Love Quote by Carrie Donovan

Carrie Donovan, the legendary American fashion editor with the signature black glasses and a flair for drama, built a career on decisive taste. The declaration "I love being by myself" distills a philosophy that underpinned her authority. In an industry defined by spectacle and social circulation, the claim for solitude is a countercultural move. It asserts that the core of style is not noise but judgment, and judgment needs space.

The sentence is short, almost clipped, yet unusually affectionate. The operative word is love. Not tolerating solitude, not enduring it between parties and runway shows, but celebrating it. That affection reframes aloneness as a resource. For an editor, the work is an act of subtraction: removing the extra, seeing the line, hearing the signal in the blur. Being by oneself becomes the studio where the eye resets, where instinct can be heard without chorus or consensus.

There is also a stance of autonomy in that choice of phrasing. "By myself" carries agency. It is not the passivity of being left alone; it is the active creation of a boundary that protects a point of view. Coming from a woman who shaped magazine pages at Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and The New York Times Magazine, the sentence reads as professional practice and personal ethic. It answers the pressure to be perpetually available with a clear no. The self is not a concession to the agenda of others. It is a place to live.

That distinction between solitude and loneliness matters. Loneliness is absence; solitude is presence without audience. Donovan turns solitude into companionship with the self, and by doing so models a kind of independence that makes taste possible. The public persona may be flamboyant, even performative, but the source is private. Loving to be by oneself is the quiet engine of discernment, the courage to like what you like, even when no one is looking.