Quotes About Isolation

There's no deodorant for desperation.

She protected herself by making herself believe no-one else could ever really understand her.

Karen told me about an old woman who was the last surviving inhabitant of one of the Hermit Islands. She was the only one left who could speak her tribe's language, but the anthropologists didn't realize it and never bothered to learn it from her. When the old woman died, the language died with her.

Facing the cameras with their unsensing triple lenses pointed at him like snouts, Chance became only an image for millions of real people. They would never know how real he was, since his thinking could not be televised. And to him, the viewers existed only as projections of his own thought, as images. He would never know how real they were, since he had never met them and did not know what they thought.

As a vagrant, I was everybody's victim.

Was it contagious, the emptiness I felt? Was he worried he'd catch it?

God, this life is a cold, brittle thing. And yet it's all there is.

I may be sick. I may come from a hole in the ground. My best friend may be an insect. But at least I don't live in decent society.

So I have spent four years without touch and affection and without wanting any. But now there is Christopher Shepherd, the boy who changed all the rules.

Solitude, which I both crave and detest.

Eventually, my tears give out, my voice goes, and my throat is so raw that my body battles against my mind and shuts down my crying. There is nothing left in me now.

One negative thing seems like it overrides a thousand positives. In a sea of love, all you see is the one person drowning.

You have more strength than anyone should. All those years that you were alone? That you isolated yourself? You didn't have friends, you didn't have anyone to be close with, to talk with, or… or play with. You were alone. That must have been painful, and yet you rallied anyway and kept going. It takes strength to stay apart from the crowd. You are brave, Celeste.

He could see it because he knew that lonely people hide secrets more than others.

I'm sorry. I had the volume at a very high level, and the world sort of disappeared.

Sometimes...you can cry until there's nothing wet in you. You can scream and curse to where your throat rebels and ruptures. You can pray, all you want, to whatever god you think will listen. And, still it makes no difference. It goes on, with no sign as to when it might release you. And you know that if it ever did relent...it would not be because it cared.

It's a frightening world to be alone in.

The numbing mind-ream of knowing you're alone not because people won't accept you but because you find so little worth accepting. An imposed solitude is better than simply tolerating your company in waiting for something better. So loneliness is not such a terrible thing when you consider that the alternative to thought provoking solace is to be surrounded only by remindings of why that solitude is preferable.

I think there is something a little too self conscious about enjoying being an outsider.

Dear Die-ary, I stared, motionless, before the mirror. As always, I stayed until I'm convinced that there is no glass, nothing, separating me from the room I see on the other side. I imagine that everything is different over there. Better. There are people, in that world, who I would like. But, like always, my hand hits the glass. I know that if I'd only waited just one more second... Shit. I'm gonna go kill a party clown.

A woman who had fallen out of love with her life

Solitude: it's become my trade. As it requires a certain discipline, it's a condition I try to perfect. And yet it plagues me, it weighs on me in spite of my knowing it so well.

The sky was different, without color, taut and unforgiving. But the water was the most unforgiving thing, nearly black at times, cold enough, I knew, to kill me, violent enough to break me apart. The waves were immense, battering rocky beaches without sand. The farther I went, the more desolate it became, more than any place I'd been, but for this very reason the landscape drew me, claimed me as nothing had in a long time.

What did I do? I read books and studied. I listened to my parents and did what they asked me to. Even though, in the end, I never made them happy. I didn't like myself, and something told me I'd end up alone.