Quotes About Isolation

Sleep came upon me as it came on many other outcasts, against whom house-doors were locked, and house-dogs barked, that night—and I dreamed of lying on my old school-bed, talking to the boys in my room; and found myself sitting upright, with Steerforth's name upon my lips, looking wildly at the stars that were glistening and glimmering above me.

The large rooms are too cramped and close. She cannot endure their restraint, and will walk alone in a neighbouring garden.

To stop the clock of busy existence at the hour when we were personally sequestered from it, to suppose mankind stricken motionless when we were brought to a stand-still, to be unable to measure the changes beyond our view by any larger standard than the shrunken one of our own uniform and contracted existence, is the infirmity of many invalids, and the mental unhealthiness of almost all recluses.

like a bad lobster in a dark cellar.

Oh! but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire, secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.

External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather

A multitude of people and yet a solitude.

Few people enjoy associating with angry people...As a result, angry people are increasingly alone and not included, invited or involved. This isolating effect makes many angry people even angrier...Over time, the angry person finds himself or herself intensely lonely.

Our worst pain is confined within our own skin.

Humble is such a lonely word.

Home is where you can say anything you like cause nobody listens to you anyway.

Night lies beside me Chaste and cold as a sharp sword. It and I alone.

Night — the quiet of solitude — the silence of loneliness

To live alone, one must be a beast or a god — says Aristotle — leaving out the third case: that one must be both — a philosopher.

In the nineteenth century, among other things, they didn't have telephones. You can become the victim of telephones. That's why I hate talking on the phone. Sometimes I put it in the refrigerator.

Some places speak distinctly. Certain dark gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck.

When others, a man begins to blame He'll soon find himself alone, The same.

Science was false by being unpoetical. It assumed to explain a reptile or mollusc, and isolated it, — which is hunting for life in graveyards. Reptile or mollusc or man or angel only exists in system, in relation... Science does not know its debt to imagination.

Herman Melville, "Bartleby"

As the truest society approaches always nearer to solitude, so the most excellent speech finally falls into Silence.

Smoke your pipe and be silent; there's only wind and smoke in the world.

There is one inescapable fact: by the time the SOS was sent, the Morro Castle was beyond help.

Dr. Cochrane and his sister were alone on the sun deck watching the last hold being filled with a cargo of salted hides. The stench was awful.

Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults.