Quotes About Isolation

We just sat there and watched the plane pass the island, and it never came back," he said. "I could see it on the radar. It makes you feel terrible. Life was cheap in war.

That night, before he tried to sleep, Louie prayed. He had prayed only once before in his life, in childhood, when his mother was sick and he had been filled with a rushing fear that he would lose her. That night on the raft, in words composed in his head, never passing his lips, he pleaded for help.

All I see, he thought, is a dead body breathing.

The crash of Green Hornet had left Louie and Phil in the most desperate physical extremity, without food, water, or shelter. But on Kwajalein, the guards sought to deprive them of something that had sustained them even as all else had been lost: dignity.

In September 1942, a B-17 crashed in the Pacific, stranding nine men on a raft. Within a few days, one had died and the rest had gone mad.

Blackout curtains were hung in windows across America, from solitary farmhouses to the White House.

With arms shrunken to little more than bone and yellowed skin, the castaways waved and shouted

We just sat there and watched the plane pass the island, and it never came back," he said. "I could see it on the radar. It makes you feel terrible. Life was cheap in war.

McMullen came out of Japan racked by nightmares and so nervous that he was barely able to speak cogently. When he told his story to his family, his father accused him of lying and forbade him to speak of the war. Shattered and deeply depressed, McMullen couldn't eat, and his weight plunged back down to ninety pounds. He went to a veterans' hospital, but the doctors simply gave him B12 shots.

Only the Laundry Knew How Scared I Was

They were alone on sixty-four million square miles of ocean. A month earlier

Louie and Phil were separated again, and Louie was locked in an officer's cabin. Every few days, he had strange visits from a grinning sailor who would lean into the room, say, "Thump on the head for a biscuit?," rap his knuckles on Louie's head, hand him a biscuit, and amble away.

From this day forward, until victory or defeat, transfer, discharge, capture, or death took them from it, the vast Pacific would be beneath and around them. Its bottom was already littered with downed warplanes and the ghosts of lost airmen. Every day of this long and ferocious war, more would join them.

it was believed that the former sergeant, hunted, exiled and in despair, had stabbed himself to death.

Then she stopped on one tree, one that must be dying. The branches were bare, stark, hardly moving in the wind. How was it Iris had never noticed this tree before? Such a delicate web of boughs and knots and air, it made her feel for the bare branches, made her feel she too was a bare branch, all alone in the air, and made her want to possess, to own, the beauty of those branches. But how?

I realized that feeling isolated while with someone is the worst kind of loneliness.

No one is going to hear what she says whether she speaks or not. Simply she could close her eyes and never speak again. She could suck all of the air in this room-every dust mote, every atom-into her body and hide it inside her…

When I built my luminous prison around you, you simply lay down at the center of it and died.

if you sing a sad song loud enough, the boys on those torpedo boats can hear you under the sea.

Well, I keep forgetting. You never listened to my suggestions. Never asked for my advice. When I built my luminous prison around you, you simply lay down at the center of it and died.

Dost though even know what would become of me? Thou dost not." She exhaled sharply. "Friends would disown me. It is our way. I would be alone!" "No," he said unexpectedly. He turned and held his hand to her, palm upward, empty, a simple masculine offering. "Maddygirl. With... me .

She was afraid, too, frightened of what she found herself becoming. She felt that she was transforming into a malevolent black spider, hunched back in her crack, staring out at the world and despising everything and everyone for having what she did not.

It was high time that she left behind these silly daydreams, before she became odd and ended up locked in some attic, collecting bits of string and candle wax and muttering.

Webs of deceit were not only tangled, they were also very lonely.