Quotes About Isolation

It was as if I was in a picture, a flat canvas, and everything around me was flat, me painted on like everything else: no colour, nothing in front and nothing behind me, not even earlier today or tomorrow, nothing to look back or forward to, just this moment.

Cleaners have a dark side, and a zone you can't enter. They get what they want, but they pay for it in solitude. Excellence is lonely. They never stop working, physically or mentally, because it gives them too much time to think about what they've had to endure and sacrifice to get to the top.

This is what schizophrenia is: endless despair, endless, inconclusive treatment; endless clutching at little straws of betterness; endless realisation that that is all they are, is all there is.

Nothing helps. I'm a black spot on the chest X-ray of the universe.

To the CIA, everyone's an outsider.

Wherever I went I felt like the last person awake in a room full of sleepers

He was free and unencumbered. Which is to say alone and unemployed.

Going to the outhouse was an ordeal, a wade through shoulder-high drifts, forced to dig to make forward progress.

It still scares people driving cars named Expedition and Outlander... Throughout the Great Plains, a visitor passes more nothing than something. Or so it seems.

Here in the corner attic of America, two hours' drive from a rain forest, a desert, a foreign country, an empty island, a hidden fjord, a raging river, a glacier, and a volcano is a place where the inhabitants sense they can do no better, nor do they want to.

A decent man would stand out like a cactus on an ice floe.

A Lonely Place Is an Unmotivated Place

Every billionaire suffers from the same problem. Nobody around them ever says, 'Hey, that stupid idea you just had is really stupid.

Rissa Kerguelen by F. M. Busby.

I believe that music and people don't mix; that music should be appreciated alone without seeing or knowing who the musicians are and without other people around. Just listening to music for its own sake, not listening to the people around you and not filtered through what you know about the musician's personal life.

They waited. The door did not open. The rain did not stop. The darkness made a tent and covered them completely.

no one belongs to anyone. We're all cut off at birth with a knife and left at the mercy of strangers. You hear that? Strangers. I know what you want to do. I know you're going to go away to be a soldier. Well-you can go to hell. I'm not responsible. I'm just another stranger. Birth I can give you-but life I cannot. I can't keep anyone alive. Not anymore.

Have you ever felt like you haven't been heard?

Yet something keeps dragging us back to other people. We know we are less than human when we are all alone.

We live with this tension between self-protective isolation and the dream for meaningful relationships.

When Winston Churchill became prime minister in May 1940, Great Britain was alone. The British had won no meaningful battles and had no important allies.

smile, a handshake, or a word of greeting—banal gestures in a normal situation—took on great significance. When friends, colleagues, and acquaintances looked away or crossed the street to avoid contact, fear grew. You might not be sure, today or tomorrow, who feels threatened in the United States. But if you affirm everyone, you can be sure that certain people

When there is no one with time to talk, no chance to find another approach, then we come to feel that we have to choose between pain and pills. [...] When painkillers work, that creates a particular danger, because then we can ignore the deeper sources of suffering. [...] Suffering and self medicating are both lonely activities; they feel like free choices, but they create an imbalance that leaves us in bondage.

Die Nacht, die Stimmung auf dem Schiff und wieder dieses völlige Losgelöstsein von der gewöhnlichen Welt hatten mir jenes rauschhafte Freiheitsgefühl erweckt, das meine Droge ist.