Quotes About Isolation

I]n the American soul there is a lonely individual standing in a vast landscape. He is either on a horse or driving a car, depending, and either way he's carrying a gun. This is one of the essential images in American mythology.

That clean but lonely feeling when there are no other cars. The traffic lights changing just for you.

Non chiamai Marion. Provai un senso di solitudine, in mancanza di parole migliori, ma in effetti è la parola giusta, una cosa a cui ho sempre cercato di oppormi e da cui sapevo come uscire, ma talvolta anche questo non bastava, e non la chiamai perché non volevo arrendermi, guardando la notte che scendeva.

Only writing could soak up his loneliness and pain. Written words could tell him who he was.

it occurred to me that perhaps in this city the crowd was essential to the individual; without it, he had nothing against which to scrape his anger, no echo for grief, and not the slightest proof that there were others more lonely than he. it was just a passing thought.

If the world is where we hide from ourselves, what do we do when the world is no longer accessible? We invent a false name, invent a destiny, purchase a firearm through the mail.

Crowds came to form a shield against their own dying. To become a crowd is to keep out death. To break off from the crowd is to risk death as an individual, to face dying alone.

World is supposed to mean something that's self-contained. Everything enters something else. My days spill into light-years. This is why I can only pretend to be someone. And this is why I felt derived at first, working on these pages. I didn't know if it was me that was writing so much as someone I want to sound like.

If we isolate the stray thought, the passing thought, he said, the thought whose origin is unfathomable, then we begin to understand that we are routinely deranged, everyday crazy.

It is only me, the body in the shower, one person enclosed in plastic watching a drop of water skate down the wet curtain. The moment is there to be forgotten. This seems the ultimate point. It is a moment never to be thought of except when it is in the process of unfolding.

Is he one of them now? Frustrated, stuck, self-watching, looking for a means of connection, a way to break out. After Oswald, men in America are no longer required to lead lives of quiet desperation. You apply for a credit card, buy a handgun, travel through cities, suburbs and shopping malls, anonymous, anonymous, looking for a chance to take a shot at the first puffy empty famous face, just to let people know there is someone out there who reads the papers.

But she missed simple things, parents' birthdays, a rug underfoot, nights when she didn't have to sleep in a zipped bag. She began to think she was inadequate to the strict plain shapes of churchly faith. Head pains hit her at the end of the day. They came with a shining, an electrochemical sheen, light from out of nowhere, brain-made, the eerie gleam of who you are.

Maybe this man experiences another kind of reality where he is here and there, before and after, and he moves from one to the other shatteringly, in a state of collapse, minus an identity, a language, a way to enjoy the savor of the honey-coated toast she watches him eat.

Her sweat is a rank reminder, the only one, that she exists, that she is separate from the things that surround her.

This was the year he rode the subway to the ends of the city, two hundred miles of track.

Isolation is not a drawback to those who understand that isolation is the point.

What is the self? Everything you are, without others, without friends or strangers or lovers or children or streets to walk or food to eat or mirrors in which to see yourself. But are you anyone without others?

I had to wonder whether this interval had any more spread and breadth than just another sequestered moment, bordered by closed doors.

No, no, no, no. Who are you? What is this? Don't leave. They're leaving. They've left.

lonely-chrome America.

Te lo ricordi com'era, sudare sotto le coperte, da bambini? La febbre è una cosa segreta. È come cadere in un buco dove nessuno può seguirti, ma non provi né paura né dolore perché non ti senti neanche te stesso. Io adoro raggomitolarmi nel sudore.

She used to say to him, If people knew what I was thinking they would put me away forever. But they would put us all away, he said. They have put us away. we are put away for our thoughts, one way or another. We have put ourselves away, he said.

Exile in a real place, a place of few bodies and many stones, is just an extension (a packaging) of the other exile, the state of being separated from whatever is left of the center of one's own history

Behind me, his bedroom light went out, brightening the sky, and how queer it seemed, half the heavens coming nearer, all those incandescent masses increasing in number, the stars and constellations, because somebody turns off a light in a house in the desert...