Solitude is defined as a state of seclusion or isolation, i.e., lack of contact with people. It can have both positive and negative effects, depending on the situation. Short-term Solitude is often valued as a time when one may work, think, or rest without being disturbed, desire to be in your own presence, and enjoy your own company. Undesirable long-term solitude may stem from bad relationships, loss of loved ones, deliberate choice, infectious disease, mental disorders, neurological disorders, or employment circumstances.

A distinction has been made between solitude and loneliness. They look very similar on the outside, But in this sense, these two words refer, respectively, to the joy and the pain of being alone. Inside, solitude and loneliness are both tremendously different experiences. While solitude is chosen, loneliness is imposed by others.

The capacity to experience true solitude comes from an inner richness. Introverts tend to increase their energy when alone. Extroverts derive their energy from people. And yet, both extroverts and introverts benefit from the power of solitude. Many people throughout history composed their best works in solitude – in fact, they required it. Thoreau did it. His book Walden is a classic, filled with the wisdom of his time alone in the woods.

Don’t also forget to read these being alone quotes to conquer feeling lonely. These solitude quotes will help you clear your mind to focus on your own reflections and values. These are some of the unique thoughts they shared from their solitary experiences.

180 Inspirational Quotes On Solitude

Top 10 Solitude Quotes

“Solitude is strength; to depend on the presence of the crowd is weakness. The man who needs a mob to nerve him is much more alone than he imagines.” – Paul Brunton

“Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.” – May Sarton

“Loneliness expresses the pain of being alone and solitude expresses the glory of being alone.” – Paul Tillich

“We live in a world starved for solitude and silence and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.” – C.S. Lewis

“Solitude vivifies; isolation kills.” – Joseph Roux

“Solitude, isolation, are painful things and beyond human endurance.” – Jules Verne

“To go out with the setting sun on an empty beach is to truly embrace your solitude.” – Jeanne Moreau

“In solitude the mind gains strength and learns to lean upon itself.” – Laurence Sterne

“A man can be himself only so long as he is alone, and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom, for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.” – Arthur Schopenhauer

“Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.” – Aristotle

What is Solitude?

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“Solitude isn’t loneliness. Solitude is when the entire serene universe seems to surround and hold you quietly.” – Victoria Erickson

“Solitude is where one discovers one is not alone.” – Marty Rubin

“Solitude is un-American.” – Erica Jong

“Solitude is the soul’s holiday.” – Katrina Kenison

“Solitude is the richness of self.” – May Sarton

“Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another.” – Octavio Paz

“Solitude is the place of purification and transformation, the place of the great struggle and the great encounter.” – Henri Nouwen

“Solitude is the great teacher, and to learn its lessons you must pay attention to it.” – Deepak Chopra

“Solitude is the attribute of the strong. The weak is always found in the crowd.” – Unknown

“Solitude is strength; to depend on the presence of the crowd is weakness. The man who needs a mob to nerve him is much more alone than he imagines.” – Paul Brunton

“Solitude is painful when one is young, but delightful when one is more mature.” – Albert Einstein

“Solitude is not the absence of company, but the moment when our soul is free to speak to us and help us decide what to do with our life.” – Paulo Coelho

“Solitude is like punctuation. A paragraph without periods and commas would be exhausting to read.” – Arnie Kozak

“Solitude is independence. I’m not anti-social. I’m pro-solitude.” – Beth Buelow

“Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.” – Honoré de Balzac

“Solitude is different from loneliness, and it doesn’t have to be a lonely kind of thing.” – Fred Rogers

“Solitude is creativity’s best friend, and solitude is refreshment for our souls.” – Naomi Judd

“Solitude is bliss.” – Anonymous

“Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.” – James Russell Lowell

“Solitude is a lost art in these days of ultra-connectedness.” – Leo Babauta

“Solitude is a kind of freedom.” – Umberto Eco

“Solitude is a good place to visit but a poor play to stay.” – Josh Billings

“Being solitary is being alone well: being alone luxuriously immersed in doings of your own choice, aware of the fullness of your own presence rather than of the absence of others. Becuase solitude is an achievement.” – Alice Koller

“I can tell you that solitude Is not all exaltation, inner space where the soul breathes and work can be done. Solitude exposes the nerve, Raises up ghosts. The past, never at rest, flows through it.” – May Sarton

“I try to factor solitude into my life because more and more, that’s becoming a very precious and rare commodity.” – Robyn Davidson

“In solitude is healing. Speak to your soul. Listen to your heart. Sometimes in the absence of noise we find the answers.” – Dodinsky

“Language has created the word ‘loneliness’ to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word ‘solitude’ to express the glory of being alone.” – Paul Tillich

“Loneliness is to be avoided, solitude is to be sought.” – Tom Hanks

“Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.” – Octavio Paz

“Not everyone knows how to be alone with others, how to share solitude. We have to help each other to understand how to be in our solitude, so that we can relate to each other without grabbing on to each other. We can be interdependent but not dependent. Loneliness is rejected despondency. Solitude is shared interdependence.” – David Spangler

“Now, more than ever, we need our solitude. Being alone gives us the power to regulate and adjust our lives. It can teach us fortitude and the ability to satisfy our own needs. A restorer of energy, the stillness of alone experiences provides us with much-needed rest. It brings forth our longing to explore, our curiosity about the unknown, our will to be an individual, our hopes for freedom. Alone time is fuel for life.” — Dr. Ester Buchholz

“Solitude, whether endured or embraced, is a necessary gateway to original thought.” – Jane Hirshfield

“Sometimes solitude is one of the most beautiful things on earth.” – Charles Bukowski

“There is a difference between loneliness and solitude, one will empty you, and one will fill you. You have the power to choose.”

“There’s a difference between solitude and loneliness. I can understand the concept of being a monk for a while.” – Tom Hanks

“To have passed through life and never experienced solitude is to have never known oneself. To have never known oneself is to have never known anyone.” – Joseph Krutch

“True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation. One’s inner voices become audible… In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives.” – Wendell Berry

Best Solitude Quotes

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“A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.” – Oscar Wilde

“A man can be himself alone so long as he is alone … if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.” – Arthur Schopenhauer

“Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.” – Edward Gibbon

“Every kind of creative work demands solitude, and being alone, constructively alone, is a prerequisite for every phase of the creative process.” – Barbara Powell

“Find a day for yourself—better yet, late at night. Go to the forest or to the field, or lock yourself in a room … You will meet solitude there. There you will be able to listen attentively to the noise of the wind first, to birds singing, to see wonderful nature and to notice yourself in it … and to come back to harmonic connection with the world and its Creator.” – Rabbi Nahman

“Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude.” – Arthur Schopenhauer

“I chide society, I embrace solitude, and yet I am not so ungrateful as not to see the wise, the lovely and the noble-minded, as from time to time they pass my gate.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I go in solitude, so as not to drink out of everybody’s cistern. When I am among the many I live as the many do, and I do not think I really think; after a time it always seems as if they want to banish myself from myself and rob me of my soul.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

“In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone.” – Rollo May

“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Men fear silence as they fear solitude, because both give them a glimpse of the terror of life’s nothingness.” – Andre Maurois

“Only in solitude do we find ourselves; and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in solitude.” – Miguel de Unamuno

“Ordinary men hate solitude. But the Master makes use of it, embracing his aloneness, realizing he is one with the whole universe.” – Lao Tzu

“That is why I go into solitude so as not to drink out of everybody’s cistern. When I am among the many I live as the many do, and I do not think as I really think; after a time it always seems as though they want to banish me from myself and rob me of my soul and I grow angry with everybody and fear everybody.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

“The best thinking has been done in solitude. The worst has been done in turmoil.” – Thomas A. Edison

“The great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone—that is the secret of invention: be alone, that is when ideas are born.” – Nikola Tesla

“My solitude doesn’t depend on the presence or absence of people; on the contrary, I hate who steals my solitude without, in exchange, offering me true company.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

“The reason that extended solitude seemed so hard to endure was not that we missed others but that we began to wonder if we ourselves were present, because for so long our existence depended upon assurances from them.” – Doris Grumbach

“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.” – Aldous Huxley

“The value of solitude – one of its values – is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression.” – May Sarton

“There’s staggering power in leaving the world and heading out into some solitude for at least and hour every day.” – Robin Sharma

“We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being.” – Hermann Hesse

“We need society, and we need solitude also, as we need summer and winter, day and night, exercise and rest.” – Philip Gilbert Hamerton

“Your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.” – Rainer Maria Rilke

“If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities.” – Maya Angelou

“Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind.” – Nikola Tesla

“You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.” – Franz Kakfa

“O solitude, where are the charms That sages have seen in thy face? Better dwell in the midst of alarms, Than reign in this horrible place.” – William Cowper

Short Solitude Quotes

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“The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.” – Albert Einstein

“A well-ordered mind is at home with solitude.”

“A warrior balances solitude and dependence.” – Paulo Coelho

“He who understands humanity seeks solitude.” – Ali ibn Abi Talib

“I owe my solitude to other people.” – Alan Watts

“I’m not anti-social. I’m pro-solitude.”

“If you can’t stand solitude, maybe you bore others too.”

“In nature, in solitude, the soft voice of wisdom can be heard.”

“In solitude I find my answers.” – Kristen Butler

“In solitude one finds only what he carries there with him.” – Juan Ramon Jimenez

“It is only in solitude that I ever find my own core.” – Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“Letter writing is the only device for combining solitude with good company.” – Lord Byron

“Make the time to be alone. Your best ideas live within solitude.” – Robin Sharma

“One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.” – Carl Sandburg

“Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Solitude appeared to me as the only fit state of man.” – Walter Benjamin

“Solitude was my only consolation – deep, dark, deathlike solitude.” – Mary Shelley

“Solitude terrifies the soul at twenty.” – Molière

“Solitude sometimes is best society.” – John Milton

“Solitude shows us what should be; society shows us what we are.” – Robert Cecil

“Solitude sharpens awareness of small pleasures otherwise lost.” – Kevin Patterson

“Solitude has its own very strange beauty to it.” – Liv Tyler

“Solitude would be ideal if you could pick the people to avoid.” – Karl Kraus

“Solitude, in these days as much as ever, is an absolute necessity.” – Leo Babauta

“The happiest of all lives is a busy solitude.” – Voltaire

“The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.” – Gabriel García Márquez

“The thoughtful soul to solitude retires.” – Omar Khayyam

“Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.” – Franz Kafka

“Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.” – Pablo Picasso

“Religion is what an individual does with his solitariness.” – Alfred North Whitehead

“Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.” – Winston Churchill

“Sometimes the solitary voice can be the best one.” – Frank Miller

Enjoying Solitude Quotes

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“You don’t need to be a monk to find solitude, nor do you need to be a hermit to enjoy it.” – Leo Babauta

“Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.” – Jodi Picoult

“I enjoy the freedom and solitude. In those moments I remember who I am and what I want in life.”

“A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.” – Don DeLillo

“Although the wish for solitude can be a denial of dependence, a capacity for solitude may be its fullest acknowledgment.” – Adam Phillips

“An introvert’s desire for solitude is more than just a preference. It is crucial to our health and happiness.” – Michaela Chung

“Blessed are those who do not fear solitude, who are not afraid of their own company, who are not always desperately looking for something to do, something to amuse themselves with, something to judge.” – Paulo Coelho

“I am a bit of a solitude person – a solitary personality. I like being on my own. I don’t have any major friendships or relationships with people.” – Anthony Hopkins

“I feel the same way about solitude as some people feel about the blessing of the church. It’s the light of grace for me. I never close my door behind me without the awareness that I am carrying out an act of mercy toward myself.” – Peter Høeg

“I like solitude. I like the anomalous life. I like a quiet life.” – Eric Clapton

“I lived in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in maturity.” – Albert Einstein

“I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me. I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me.” – Charles Bukowski

“If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude and leave you by the side of the road with your truth and nothing else.” – Thomas Ligotti

“In stillness lives wisdom. In quiet you’ll find peace. In solitude you’ll remember yourself.” – Robin Sharma

“In the solitude of your dreams grows the flame that will bring the light to this world.”

“Introverts live in two worlds: We visit the world of people, but solitude and the inner world will always be our home.” – Jenn Granneman

“Some people can’t stand being alone. I love solitude and silence. But when I come out of it, I’m a regular talking machine. It’s all or nothing for me.” – Celine Dion

“To make the right choices in life, you have to get in touch with your soul. To do this, you need to experience solitude, which most people are afraid of because in the silence you hear the truth and know the solutions.” – Deepak Chopra

“We live in a very tense society. We are pulled apart… and we all need to learn how to pull ourselves together… I think that at least part of the answer lies in solitude.” – Helen Hayes

“What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Your inner voice is the voice of divinity. To hear it, we need to be in solitude, even in crowded places.” – A. R. Rahman

“A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live.” – Bertrand Russell

“Closed in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is missing out.” – Criss Jami

Solitude is Addictive Quotes

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“Solitude is dangerous. It’s very addictive. It becomes a habit after you realise how peaceful and calm it is. It’s like you don’t want to deal with people anymore because they drain your energy.” – Jim Carrey

“Solitude is dangerous. It’s addicting. Once you see how peaceful it is, you don’t want to deal with people.”

“Don’t fear solitude: If you are never alone, you cannot know yourself. But don’t get too attached to it – it may become an addiction.” – Paulo Coelho

“Give solitude a chance. You’ve got nothing to lose. And your life to gain back.” – Joshua Becker

“I live in solitude. I have need of solitude to do the next day’s work. I can’t be to parties where the noise tires me. I can’t speak on the telephone. I must have complete calm.” – Yves Saint Laurent

“When from our better selves we have too long been parted by the hurrying world, and droop. Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired, how gracious, how benign is solitude.” – William Wordsworth

Solitude Quotes Thoreau

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“You think that I am impoverishing myself withdrawing from men, but in my solitude I have woven for myself a silken web or chrysalis, and, nymph-like, shall ere long burst forth a more perfect creature, fitted for a higher society.” – Henry David Thoreau

“Wherever you may seek solitude, men will ferret you out and compel you to belong to their desperate company of oddfellows.” – Henry David Thoreau

“We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.” – Henry David Thoreau

“In proportion as a person simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude.” – Henry David Thoreau

“I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.” – Henry David Thoreau

“I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.” – Henry David Thoreau

“I have a great deal of company in the house, especially in the morning when nobody calls.” – Henry David Thoreau

“I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.” – Henry David Thoreau

“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.” – Henry David Thoreau

Solitude Quotes Rumi

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“It’s your road and yours alone. Others may walk it with you, but no one can walk it for you.” – Rumi

“A little while alone in your room will prove more valuable than anything else that could ever be given you.” – Rumi

“If you love someone, you are always joined with them–in joy, in absence, in solitude, in strife.” – Rumi

“In Silence there is eloquence.” – Rumi

Solitude Quotes Shakespeare

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“Society is no comfort, to one not sociable.” – William Shakespeare

“I myself am best when least in company.” – William Shakespeare

“I had as lief have been myself alone.” – William Shakespeare

“I and my bosom must debate awhile, and then I would no other company.” – William Shakespeare

One Hundred Years Of Solitude Quotes

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“Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s orders were being carried out even before they were given, even before he thought of them, and they always went much beyond what he would have dared have them do. Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction.” – Gabriel García Márquez

“In spite of the visible hostility of the family, Fernanda did not give up her drive to impose the customs of her ancestors. She put an end to the custom of eating in the kitchen and whenever anyone was hungry, and she imposed the obligation of doing it at regular hours at the large table in the dining room, covered with a linen cloth and with silver candlesticks and table service.” – Gabriel García Márquez

“Aureliano thought without saying so that the evil was not in the world but in some hidden place in the mysterious heart of Petra … Intrigued by that enigma, he dug so deeply into her sentiments so that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her.” – Gabriel García Márquez

“Úrsula suddenly realized that the house had become full of people, that her children were on the point of marrying and having children, and that they would be obliged to scatter for lack of space. Then she took out the money she had accumulated over long years of hard labor, made some arrangements with her customers, and undertook the enlargement of the house.” – Gabriel García Márquez

“The only affection that prevailed against time and the war was that which he had felt for his brother José Arcadio when they both were children, and it was not based on love but on complicity.” – Gabriel García Márquez

“He succeeded in having Macondo raised to the status of a municipality and he was therefore its first mayor, and he created an atmosphere of confidence that made people think of the war as an absurd nightmare of the past.” – Gabriel García Márquez

“The only one who had not lost for a single minute the awareness that [Rebeca] was alive and rotting in her wormhole was the implacable and aging Amaranta. […]Always, at every moment, asleep and awake, during the most sublime and most abject moments, Amaranta thought about Rebeca because solitude had made a selection in her memory and had burned the dimming piles of nostalgic waste that life had accumulated in her heart, and had purified, magnified, and eternalized the others, the most bitter ones.” – Gabriel García Márquez

“He wasn’t only a fierce lover, with endless wisdom and imagination, but he was also, perhaps, the first man in the history of species who had made an emergency landing and had come close to killing himself and his sweetheart simply to make love in a field of violets.” – Gabriel García Márquez

“One minute of reconciliation is worth more than a whole life of friendship.” – Gabriel García Márquez

“Alone, abandoned by his premonitions, fleeing the chill that was to accompany him until death, he sought a last refuge in Macondo in the warmth of his oldest memories. ” – Gabriel García Márquez

“Úrsula, on the other hand, who had suffered through a process opposite to Amaranta’s, recalled Rebeca with a memory free of impurities, for the image of the pitiful child brought to the house with the bag containing her parents’ bones prevailed over the offense that had made her unworthy to be connected to the family tree any longer.” – Gabriel García Márquez

“It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay. ” – Gabriel García Márquez

“Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia.” – Gabriel García Márquez

“Finally in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of loving each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out old people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs.” – Gabriel García Márquez

“When the war was over, while Colonel Aureliano Buendía was sneaking about through the narrow trails of permanent subversion, General Moncada was named magistrate of Macondo. He wore civilian clothes, replaced the soldiers with unarmed policemen, enforced the amnesty laws, and helped a few families of Liberals who had been killed in the war.” – Gabriel García Márquez

“But while the adversaries forgot the war to remember things of the past, Úrsula had the gloomy feeling that her son was an intruder. […] He was preserved against imminent old age by a vitality that had something to do with the coldness of his insides. He was taller than when he had left, paler and bonier, and he showed the first symptoms of resistance to nostalgia.” – Gabriel García Márquez

“Arcadio was a solitary and frightened child during the insomnia plague, in the midst of Úrsula’s utilitarian fervor, during the delirium of José Arcadio Buendía, the hermetism of Aureliano, and the mortal rivalry between Amaranta and Rebeca. Aureliano had taught him to read and write, thinking about other things, as he would have done with a stranger.” – Gabriel García Márquez

“Amaranta could not reconcile her image of the brother who had spent his adolescence making little gold fishes with that of the mythical warrior who had placed a distance of ten feet between himself and the rest of humanity. But when the approach of the armistice became known and they thought that he would return changed back into a human being, delivered at last for the hearts of his own people, the family feelings, dormant for such a long time, were reborn stronger than ever.” – Gabriel García Márquez

“The only difference today between Liberals and Conservatives is that the Liberals go to mass at five o’clock and the Conservatives at eight.” – Gabriel García Márquez

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