Quotes About Isolation

I didn't know my dad for a long time. My dad was on drugs and my dad was at the VA Hospital, my dad was off in his own world selling drugs or using them or there would be crack heads in the house or whatever it would be.

As you get older, the summer is less of a vacation and more of a training period by yourself away from the team. It's exciting for me. I felt like I've been really getting better as far as my conditioning every single season as I get older.

My mom and dad never really had friends, never went on vacations. We stayed home. And I see a similarity there: A general anxiety runs pretty deep.

In space, you don't get that much noise. Noise doesn't propagate in a vacuum.

Often, romantic comedies exist in a vacuum, and it's kind of odd.

When you go to vacuum in the airlock and you take the hose off the front of your space suit, there's a little bit of water in there, and you can see that sublimate and ice crystals form and fly away. My thought at that moment was, 'Oh, we are not kidding at vacuum here; we are really in space.'

When I explain to people what was the situation in North Korea, they think, how can such a country exist? They know North Korea is bad in some vague way, not clearly. But when we explain it, they then wonder how can a whole country be modern-day slaves?

This is my saddest story: In grade school, they would have us open our Valentine's cards and read them out loud. I always sent cards to myself because nobody else did.

My Hamlet was about as alienated as you can get. Mine was a bitter and lonely prince. Valid, I think, but maybe tough to root for. I think that romance was missing.

Social media has created a digital latticework, but it has also, for some, created abusive commenters, silos, and validation rather than curiosity.

Because we're in a small town and somewhat isolated from the fast lane of high tech, we've been able to grow and concentrate on our work instead of being distracted by the competition and getting caught up in the soap opera of Silicon Valley.

I really enjoyed staying at an encampment at the top of a hill in the Samburu Reserve in Kenya. You reach it on a small plane; there is no electricity, no city noises and you sleep and shower under the Milky Way, with moths fluttering around a kerosene lamp, knowing that there are elephants and lions roaming free in the valley.

To hike out alone in the desert; to sleep on the valley floor on a night with no moon, in the pitch black, just listening to the boom of silence: you can't imagine what that's like.

We have a choice in Silicon Valley. We can either continue to exist as an island to ourselves, focused on wealth creation and innovation... or we can understand that we are in the middle of a software revolution and answer the nation's call to provide economic opportunity and technology to places left behind.

Too many of the elderly do not have the family or the communal attachments necessary to feel valued; too many are widowed or otherwise alone; too many live in surroundings where they are essentially without the companionship necessary to stimulate a mind in danger of deteriorating.

It wasn't that I got pinned against my locker, but I was intensely aware that the things I valued weren't shared by anyone. Girls didn't like me, and I had few friends.

Loneliness is such an omnipotent and painful threat to many persons that they have little conception of the positive values of solitude and even, at times, are frightened at the prospect of being alone.

I not only lived physically away from my native land, but the values and critical judgments of those closest to me became stranger and stranger.

With no other accessible islands to colonize, the Moriori had to remain in the Chathams, and to learn how to get along with each other. They did so by renouncing war, and they reduced potential conflicts from overpopulation by castrating some male infants. The result was a small, unwarlike population with simple technology and weapons, and without strong leadership or organization.

New Guinea, though it accounts for only a small fraction of the world's land area, encompasses a disproportionate fraction of its human diversity. Of the modern world's 6,000 languages, 1,000 are confined to New Guinea.

Human populations of only a few hundred people were unable to survive indefinitely in complete isolation. A population of 4,000 was able to survive for 10,000 years, but with significant cultural losses and significant failures to invent, leaving it with a uniquely simplified material culture.

The overall picture for Easter is the most extreme example of forest destruction in the Pacific, and among the most extreme in the world: the whole forest gone, and all of its tree species extinct. Immediate consequences for the islanders were losses of raw materials, losses of wild-caught foods, and decreased crop yields.

Zo is het gegaan met de Indiaanse bevolking van San Nicolas-eiland, voor de kust van Los Angeles, die uiteindelijk werd gereduceerd tot één enkele vrouw die in volstrekte afzondering nog 18 jaar leefde.[...] Brachten de laatste inwoners van Henderson veel tijd door op het strand, generatie na generatie starend over zee in hoop de kano's te zien die nooit meer kwamen, totdat zelfs de herinnering aan hoe een kano eruitzag was vervaagd?

Toen de bewoners van Paaseiland in de problemen kwamen, konden ze nergens heen, was er niemand bij wie ze hulp konden zoeken - en wij moderne aardbewoners zullen evenmin elders ons heil kunnen zoeken als onze problemen groter worden. Dat zijn de redenen waarom mensen de ondergang van Paaseiland zien als een metafoor, een doemscenario voor wat ons in onze eigen toekomst misschien te wachten staat.