"Being solitary is being alone well: being alone luxuriously immersed in doings of your own choice, aware of the fullness of your won presence rather than of the absence of others. Because solitude is an achievement"
About this Quote
Koller draws a hard, unfashionable line between loneliness (a deficit) and solitude (a skill), and she does it with language that quietly refuses self-pity. “Being alone well” is an almost puritan phrasing for something she immediately reframes as pleasure: “luxuriously immersed.” That adverb is doing cultural work. It pushes back against the idea that time by yourself is either punishment or self-improvement homework. Solitude here is indulgence with agency: not empty hours to be endured, but chosen “doings” that restore a sense of authorship over your own attention.
The subtext is a critique of a social order that treats constant availability as virtue. Koller’s “fullness of your own presence” is a rebuke to the way modern life trains us to experience the self as a waiting room for other people’s messages, plans, validations. She’s not romanticizing isolation; she’s renaming the internal shift where you stop measuring a moment by who isn’t there. That move - presence over absence - is essentially a cognitive reorientation, a reclaiming of perception.
“Because solitude is an achievement” lands like a verdict. It implies obstacles: noise, neediness, social scripts, maybe even fear of confronting oneself without witnesses. The sentence also flatters, but not cheaply; it offers a standard. In a culture that markets connection as a product and treats aloneness as a problem to solve, Koller frames solitude as earned competence - a form of quiet power that can’t be outsourced.
The subtext is a critique of a social order that treats constant availability as virtue. Koller’s “fullness of your own presence” is a rebuke to the way modern life trains us to experience the self as a waiting room for other people’s messages, plans, validations. She’s not romanticizing isolation; she’s renaming the internal shift where you stop measuring a moment by who isn’t there. That move - presence over absence - is essentially a cognitive reorientation, a reclaiming of perception.
“Because solitude is an achievement” lands like a verdict. It implies obstacles: noise, neediness, social scripts, maybe even fear of confronting oneself without witnesses. The sentence also flatters, but not cheaply; it offers a standard. In a culture that markets connection as a product and treats aloneness as a problem to solve, Koller frames solitude as earned competence - a form of quiet power that can’t be outsourced.
Quote Details
| Topic | Self-Love |
|---|---|
| Source | An Unknown Woman — Alice Koller (1973). Passage on solitude commonly cited from this book. |
More Quotes by Alice
Add to List
