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Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World QUOTES

Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World QUOTES

1 " As the twenty-first century lurches forward, though, we find that love letters—so awkward, so slow, so exhausting to compose—are an endangered species. We forget that romantic connections benefit from solitude nearly as much as the beloved’s company. "

― Michael Harris , Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

2 " The difference between Before and After is that today we need to safeguard our inner weirdo, seal it off and protect it from being buffeted. Learn an old torch song that nobody knows; read a musty, out-of-print detective novel; photograph a honey-perfect sunset and show it to no one. We may need to build new and stronger weirdo cocoons, in which to entertain our private selves. Beyond the sharing, the commenting, the constant thumbs-upping, beyond all that distracting gilt, there are stranger things waiting to be loved. "

― Michael Harris , Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

3 " Our best thinkers may also crave solitude because, as Storr notes, “ideas are sensitive plants which wilt if exposed to premature scrutiny.”25 "

― Michael Harris , Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

4 " nervous hive mentality; it reminds us the self is no monster after all. "

― Michael Harris , Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

5 " Switching our allegiance from one Big Brother to the next cannot purchase independent thought. "

― Michael Harris , Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

6 " Has social media made us socially obese—gorged on constant connection but never properly nourished? "

― Michael Harris , Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

7 " Our online crowds are so insistent, so omnipresent, that we now must actively elbow out the forces that encroach on solitude’s borders, or else forfeit to them a large portion of our mental landscape. "

― Michael Harris , Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

8 " Until recently, though, there were still moments in the day when the busyness abated and life’s pace decelerated. You would find yourself alone, separated from friends and colleagues, and you would be thrown back on your own resources, your own thoughts. Such interludes could provoke feelings of loneliness and boredom. Yet they also provided opportunities to tap into ideas, perceptions, and emotions inaccessible to the social self. "

― Michael Harris , Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

9 " We cannot compound the ideas of others into a singular meaning for ourselves unless we’re given a private mental workshop in which to hammer at them. (Will I ever be able to write my book, I worry, if I can’t build such a workshop for myself?) Without daydreams our minds are only parrots—or, worse, computers. Daydreams are the engineers of new worlds. "

― Michael Harris , Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

10 " Perhaps future generations will hack the system, move at will between storytelling technologies. As for me, I was retreating from the social option. I began taking myself to the water’s edge in order to read—away from the phone and the terrible Cyclops eye of my modem. On the seawall, bundled against wind and propped up with a sweater for a seat, I rediscovered a frame of mind that I was in danger of forgetting—real, trance-like reading that obliterated my anxieties, my fussing daily life. "

― Michael Harris , Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

11 " The daydreamer is like the tree in which she crouches, oblivious to the red-faced plans of industry. It’s understood that if someone were to come along and put her mind “to use,” she would gain little from the interruption. "

― Michael Harris , Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

12 " Beauty begins the moment you decide to be yourself. —Coco Chanel "

― Michael Harris , Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

13 " To be happily alone is to affirm one’s faith in the love of others. "

― Michael Harris , Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

14 " When speaking: avoid jargon and slang, since “someone with style shuns identification with a group.”65 "

― Michael Harris , Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

15 " To write is to divorce the world and temporarily marry an idea of it instead. "

― Michael Harris , Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

16 " And what about the hundreds of bits of brain-flotsam that I immediately forgot or couldn’t put down in words? The process looks nothing like the Cartesian vision of the mind we’re sometimes fed—with the little man, my “self,” rational and purposeful, at the helm of the brain, guiding me toward a sublime conclusion. Instead, the brain of a daydreamer does not much care whether it arrives anywhere at all "

― Michael Harris , Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

17 " Meanwhile, I start to see time-devouring apps like Candy Crush as pacifiers for a culture unwilling or unable to experience a finer, adult form of leisure. We believed those who told us that the devil loves idle hands. And so we gave our hands over for safekeeping. We long for constant proof of our effectiveness, our accomplishments. And perhaps it’s this longing for proof, for glittering external validation, that makes our solitude so vulnerable to those who would harvest it. "

― Michael Harris , Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

18 " For this reason, Freud writes, “in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his immortality. "

― Michael Harris , Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

19 " This, as the media critic and filmmaker Astra Taylor has pointed out, is digital feudalism. She writes that “sites like Facebook and Tumblr offer up land for content providers to work while platform owners expropriate value with impunity. "

― Michael Harris , Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

20 " They must live. This seems, to me, like the single most salient reason for individual style: we are telling each other that, buried beneath all the common trappings of culture, we are here, and we are human, and we are not to be washed away in a morass of conformity. "

― Michael Harris , Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World