From that time on she lived in lonely caves.

The greatest saints used to avoid as far as they could the company of men, and chose to live in secret with God.

In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong.

Society is the cave. The way out is solitude.

I have gone into the waste lonely places

Guilt and misery shrink, by a natural instinct, from public notice: they court privacy and solitude: and even in their choice of a grave will sometimes sequester themselves from the general population of the churchyard, as if declining to claim fellowship with the great family of man; thus, in a symbolic language universally understood, seeking (in the affecting language of Mr. Wordsworth)

’ Humbly to express
A penitential loneliness.

One was there who left all his friends behind; Who going inland ever more and more, And being left quite alone, at last did find A lonely valley sheltered from the wind, Wherein, amidst an ancient cypress wood, A long-deserted ruined castle stood.

They stood inside their own quiet like a pocket.

He wanted to be where no one would know who he was. He wanted to escape from himself.

hidden places, which had been mysterious mines for exploration in leafy summer, now exposed themselves and their secrets pathetically,

They tried to escape technology, to stay away from that and still have relationships with their fellow humans. Very difficult.

He talked about terrible meetings in lonely places, of cyclopean ruins in the heart of the Maine woods beneath which vast staircases led down to abysses of nighted secrets, of complex angles that led through invisible walls to other regions of space and time, and of hideous exchanges of personality that permitted explorations in remote and forbidden places, on other worlds, and in different space-time continua.

There were human cultures that taught an afterlife of the blessed on mountaintops or in clouds in caverns or oases but she could not recall any in which if you were very very good when you died you went to the beach.

To wander solitary there:
Two paradises ‘twere in one
To live in paradise alone.