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Women need real moments of solitude and self-reflection to balance out how much of ourselves we give away.

I think female solitude is a mental condition as well as a physical state. You can be married and a spinster. I think spinster is an identity every woman can claim, if she will... I feel like a lot of women, or a lot of feminists, joke about taking to the sea or living alone in a cottage as this kind of fun freedom.

At the moment of childbirth, every woman has the same aura of isolation, as though she were abandoned, alone.

Women today are dealing with both their independence and also the fact that their lives are built around finding and satisfying the romantic models we grew up with.

In Genesis, it says that it is not good for a man to be alone; but sometimes it is a great relief.

Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world alone and leave it alone.

I really don't like that modern notion of 'I don't need anyone.' I see a lot of young women feeling they have to be that way, they have to be hard, in a way. And what does that bring them? They're just going to be lonesome. They're going to be, at best, lonesome and capable, at worst, lonesome and hard. And is that what we want? No.

Women are at once the guardians and the well-spring of the world's faith, morality, and tenderness; and if ever they are degraded to a commonplace level with men, this fine essential quality will be impaired, and their weakness will have to beg and follow where now it guides and controls.

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.