These days I prefer my own company, those days too

If I lost everybody around me for standing up for what I believed in then I'd have no qualms - so on choosing solitude over ''everybody around me'' I'd choose solitude every time

I lived in solitude to be at one with oneself, to remove all external judgement, only now it's internal judgement of oneself and I talk to myself

The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can’t see this house. You’d never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn’t see but a few feet ahead. I didn’t meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That’s what I wanted—to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was the ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost.

The rocking of the boat by the waves was soothing but unknown. The men on the shore were asleep. Not the twelve-year-old, though. He shifted and lay on his back and decided to look up at the sky. What he saw took him by surprise. He was basically a city kid. He had never really seen the night sky for what it is. As he stared up at millions of stars, he was filled with a dread he had never known before.
I was just a boy, I said to my wife in a hotel room in Cornwall. I was just a boy on a boat in the universe.

You think you know these people but you forget the world is full of actors and the world is their stage