Quotes About Isolation

And a rock feels no pain; And an island never cries.

Hello darkness, my old friend I've come to talk with you again.

A man walks down the street. It's a street in a strange world. Maybe it's the third world. Maybe it's his first time around. He doesn't speak the language. He holds no currency. He is a foreign man. He is surrounded by the sound, sound of cattle in the marketplace, scatterlings and orphanages. He looks around, around he sees angels in the architecture spinning in infinity and he says, Amen and Hallelujah!

One of the sicknesses of the twentieth century? I'll tell you the worst one. People can't stand to be alone. Can't tolerate it! So they go to the movies, get drive-in hamburgers, put their home telephone numbers in the crapsheets and say 'Please call me up!' It's sick. People hate their own company --- they cry when they see themselves in mirrors. It scares them, the way their faces look. Maybe that's a clue to the whole thing...

To travel unconnected, away from anyone's gaze or reach, is bliss

To travel unconnected, away from anyone's gaze or reach, is a bliss.

And yet on that bench at Jacobacci, I was glad I had left everyone else behind. Although this was a town with a main street and a railway station, and people with dogs and electric lights it was near enough to the end of the earth to give me the impression that I was a solitary explorer in a strange land. That illusion (which was an illusion in the South Pole and at the headwaters of the Nile) was enough of a satisfaction to me to make me want to go forward.

When she was done, I talked to her a little—and I was the only one.

I was tumbling down the side of a dark star.

the conceit of the long-distance traveler is the belief that he is going so far, he will be alone—inconceivable that another person has the same good idea.

No one ever came here; people just went away from it and never returned.

The recluse, the shunner of fame, the "I just want to be alone" escapee—B. Traven was one, so was J. D. Salinger—seems perversely to invite intrusion.

after the town of Tehuacán into the heights of the rocky past, not a person in sight, the summits of these nameless mountains looking scalded and bare and terrifying in their flinty emptiness.

bleak and beautiful expanse of lifeless isolation.

I did not share their joy or feel very kindly toward any of them

And I began writing, to console myself in my solitude and to ease the passing of time.

I had my own compartment - plenty of space, plenty of provisions, the grapes, cookies, chocolates and tea that made being on the Trans-Siberian like a luxurious form of convalescence.

the echo chamber that most expat communities become

the way a backyard might look from a high window in the deep of winter: a skeleton of the world, a tract of abandonment, objects dead and obsolete.

Primeval forest,' he said. 'Original forest.' 'Wouldn't you like to build a house here and live alone with your wife?' 'Yes,' he said. 'Have a family and write something-poems and stories.' 'Maybe have four children.' 'It is not permitted,' he said. Then he smiled. 'But this is so far they wouldn't know. It wouldn't matter. Yes, I would like that.

an ugly steel fence you might associate with a prison perimeter, twenty-five feet high, like nothing I had seen in any other country.

I am still alive, Waking, lonely.

That was the last day I lived in my body. I retreated above the neck, and lived inside the fire in my head ever since.

Human beings can withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness. It is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings.