anchorite

• Applying the term anchorite to me is perhaps a juster comparison than you think I pass entire weeks without exchanging a word with a human being, and at the end of the week it is not possible for me to recall a single day nor any event whatsoever. —  The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters
• The room of an anchorite (male) or an anchoress (female) would be bricked up after the person had entered. —  BlogHer
• And in any case an anchorite, and a woman-hater, would never be much in my line. —  The Great Amulet
• Our large trading cities bear to me very nearly the aspect of monastic establishments in which the roar of the mill-wheel and the crane takes the place of other devotional music; and in which the worship of Mammon or Moloch is conducted with a tender reverence and an exact propriety; the merchant rising to his Mammon matins with the self-denial of an anchorite, and expiating the frivolities into which he may be beguiled in the course of the day by late attendance at Mammon vespers. —  A Joy For Ever (And Its Price in the Market)
• Undoubtedly the cave was once the abode of an anchorite, for on each side of the entrance a Latin cross is deeply carved in the rock, while within, at the further side, and opposite the door, a block of stone four feet high was left for an altar. —  Irish Wonders

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