Quotes About Isolation

My destiny doomed me to be in this desert land. I will map it.

In this brutal world of incessantly exploding sound effects, pubescent song lyrics and banal advertisements appealing to the lowest common denominator, the trick is to take refuge with the very small band of survivors who savor words like chocolates.

People who don't have a life have television.

today as then I am a solitary, because I know things and must hint at things which other people do not know, and usually do not even want to know.6

Empirical studies show that New Zealanders are the most widely traveled people on the planet. The computer and the Internet have made a major difference. Insularity, distance, and isolation may have been important in an earlier period of New Zealand's history, but not today. The rapid progress of communications has wrought a revolution in the spatial condition of New Zealand, and yet its culture remains very distinctive. This fact suggests that distance itself is not the key.

Wherever the mind dwells apart is itself a distant place.

I am first affrighted and confounded with that forelorn solitude, in which I am plac'd in my philosophy, and fancy myself some strange uncouth monster, who not being able to mingle and unite in society, has been expell'd all human commerce, and left utterly abandon'd and disconsolate. Fain wou'd I run into the crowd for shelter and warmth; but cannot prevail with myself to mix with such deformity.

I am first affrighted and confounded with that forelorn solitude, in which I am plac'd in my philosophy, and fancy myself some strange uncouth monster, who not being able to mingle and unite in society, has been expell'd all human commerce, and left utterly abandon'd and disconsolate (Hume, 1739, p. 312).

I am first affrighted and confounded with that forelorn solitude, in which I am plac'd in my philosophy, and fancy myself some strange uncouth monster, who not being able to mingle and unite in society, has been expell'd all human commerce, and left utterly abandon'd and disconsolate (Hume, 1739, p. 311-312).

We fear being alone if we express our uniqueness because we lack self esteem and inner security.

There are times when I can find myself in a book, too, for two or three hours. But afterward I have such an urge to go out and reach for other people. Very often they're not around. There's also a metaphysical loneliness. We all feel it. The burden of living one's own life is experiencing sensations that no one else can share. You take a step in a house, you start moving around the house, no one else moves with you. You're walking by yourself.

I, a stranger and afraid In a world I never made." (A. E. Housman)

Our lack of community is intensely painful. A TV talk show is not community. A couple of hours in a church pew each Sabbath is not community. A multinational corporation is neither a human nor a community, and in the sweatshops, defiled agribusiness fields, genetic mutation labs, ecological dead zones, the inhumanity is showing. Without genuine spiritual community, life becomes a struggle so lonely and grim that even Hillary Clinton has admitted "it takes a village".

The truth is I'm in a place without a bright side or a one best thing. I'm in a place where, honest to God, you feel you can kill your friends just by asking the names of stars.

Shed stallion stands in surf gazing out to sea. So large. So noble. Once so powerful. Now completely defeated and alone.

Melancholy persons are foreigners in their mother tongue. The dead language they speak foreshadows their suicide.

When the noise died down, she could lose herself in mathematics—in attempts to combine quantum mechanics with the theory of relativity—and forget the world around her.

It's one thing to refuse an invitation," Aaron said, "another to be told you'll never get one.

We cannot read each other's hearts, and sadly, silence is its own pervasive pastime. We are disposed more to assuming masks than we are to revealing the tenderness and freight within that might transform the world. More than any other time in history it seems the man and woman standing in close proximity to each other in a subway car are as far away from each other as two galaxies.

It would be too easy to say that I feel invisible. Instead, I feel painfully visible, and entirely ignored.

Meggie Folchart: Having writer's block? Maybe I can help. Fenoglio: Oh yes, that's right. You want to be a writer, don't you? Meggie Folchart: You say that as if it's a bad thing. Fenoglio: Oh no, it's just a lonely thing. Sometimes the world you create on the page seems more friendly and alive than the world you actually live in.

David thought books existed to stop you from feeling lonely.

David Foster Wallace: It just makes me a person that's really exhausted a couple other ways to live, you know? And really taken them, taken them to their conclusion. Which for me was a pink room, with no furniture and a drain in the center of the floor.

In one of Updike's stories about Henry Bech, someone tells the novelist that his books "are weeping, but there are no tears." "Troubling Love" is soggy with tears — and the blank mood that follows a good long cry — but you can't isolate the source of the weeping.