1. People
    2.  › 
  2. Sam Parker

Sam Parker Quotes

Total quotes: 4
“And yet at the very same time, like most men, I am drawn to the idea of solitude. Why wouldn't I be? The story of man on his own – unlimited by society, discovering greater truths about life and nature – can be found everywhere. It's in the founding religious texts and the epic poems of the ancient world. It's in Wordsworth's hermit and Thoreau's cabin. It's in Hemingway's noble fishermen and Clint Eastwood's stoic cowboys and in Batman the tortured outsider, and all the other lone superheroes we cheer on.”
— Sam Parker, Alone: How It Feels To Spend A Week In Isolation
Tagged: Aloneness, Solitude
“The final days pass the same as the first: I chop, I build fires, I eat, I sleep, I rest. Only I am thinking differently: my mind has clicked into a gear it has never used before. I begin to take pleasure in cutting the wood, getting better at it until I am dicing the logs like they're onions. Instead of counting down the hours like a prison sentence, I am content to let them drift by.

I sit and write like I did when I was a teenager – sloppily but freely – trying to describe the view outside the front door of the bothy, the way the reds and purples mingle with the greens and browns, the way turquoise fur quivers on the branches of the trees.

I start to think of others fondly, rather than panic because they're not there.

I start to enjoy my own company.

I stop sleeping with the axe.”
— Sam Parker, Alone: How It Feels To Spend A Week In Isolation
Tagged: How To Think, The Wisdom of Solitude
“It's 3:35am in the morning. I am standing in an open doorway, peering into a dark wood, wearing only a pair of thermal long johns. Snow is drifting onto my face from a moonlit sky. My heart is pounding. And I am holding an axe.

Was it a falling tree branch that caused the noise that woke me? Or is there something out there, watching from the shadows? I strain to listen, but can hear nothing except my own breath and the slow whistle of the wind-whipped trees.

I go back inside the hut, wedge a broom under the handle of the lockless door and put the axe by my bed. I lie down. I close my eyes. I add it up again: 62 hours, 35 minutes since I last saw or spoke to another human being.”
— Sam Parker, Alone: How It Feels To Spend A Week In Isolation
Tagged: Beautiful Isolation, Self-Efficiency, Aloneness, Solitude
“We began as disparate tribes, scattered across a giant and unfathomable earth, unaware each other even existed. We settled and built communities. We explored, and merged civilisations. As the population grew, we invented new ways to communicate with each other — always quicker and from greater distances than before – the pinnacle of which is in your pocket or your hand right now.

Along the way, solitude was part of the average human experience. Today, it has been all but eradicated from our lives. It's not just deeply unfashionable, but entirely antithetical to the technological and social changes thrust upon us by the digital age. As social media and tech companies wrestle for our attention, they all fundamentally promise the same thing: wherever we are, whatever we're doing, we never have to be on our own again.”
— Sam Parker, Alone: How It Feels To Spend A Week In Isolation
Tagged: Aloneness, Solitude
loading next page...