Quotes About Isolation

Hide until everybody goes home. Hide until everybody forgets about you. Hide until everybody dies.

This, after all, was the month in which families began tightening and closing and sealing; from Thanksgiving to the New Year, everybody's world contracted, day by day, into the microcosmic single festive household, each with its own rituals and obsessions, rules and dreams. You didn't feel you could call people. They didn't feel they could phone you. How does one cry for help from these seasonal prisons?

Jerome said, It's like, a family doesn't work anymore when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone, You know?

It seems to me, said Magid finally, as the moon became clearer than the sun, that you have tried to love a man as if he were an island and you were shipwrecked and you could mark the land with an X. It seems to me it is too late in the day for all that.

She struggled to think of anyone besides perhaps James Baldwin and Jesus who had experiences the profound isolation and loenliness she now knew to be the one and only true reality of this world.

Yes, sometimes it's the strangers that sustain you.

he] had become the bloke in the joke: the last man on earth

I could see what everyone was feeling, but I was not with them and could not feel it. "You

Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

She held herself apart, always.

Everybody knows that if people hang around for any length of time in an urban area without purpose they are likely to become "antisocial.

In that huge game of musical chairs, I turned round one day and found I had no place to sit. At a loss, I became a Goth—it was where people who had nowhere else to go ended up.

Well, we can say that Aimee lives in her bubble, he said, interrupting me, and so does your friend and, by the way, so do you. It's possible that it's like this for everyone. The size of the bubble is different, this is all. And perhaps the thickness of the--what do you call this in English?--skin--film. The thin layer on a bubble.

This is what I understood by it: that for Astaire the person in the film was not especially connected with him.

Although the most powerful art, it sometimes seems to me, it's an experience and a going-through; it is love comprehended by, expressed and enacted through the artwork itself, and for this reason has perhaps been more frequently created by people who feel themselves to be completely alone in this world —and therefore wholly focused on the task at hand— than by those surrounded by loved ones.

In today's globalized and interconnected world, it is foolish to imagine that anything can be studied in isolation.

Lonely people are terrible snobs about one another, I've found. They're afraid that consorting with their own kind will compound their freakishness.

I made up my mind to keep my feelings to myself since they did not seem to matter to anyone else but me.

It was not death she feared. It was misunderstanding.

She must talk to a man who was ten immensities away.

Packed tight like a case of celery, only much darker than that. They were all against her, she could see. So many were there against her that a light slap from each one of them would have beat her to death. She felt them pelting her with dirty thoughts.

Kossula was no longer on the porch with me. He was squatting about that fire in Dahomey. His face was twitching in abysmal pain. It was a horror mask. He had forgotten that I was there. He was thinking aloud and gazing into the dead faces in the smoke. His agony was so acute that he became inarticulate. He never noticed my preparation to leave him. So I slipped away as quietly as possible and left him with his smoke pictures.

But it was night, it stayed night.

There is something about poverty that smells like death.