Quotes About Isolation

Walls Without reflection, without mercy, without shame, they built strong walls and high, and compassed me about. And now I sit here and consider and despair. My brain is worn with meditating on my fate: I had outside so many things to terminate. Oh! why when they were building did I not beware! But never a sound of building, never an echo came. Out of the world, insensibly, they shut me out.

But Alberta sat there wretchedly. God knows who put the words into her mouth. They were not her own. They were foreign to her, stupid words behind which she hid herself. Her own never saw the light of day, they died unborn or withered on her tongue and were born distorted. She was disabled, she was without the use of speech, she would die of muteness.

Sometimes Alberta felt as if there were a conspiracy against her, as if the whole world were in agreement not to say a word. A foolish desire to shake people – But speak out, can't you – would come over her. If she did not do so, it was because we really can remain on the verge of action for a long time without doing anything.

If only my heart were stone.

And he's alone there, with the unconscious pilot lying a little way off for company, and some other guy he's never even seen, only spoken to over the radio. He wants to sleep so badly - dying they call it - and he can't. Something's bothering him to keep him awake. ("Jane Brown's Body")

The big weekend rush is on. The big city emptying itself out at once. Just a skeleton crew left to keep it going until Monday morning. Everybody getting out - everybody but me, everybody but those who are coming here for me tonight. We're going to have the whole damned town to ourselves. ("New York Blues")

Strange is loneliness; it still longs to have something to belong to, some group, some aggregate.

I had that trapped feeling, like some sort of a poor insect that you've put inside a downturned glass, and it tries to climb up the sides, and it can't, and it can't, and it can't.

Human beings shouldn't have to enter such doors, shouldn't have to stay behind them. No moon ever entered there, no stars, no anything at all. They were worse than the grave, for in the grave is an absence of consciousness. And God, she reflected, ordered the grave for all of us; but God didn't order such burrows in a third-class New York City Hotel.

La scelta di chiudersi in casa sbarrando le finestre per non vedere, abbandonando ogni cura per la cosa pubblica è rimasta del resto fino ai nostri giorni, in particolare in quelle regioni meridionali diventate preda della criminalità.

Surely there is no more wretched sight than the human body unloved

Someone's elbow dug into my back, another woman's feet were two inches from my face. How was it possible, packed so close, to be so utterly and miserably alone?

Surely there is no more wretched sight than the human body unloved and uncared for.

I'm ultimately a widow and a single mother, who's not even getting to be a mother right now. I am so alone, it's freaky.

It was terrifying to realize life goes on without you.

I didn't have anyone, I spent a lot more time alone. I loved reading, and I know it sounds stupid, but the characters in the books I read became my best friends. The only ones who would never hurt me.

Everything she'd believed had been a lie. And she'd never felt more alone in her life.

I rise and turn back.... leaving the rest of the world to coyotes who are now running across the mountain together, howling and yipping behind me, calling for the frozen night to come.

There are so many of us now that we threaten to devour the world with our touching, starting with the things we adore most. At the same time, we obviously yearn for contact, and I fear what would happen if we were cut off from a distinctive, on-the-ground relationship with the past.

Dark, closed places like this make me uneasy. It is not the wild beasts or the idea of a lunatic with an ax. It is not facing my dreaded interior self. It is the informality, the thoughtlessness, the brooding wisdom, the endlessness, the closure of darkness. More than that, it is the thing in darkness I cannot name.

There is the constant temptation to relate to the iPhone rather than our world. It is a convenient filter for screening calls, keeping colleagues at a manageable distance. It provides a safe place to hide when we're anxious in a crowd. We avoid awkward moments by fading into our phone. It prompts us to look down rather than up, to ask Siri for answers rather than our friends, our parents, or our God.

I am a waning bird encased in a glass sphere; I cannot see my prison, and my cries no one can hear.

We live as emotional transients in a world of isolation. Oh, if I could only borrow back so many wasted moments, but only the arrogant have no regrets; so much is paid for with borrowed time. The infant road, the child's path, in the rising tide of the day, is the aged road the dying path, in the dusk where mortals play.

When we front a fiction, we are destined for loneliness.