Quotes About Isolation

I loved Le Taha'a private resort in Tahiti. It's accessible only by private boat or helicopter, and it sits on a tiny strip of land just big enough for one hotel. It's extraordinary and faces the Vanilla Island where Tahitians grow vanilla.

I would cry all of the time and I didn't know why! I was having shows and after the show I would go to the room, order a big hamburger and a vanilla shake or something like that... and cry because I was so depressed... I think it was because I was too tired.

If I'm really rolling with a short story, I work on it everywhere and end up with a finished draft in a couple months, but a novel really demands that I step out of my life and vanish into the world of the book.

In front of us lay a smooth sandy beach, beyond which rose gradually a high wooded country, and behind us was the sea, studded with numerous islands of every variety of form.

One of the main ways that leadership stays in power is by, in various ways, convincing people that they should just let those who are in government govern: 'Trust us. Trust me. Just let us take care of things. Stay out of it.' Your opinions don't really matter. You are isolated. You are insignificant.

I seem to long for community and mistrust it in equal measure, and so I spend most of my days carefully constructing various communities in stories and seeing if they fly.

There is extraordinary similarities between the Midwest in America and Europe in that there is this sense of vast, open sky and loneliness and cold.

One of the great themes in American literature is the individual's confrontation with the vast open spaces of the continent.

What I would love to see is art that explicitly addresses not personal intimacies but anonymous intimacies: the vast collections of facts about you and me that now exist in giant server banks.

I think there's all kinds of life out there, including intelligent life, but the reason we haven't found each other is because of vast distances.

The noble gases, which reside on the East Coast of the periodic table, are its aristocrats - detached and aloof, never bothering to interact with the rabble of common elements that make up the vast majority of the world.

We shot 'Delusion' in the middle of the desert and outside of Las Vegas where they did those underground nuclear bomb testings. So I only ate oysters and drank coffee because I didn't want to turn into a mutant.

I just became a vegetable for three months. I couldn't talk to people. I was very ill and that was part of the reason I left college.

I didn't actually know what a vegetarian was until I was 13 years old. I know in this day and age it's hard to believe that, but I think because I grew up on a farm, I wasn't indulged in magazines, newspapers, Internet, television. And so, for some reason, I was never exposed to what a vegetarian was.

Sleeplessness is a desert without vegetation or inhabitants.

The doctor punched my vein, the captain called me Cain, upon my belly sat the sow of fear.

One girl used to call me Brownie and tell me to go back to my own country. At lunch, I'd get a bag of chips from the vending machine and eat it in the storage room so I wouldn't have to see her.

I like to show subjects inside a sealed veneer. There's a sense that you can't get in.

The building I most admire is the Doges Palace in Venice, both by day and by night. Looking at it from the lagoon, it resembles a floating kilim carpet. I love all the bridges which connect houses, people, gardens and palaces. I also love moats to isolate yourself. A ha-ha for secrecy, as in every English country garden.

I live at the bottom of a valley. I have a small bookshop in a small town, and I seldom venture far afield.

I once asked a hermit in Italy how he could venture to live alone, in a single cottage, on the top of a mountain, a mile from any habitation? He replied, that Providence was his next-door neighbor.

When you grow up in the city, New York is so big that you can kind of stay in your own little corner of the city and think that that's it because you don't need anything. You don't have to venture out; you don't have to touch the boroughs. You can kind of stay in your neighborhood, and there's everything there.

In 2002 I did a big tour of Europe, by train, by myself, on foot, all the time walking from train station to the venue, in a weird town, in a weird country. I'd brought an acoustic guitar with me but it got broken somehow in transit.

Americans are opting out of public venues like the playground and the sidewalk for private venues like the healthclub and the mall. We're living our lives inside one form of corporation or another.