Quotes About Isolation

The Yellow Wallpaper] was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.

I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time. Of course I don't when John is here, or anybody else, but when I am alone.

I don't like to look out of the windows even—there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper, as I did?

It was not a pleasant evening. She tried to read, but the insistent gnawing thought that her life was done, and not very well done at that, appeared on every page. She tried to sew—but the work she had at hand was unsatisfactory. "It's only another failure!" she said to herself, and laid it down. She had no fancy work. If her books failed her she was lonely indeed.

Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able, - to dress and entertain, and order things

It is the strangest yellow, that wallpaper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw - not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things.

I always lock the door when I creep by daylight.

John doesn't know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him. It is getting to be a great effort for me to think straight. Just this nervous weakness I suppose.

It's a sad thing not to have friends, but it is even sadder not to have enemies.

We ourselves, a revolutionary government, part of the people, have learned by always asking the people and without ever isolating ourselves from them. Because he who governs, yet isolates himself in an ivory tower and tries to lead the people with formulas, is lost and is on the road to despotism. The people and the government should always be one.

I assume they're still there, ostriching themselves and eating paint chips, or whatever it is they do in their spare time. I

Soon the bare but civilized streets of St. Paul gave way to emptier places with shorter buildings and fewer streetlights … and then no buildings, and no streetlights, and after a few turns I was urging the Nissan along a two-lane road in the middle of what could best be described as the geographic center of Godforsaken, Bumblefuck. The

Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.

I was a pebble. I was a leaf. I was the jagged branch of a tree. I was nothing to them and they were everything to me.

Alone had always felt like an actual place to me

Maybe I was more alone than anyone in the whole wide world. Maybe that was okay.

Being with him felt unbearable, but being with anyone else did too.

I'd only wanted to be alone. Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.

Fear of being alone is not a good reason to stay

The people in my life were like the BandAids that had blown away in the desert wind that first day on the trail. They scattered and then they were gone.

I was a pebble. I was a leave. I was the jagged branch of a tree. I was nothing to them and they were everything to me.

Their leaving made me melancholy, though I also felt something like relief when they disappeared into the dark trees. I hadn't needed to get anything from my pack; I'd only wanted to be alone. Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.

I was alone. I was barefoot. I was twenty-six years old and an orphan too. An actual stray, a stranger had observed a couple of weeks before, when I'd told him my name and explained how very loose I was in the world.

Z is like a motorcycle with no one on it. Beautiful. Going nowhere.