Quotes About Isolation

But he was a human being, or part of one, and he felt just as Lyra did: unhappy, and guilty, and wretchedly lonely.

Being invisible was hard work, unrewarding, soul-crushing work.

When we are born we are all wonderful. But, gradually, masks and streets are erected around us, walls and lies fence us in, make us prisoners, trap us inside our skulls, turn hearts to stone, until the magic—once bright and sparkling—turns black and blistered in our minds.

I am the Raskolnikov of jerking off – the sticky evidence is everywhere!

Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful consideration, getting them wrong again.

True, he had chosen to live alone, but not unbearably alone. The worst of being unbearably alone was that you had to bear it - either that or you were sunk. You had to work hard to prevent your mind from sabotaging you by its looking hungrily back at the superabundant past.

There is no protest to be lodged against loneliness—not all the bombing campaigns in history have made a dent in it.

Alvin didn't cry, didn't curse, didn't holler.... He was too far gone to roar on that day or even to crack. Only I did.... Only I cracked, alone, later in the one place in our house where I knew I could go to be apart from the living and all that they cannot not do.

Yes, alone we are, deeply alone, and always, in store for us, a layer of loneliness even deeper. There is nothing we can do to dispose of that. No, loneliness shouldn't surprise us, as astonishing to experience as it may be. You can try turning yourself inside out, but all you are then is inside out and lonely instead of inside in and lonely.

There is no protest to be lodged against loneliness—not all the bombing campaigns in history have made a dent in it. The most lethal of manmade explosives can't touch it. Stand in awe not of Communism, my idiot child, but of ordinary, everyday loneliness.

Sì, siamo soli, profondamente soli, e in serbo per noi, sempre, c'è uno strato di solitudine ancora più profondo. Non c'è nulla che possiamo fare per liberarcene. No, la solitudine non dovrebbe stupirci, per sorprendente che possa essere farne l'esperienza. Puoi cercare di tirar fuori tutto quello che hai dentro, ma allora non sarai altro che questo: vuoto e solo anziché pieno e solo.

Tanta istruzione, e non serve a nulla. Nulla può isolare dal più infimo livello del pensiero.

It just makes me a person that's really exhausted a couple other ways to live, you know? And really taken them, taken them to their conclusion. Which for me was a pink room, with no furniture and a drain in the center of the floor.

But the point was that I realized, on some level, that whatever a potentially 'lost soul' was, I was one -- and it wasn't cool or funny.

Men who aren't enough like human beings even to hate—what one feels when they loom into view is just an overwhelming lack of interest, the sort of deep disengagement that is often a defense against pain.

If his young companions have their own special delusions—D.L.'s that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive, Sternberg's that a body is a prison and not a shelter—Mark's is that he's the only person in the world who feels like the only person in the world. It's a solipsistic delusion.

It is true that doing original math is 'lonely.' But it is also true that professional mathematicians compose a community.

The one-third of America that identifies as "conservative" will be isolated even more profoundly within an information ghetto of deception and incitement.

I'm the only person who exists in my world—but isn't it that way for all of us?

It was almost as if they were afraid the grass would grow so tall around us we'd never get out. Some people say you can actually see the grass growing. You can certainly hear it, an endless whispering. Sometimes, you can almost make out the worlds.

I didn't know how Douglas and Mickey felt about the news, but the Earth seemed so far away now it didn't matter anymore. Maybe that was the wrong way to feel, but that's what I felt anyway.

The place felt sinister, though. Your imagination can get the better of you where a road ends against a forest.

The strange thing was, he wanted to like everyone. He just couldn't find a way to do it.

It ate at whatever was warm nearby, and then the coldness settled in permanently. You learned to live with it