Quotes About Isolation

Writing fiction is a solitary occupation but not really a lonely one. The writer's head is mobbed with characters, images and language, making the creative process something like eavesdropping at a party for which you've had the fun of drawing up the guest list. Loneliness usually doesn't set in until the work is finished, and all the partygoers and their imagined universe have disappeared.

I'd look on as old men walked down city streets arm in arm with their wives. I would watch babies resting on their mothers' bellies in patches of grass and sunlight in Central Park. I would watch cigarette-smoking teenagers glittering with meanness and youth, whispering and laughing as they shopped on lower Broadway. These exchanges of intimacy were all the same to me because they excluded me [...]

North Korea is perhaps the darkest place in the world. The country lacks electricity; everything is gray and monotone

it's a good thing I'm used to this; the process of shutting things out as they fall apart, the pretence of cool in a dry, hot season, the taste of redemption in a t.v. screen if God had a voice what would it say?

Why is it?.. I'm so sad and so lonely. But the tears just won't come.

Lieutenant Onada, sir, reporting for orders

It was a little before noon on March 9, 1974, and I was on a slope about two hours away from Wakayama Point.

This was the place where I had met and talked with Norio Suzuki two weeks before. Just two days earlier a message from Suzuki asking me to meet him here again had been left in the message box we had agreed on, and I had come. I was still afraid it might be a trap. If it was, the enemy might be waiting for me on the hill.

Suzuki was standing with his back to me, between the tent and a fireplace they had rigged up by the riverbank. Slowly he turned around, and when he saw me, he came toward me with arms outstretched. "It's Onoda!" he shouted. "Major Taniguchi, it's Onoda!

Although I drank little, I smoked about twenty cigarettes a day, and when I played mahjong all night long, as I sometimes did, I smoked fifty or more. I did not have much to do with the other Japanese in Hankow, and for that reason I was soon able to speak Chinese pretty well.

They said they understood and would do as I requested. Then they all thanked me for making it possible for them to destroy themselves. I prepared the explosives and the cannister and left the tent. The feeble voices followed me, "Take care of yourself, Commander!

One day Corporal Fujita picked up a model 99 infantry rifle in the woods. I had earlier found a model 38, and I traded it to Fujita for the model 99, because I had about three hundred cartridges for a 99. I carried this model 99 for the remainder of my thirty years on Lubang.

In the back of my mind I thought of General Yokoyama telling me that as long as I had one soldier, I was to lead him even if we had to live on coconuts.

Although I had a pencil that I had found, I kept all the reports I intended to make in my head. I firmly believed that when friendly troops eventually established contact with us, they would need my reports in planning a counterattack.

Akatsu finally deserted in September, 1949, four years after the four of us had come together.

Shimada spoke even more enthusiastically. "The three of us ought to secure this whole island before our troops land again.

The beach at Gontin was unlucky for Shimada. On May 7, 1954, he was killed at a spot only about half a mile from the place where he had been wounded in the leg.

Not long after that the large search party of 1959 arrived from Japan to look for us. "The Americans seem to be starting another one of their fake rescue operations," I said. "What a nuisance!" growled Kozuka. "Let's move somewhere where it's quiet.

If there should indeed be a full-scale search, we had a plan for escaping from the island, but in the event that we were found before we could carry this into effect, we had resolved to inflict as much damage as we could. If we had to die, it would be easier knowing that we had killed ten or twenty or thirty enemy troops.

At this point Squadron Leader Yamaguchi suddenly smiled. "Anyway," he said, "Lubang is a very good island. There aren't many like it anymore. There's always plenty to eat there, Onoda. At least you don't have to worry about that.

Acting on my own, I ordered the mayor of the town of Lubang to supply us with fifty sacks of polished rice. When the Suehiro and Ã…Å'saki outfits found out about this, without saying anything to me they ordered the mayor to supply them with rice too. The mayor came weeping and said that if the islanders supplied all our demands, they would starve.

I had been sent to this island to fight, only to find that the troops I was supposed to lead were a bunch of good-for-nothings, quick to profess their willingness to die, but actually concerned only with their immediate wants. As if this were not enough, I had no authority to issue orders to them. I could only deploy them with the consent of their commander.

Then, in 1972 Onoda and Kozuka surfaced, and Kozuka was killed in an encounter with Philippine police. In the following half year, three Japanese search parties attempted to persuade Onoda to come out of the jungle, but the only response they received was a thank-you note for some gifts they left. This at least established that he was alive. Owing partly to his reluctance to appear, he became something of a legend in Japan.

When he left Japan, he told his friends that he was going to look for Lieutenant Onoda, a panda and the Abominable Snowman, in that order. Presumably the panda and the Snowman are still waiting, because after only four days on Lubang, Suzuki found Onoda and persuaded him to meet with a delegation from Japan, which Suzuki undertook to summon.