Quotes About Isolation

Man disavows, and Deity disowns me; Hell might afford my miseries a shelter; Therefore Hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths all Bolted against me. Hard lot! encompassed with a thousand dangers, Weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors, I'm called, if vanquished, to receive a sentence Worse than Abiram's. Him the vindictive rod of angry Justice Sent quick and howling to the centre headlong; I, fed with judgement, in a fleshy tomb, am Buried above ground.

In a fleshy tomb I am buried above ground.

The Castaway" Obscurest night involved the sky, The Atlantic billows roared, When such a destined wretch as I, washed headlong from on board. Of friends, of hope, of all bereft, His floating home forever left...

All at once A fresher wind sweeps by, and breaks my dream, And I am in the wilderness alone.

Fetch me the money box and some punkwood, will you, my boy?" Gannon asked him, licking the honey from his plate. (I fear table manners in the cabin-indeed, all manners-had suffered since Gannon and his son had been left to themselves.)

In the course of this, in what seemed to many of its wisest minds an act of wilful self-harm, the English had unilaterally cut themselves off from the most powerful institution in Europe, so

turning themselves in the eyes of many Europeans into something of a pariah nation. As a result, isolated from their baffled neighbours, the English were forced to scour the globe for new markets and commercial openings further afield. This they did with a piratical enthusiasm.

Nor is it the least advantage to health, accruing from such a way of life, that it expose those who follow it to fewer temptations to vice, than persons who live in crowded society.

Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely.

The dark world seemed to lie stricken beneath the cold moon and the lidless stars.

Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely.

He was continually called upon to explain himself and day by day it had grown harder so that by now there didn't seem to be any words, the right phrases hadn't been coined yet.

For the first time in his life he realized that sometimes in life you go through doors that only open one way. You can stand before them and think about whether you want to go through them or not. But when you do and the door closes behind you there is no way to go back. The door is featureless and unknobbed and smooth as a sheet of glass. You can pound on it and claw till your fingers are bleeding, scream until your throat is raw, but no one will open the door, no one will even hear you.

Were there darker provinces of night he would have found them. —CORMAC MCCARTHY, Child of God, 1973

It was a place if not hell then certainly the room across the hall from it.

As night deepened all he could see was the shifting line of fire, like some malfunction in the wiring of the world itself, as if the very night had combusted and was creeping incrementally toward him.

Hunkered there in the darkness, he felt before himself a door, madness already raising the hand to knock.

S]ometimes in life you go through doors that only open one way. You can stand before them and think about whether you want to go through them or not. But when you do and the door closes behind you there is no way to go back. The door is featureless and unknobbed and smooth as a sheet of glass. You can pound on it and claw till your fingers are bleeding, scream until your throat is raw, but no one will open the door, no one will even hear you.

She suddenly heard a wave of sound, cicadas and whippoorwills and crickets that just abruptly assailed her, and she wondered if they'd just begun or if they had already been calling and all she'd heard was the banjo music, ancient and myth-laden and somehow enticing, like sound seeping through the cracks of a place you couldn't get to anymore

He stayed out of the house, he was much of the time in the woods, he felt like some animal half domesticated but ultimately unable to resist the feral ways of the forest. The spring nights were fecund and warm and alive, and there were nights he did not come in at all.

The man wore a dark fedora and beneath its brim the fierce empty eyes looked out as if they were coming from a thousand miles away, and were off immediately another thousand in some other direction.

One of the liberating effects of science fiction when I was a teenager was precisely its ability to tune me into all sorts of strange data and make me realize that I wasn't as totally isolated in perceiving the world as being monstrous and crazy

We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self.

Maybe there is a beast… maybe it's only us.