Quotes About Isolation

I can't breathe, she said. I feel like I'm drowning in a gray sea, like they're flooding the whole city, washing away our past and people, dashing everything from the face of the earth. Jammed

he ceased to exist for a long time, living among friends but gaunt and ghostly, one of the disappeared. He had lost many voices: the lawyer's, the impresario's, the lover's, and it isn't surprising that he found speaking or even coherence difficult.

No matter how many people care about you, she thought, if you can't be open with them about who you truly are, you're still alone.

What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney?

For it must be very lonely being dead.

They are more real than the books on the shelves, books that are sketched with the barest hint of a line here and there, fading in places to a ghostly nothingness. Why recall the picture now, you must be wondering. The reason I remember it so well is that it seems to be an image of the way I have lived my own life. I have closed my study door on the world and shut myself away with people of my imagination.

Not even a ghost could survive here.

No one cared what she wanted. No one had ever cared. And perhaps, worst of all, no one ever would care.

The house was dark. Upstairs, behind the black open window with the pale curtain flapping in the spartan air, slept Arthur Morrison, trainer of the forty-three racehorses in the stables below. Morrison habitually slept lightly. His ears were sharper than half a dozen guard dogs', his stable-hands said.

Home was a place to be only when all other places were closed.

Between the sun there is no one

Cars, with their air conditioning, windows, sound systems, and great speed, keep us isolated from our environment... Self-propulsion, such as biking, walking, canoeing, puts us in touch with the land below and the world around us.

If I see someone I see the ghost of them, the air around them, and where they've been. If I see a city I see it's living ghostliness—the stray looks, the dying hands. I see it's needs and its discomforts locked in apartments.

It's odd how different a house feels when one is alone in it. It makes it easier to think rather private thoughts...

I could hear rain still pouring from the gutters and a thin branch scraping against one of the windows; but the church seemed completely cut off from the restless day outside--just as I felt cut off from the church. I thought: I am a restlessness inside a stillness inside a restlessness.

It is odd how different a house feels when one is alone in it.

Never have I felt so separate from her. And I regret to say that there were moments when my deep and loving pity for her merged into a desire to kick her fairly hard.

What is this insurmountable barrier round him? What's it made of? Where did it come from?

I stood there ringing the bell and banging on the door, feeling I could make someone be there, knowing all the time that I couldn't.

I felt as I did once when Rose had very bad toothache - that it was callous of me to be so separate from the pain, that just being sorry for suffering people isn't enough.

But there is something I want to capture. It has to do with the feeling I had when I watched the Cottons coming down the lane, the queer separate feeling. I like seeing people when they can't see me. I have often looked at our family through lighted windows and they seem quite different, a bit the way rooms seen in looking-glasses do. I can't get the feeling into words — it slipped away when I tried to capture it.

Since the Leeburg Pike [at Tyson's Corner] carries six to eight lanes of fast-moving traffic and the mall lacks an obvious pedestrian entrance, I decided to negotiate the street in my car rather than on foot. This is a problem planners call the 'drive to lunch syndrome,' typical of edge nodes where nothing is planned in advance and all the development takes place in isolated 'pods'.

A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.

In the subways, in many of the streets, in corners of the park at night, contact could be dangerous. Contact was not a word or a touch but the air that flashed between strangers.