Quotes About Isolation

Everything, alas, is an abyss, -- actions, desires, dreams, words!

I watch the springs, the summers, the autumns; And when comes the winter snow monotonous, I shut all the doors and shutters To build in the night my fairy palace.

it helps that in michigan everyone goes inside from november through april. but from may until october they are outside, on display, and all of a sudden if you are single, you have a window to heaven and no way at all to get in.

In February, the overcast sky isn't gloomy so much as neutral and vague. It's a significant factor in the common experience of depression among the locals. The snow crunches under your boots and clings to your trousers, to the cuffs, and once you're inside, the snow clings to you psyche, and eventually you have to go to the doctor. The past soaks into you in this weather because the present is missing almost entirely.

He stopped and leaned against a pole and looked up at the deaf and swollen sky. It was a movement of dark shapes, a hurrying, a running. He closed his eyes. ("Hunger")

The winters came early, the rains not often enough, the locusts rose in biblical scale, the land broke hard to the plow, the price for the crops hardly ever enough, the isolation beyond imagination, the long nights forever, and summer sun exploding in their faces and searing their dreams with flames.

But now, severed from the companion of my infancy, the partaker of all my thoughts, my cares, and my wishes, I was like one set afloat upon a stormy sea, hanging his safety upon a plank; night was closing upon him, and an unexpected surge had torn him from his hold and overwhelmed him forever.

Books are cold," declared Arthur Merwyn. They "allow no questions, offer no explanations... They talk to us behind a screen. Their tone is lifeless and monotonous. They charm not our attention by mute significances of gesture and look.

This scene is adapted to my temper. Its mountainous asperities supply me with images of desolation and seclusion, and its headlong streams lull me into temporary forgetfulness of mankind.

The sleek locks, neat apparel, pacific guise, sobriety and gentleness of aspect by which I was customarily distinguished, would in vain be sought in the apparition which would now present itself before them. My legs, neck, and bosom were bare, and their native hue was exchanged for the livid marks of bruises and scarifications. A horrid scar upon my cheek, and my uncombed locks; hollow eyes, made ghastly by abstinence and cold . . . would prepossess them with the notion of a maniac or ruffian.

I wasn't a misanthrope and I wasn't a misogynist but I liked being alone. It felt good to sit alone in a small space and smoke and drink. I had always been good company for myself.

I don't hate people. I just feel better when they aren't around.

I didn't have any friends at school, didn't want any. I felt better being alone. I sat on a bench and watched the others play and they looked foolish to me.

Do you hate people?" "I don't hate them...I just feel better when they're not around.

there are worse things than being alone but it often takes decades to realize this and most often when you do it's too late and there's nothing worse than too late

Real loneliness is not necessarily limited to when you are alone.

being alone never felt right. sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.

I felt like crying but nothing came out. it was just a sort of sad sickness, sick sad, when you can't feel any worse. I think you know it. I think everybody knows it now and then. but I think I have known it pretty often, too often.

To dare to live alone is the rarest courage since there are many who had rather meet their bitterest enemy in the field, than their own hearts in their closet.

Only the unloved hate; the unloved and the unnatural.

One who shows signs of mental aberration is, inevitably, perhaps, but cruelly, shut off from familiar, thoughtless intercourse, partly excommunicated; his isolation is unwittingly proclaimed to him on every countenance by curiosity, indifference, aversion, or pity, and in so far as he is human enough to need free and equal communication and feel the lack of it, he suffers pain and loss of a kind and degree which others can only faintly imagine, and for the most part ignore.

All by myself, wrapped in my thoughts,And building castles in Spain and in France.

In the tumult of men and events, solitude was my temptation now it is my friend. What other satisfaction can be sought once you have confronted History?

A great country worthy of the name does not have any friends.