Quotes About Isolation

Dangerous creatures, wallflowers. Approach them with the utmost caution. They sit quietly in corners, appearing abandoned and forlorn, when in truth they're sirens who lure men to their downfall. You won't even notice the moment she steals the heart right out of your body—and then it's hers for good. A wallflower never gives your heart back.

I've been exactly that lonly. You're not connected to anything. Some nights it feels like you're dying by the hour. You're so desperate you can't even attract the kind of person you once swore you'd never settle for.

What if no one will have us here either?" "Then we'll become a pair of wicked old spinsters, romping back and forth across Europe.

You Hathaways would find it impossible to understand what it's like to be brought up in isolation, by people who don't give a damn about you. You have no choice but to assume it's your fault, that you're unlovable. And that feeling wraps around you until it becomes a prison, and you find yourself barricading the doors against anyone who wants to come in.

Her reticent nature had iced over years before. The thaw would take some time.

Being ostracized was status quo for her. She'd survive.

The problem is, I'm not sure I'm ready for anything. Everything you're supposed to do when you grow up. Move away from home, buy your own food and groceries, get married, have children. Sometimes even the easy part of all that seems impossible to me. And then I wonder what will happen ten, twenty years from now. Will I be a fifty-year-old adolescent, completely alone, still sponging off whatever family I've got left?

Moby-Dick for Nothing

She'd gone into the glass booth of the station to pay and the young man behind the counter was reading Anna Karenina and he turned the book over on the counter regretfully. She saw the big Russian saga drain out of his eyes as he took her in...she had watched as the gas attendant dragged himself from a cold night in Russia, full of passion and big fireplaces and lust. Back into the cold, lonely night of St. John's to take Helen's debit card, and she had felt motherly.

This is what Helen has learned: it is possible to be so tired you cannot reach for the sky, you cannot breathe. You can't even talk. You can't pick up the phone. You can't do a dish or dance or cook or do up your own zipper.

And then it finally did happen. I just lay there in shock. It hurt so bad, and I thought, "God, please, let me die." As he put himself inside me, I wanted to scream for help, but there was no one to help me. I had nowhere to hide. My mother's room, my little sister's embrace, Uncle Fred, Uncle Warren, nothing and no one would save me, and so I lay there silently, staring at the cracks in the ceiling, watching a part of me die.

We think that if we surround ourselves with people, we can't be alone, when the reality is that we're always alone.

I don't have a lot of friends walking around I might borrow clothes from. And with good reason: the people I care about disappear.

It was an intensely lonely moment, like all of eighth grade condensed into one claustrophobic second.

Eric had asked administration not to pipe the music into his unit but they said it would cost too much to alter the system. He told them to take it out of his budget but they said no...He knew it was part of the larger problem, that mental illness wasn't taken seriously as physical illness...

You know it's going to be a bad day when you can't get privacy inside your own head.

Shyness was a defense mechanism I had put up as a small child. Who knows why, but I felt safer keeping to myself than risk getting hurt by other people and I kept up that shield for years.

Things could be worse is wearing thin. I'm exhausted. I'm confused. I am effectively talking to the air.

This music of old age…it isn't made for dancing. It's so…lonely. You're a burden to everyone.

Come about five minutes from now, you'll be stranded like a horned toad

Truth is, instead of fixing everything, the Arcadia made everything real. Camellia's gone. Lark and Gabion are far away. Queenie's buried in a pauper's grave, and Briny's heart went there with her. He's lost his mind to whiskey, and he doesn't want to come back. Not even for me. Not even for Fern. We're not enough.

To look at me now, you would think I'd never understood the secret. This music of old age...it isn't made for dancing. It's so...lonely. You're a burden to everyone.

Scenic Route Someone was always leaving and never coming back. The wooden houses wait like old wives along this road; they are everywhere, abandoned, leaning, turning gray. Someone always traded the lonely beauty of hemlock and stony lakeshore for survival, packed up his life and drove off to the city. In the yards the apple trees keep hanging on, but the fruit grows smaller year by year...

What happened is, we grew lonely living among the things, so we gave the clock a face, the chair a back, the table four stout legs which will never suffer fatigue.