Quotes About Isolation

We came home to hatred and disgust and…maybe even worse, indifference.

She backed up against a brick wall. Tears sliding down her face, she moaned, "Please, please don't hurt me. I swear I won't tell nobody what you done. I swear to God. Please." Rogers bent down and picked

Kennedy's guy had never been the same. Quit the Service, divorced, finished his human existence in obscurity in some rat's hole in Mississippi

Bay to the west continued to pound the little spit of land. She had departed from Robie feeling both hopeful and lost, such an unsettling feeling that she was unsure from which end to work through it. If there was even a way to do so. For most of her

don't know. I've found that people in power can be incredibly insulated and therefore unrealistic about what they can accomplish.

I'm afraid of Americans.

À l'intérieur, il se sentait un creux immense et douloureux, comme s'il avait eu le cÅ"ur pris dans un étau de glace. Rien ne semblait pouvoir bouger en lui, au risque de briser quelque chose de chancelant, de précaire.

End-stage addiction is mostly about waiting for the police, or someone, to come and bury you in your shame.

The wilderness is a place of rest—not in the sense of being motionless, for the lure, after all, is to move, to round the next bend. The rest comes in the isolation from distractions, in the slowing of the daily centrifugal forces that keep us off balance.

His desktop was a sheet of black opal with neither paper nor a data console to mar its polished perfection. A small printer perched on the outer edge, as if contemplating suicide in remorse at intruding on so august a personage.

If there's a noise in the woods, and there's nobody around to hear it, is it really a noise? Of course it is, she replied calmly. How did you reach that conclusion? Beldin demanded. Because there's no such thing as an empty place, uncle. There are always creatures around --wild animals, mice, insects, birds --and they can all hear. But what if there weren't? What if the woods are truly empty? Why waste your time talking about an impossibility?

Everyone's lonely, dear," she explained, drawing him close to her. "We touch other people only briefly, then we're alone again. You'll get used to it in time.

There's a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn't happen all the time. It's these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I'm in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don't with other art.

The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.

We all suffer alone in the real world. True empathy's impossible. But if a piece of fiction can alow us imaginatively to identify with a character's pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with their own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple.

He suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre-tornadic stillness of zero sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied.

And when he came to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.

The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.

When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him.

loneliness is not a function of solitude.

she committed suicide by putting her extremities down the garbage disposal-first one arm and then, kind of miraculously if you think about it, the other arm.

I'm not afraid of new things. I'm just afraid of feeling alone even when there's somebody else there. I'm afraid of feeling bad. Maybe that's selfish, but it's the way I feel.

One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.

Here is how to handle being a feral prodigy.