These images convey a sense of loneliness, an emotion which is often unwanted and unwelcome. Yet, the following quotes give a measure of how many people enjoy this feeling, in the company of what means more. Needless to say, I have always enjoyed solitude, perhaps because I feel great in my own company. This is why Jean-Paul Sartre and I share the same opinion: "If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company."

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more”
― Lord Byron

“For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others... and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.”
― Virginia Woolf

“You cannot be lonely if you like the person you're alone with.”
― Wayne W. Dyer

“To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.”
― Anthony Burgess