, there is nothing left to think about but yourself. The sea gets its own collection in book quotes about the sea.

12. The last word from the creature

Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, chapter 24

Over Victor’s body, the creature compares himself to the fallen angel and finds Satan better off. Even hell had company. It is the bleakest line on this list, and it is the sentence Shelley chose to close the creature’s case with before he leaves for the ice.

Quick reference

Quote fragment Book Chapter
“so companionable as solitude” Thoreau, Walden Solitude
“when nobody calls” Thoreau, Walden Solitude
“we must reserve a backshop” Montaigne, Essays Book I, XXXVIII
“The soul selects her own society” Dickinson, Poems First Series, Life XIII
“I’m nobody! Who are you?” Dickinson, Poems Second Series, Life I
“The more solitary, the more friendless” C. Brontë, Jane Eyre XXVII
“A perfect misanthropist’s Heaven” E. Brontë, Wuthering Heights I
“poor Robin Crusoe!” Defoe, Robinson Crusoe X
“the print of a man’s naked foot” Defoe, Robinson Crusoe XI
“I alone am irrevocably excluded” Shelley, Frankenstein 10
“such a heartless immensity” Melville, Moby-Dick 93
“I am alone” Shelley, Frankenstein 24

Reading them together

Split the list down the middle and a pattern shows. The writers who praise solitude, Thoreau and Montaigne above all, had a town within walking distance and chose when to go back. The characters who suffer from it did not choose: Crusoe was shipwrecked, the creature was abandoned at birth, Pip was left in the water. Jane Eyre is the interesting exception, because she chooses solitude at the moment it hurts most, and the novel treats that as her strongest act.

If you want more lines with the scene around them, the same method runs through our Virginia Woolf quotes and Jane Austen quotes. And for a habit that began as a solitary one, see the history of the commonplace book.

One detail to take away: Thoreau’s chapter “Solitude” is followed directly by a chapter called “Visitors”, which opens with him saying he loves society as much as most people. Read the two together and the most famous solitude chapter in American writing turns out to be half of a pair.

Sources

More to read

Looking for lines from modern novels? Browse Lucy’s own quote collection.

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