True solitude is not the absence of people, but the presence of God. To place our lives before the face of God, to surrender to the movements of God, is to roam free in a space in which we have been given solitude…. If the eruption of God’s presence in us occurs in silence and solitude, it allows us to remain thrown among, mixed up with, radically joined to all of the people, who are made of the same clay as we are.”

Madeleine Delbrel