Quotes About Isolation

By the time you listen to this, I'll no longer remember what I said. I'll be an old message by then, buried under many new messages. The machine makes everything a message, which narrows the range of discourse and destroys the poetry of nobody home. Home is a failed idea. People are no longer home or not home. They're either picking up or not picking up.

Solitude asks no pledges of anyone.

Her umbrella was useless in the wind. It was the kind of wind-whipped rain that empties the streets of people and makes day and place feel anonymous.

There were times when he felt the lure of a submoronic mode of being.

There's less and less for people to talk to when they talk to me. I hope diminishing existence isn't contagious.

I was living, in short, on the edge of a landscape of vast shame.

Men in small rooms, in isolation. A cell is the basic state. They put you in a room and lock the door. So simple it's a form of genius. This is the final size of all the forces around you. Eight by fifteen.

I could feel myself lapsing into my smallest self, all the vainglorious ideas around me shrunk into personal reverie because what am I in this place but someone in need of self-defense. •

I moonlight, except there's nothing I'm moonlighting from. Moonlight is all that's out there.

For most people there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is.

What happens to people who live inside their phones?

Her tiny piping voice bounced down to be from a hollow ball in geosynchronous orbit.

I moonlight except that there's nothing I'm moonlighting from. Moonlight is all that's out there.

He lost the paradoxical gift for being separate and alone and yet intimately connected, mind-wired to distant things.

The desert was outside my range, it was an alien being, it was science fiction, both saturating and remote, and I had to force myself to believe I was here.

Nie mam cia?a. Jestem umys?em, ?wiadomo?ci?, samotny w wielkiej przestrzeni.

Nada existía a su alrededor. Solo el sonido dentro de su cabeza, la mente suspensa en el tiempo. Cuando muriese, no seria su fin. Seria el fin del mundo.

It seemed imperative that we get to the Boy Scout camp, scramble into the main building, seal the doors, huddle on camp beds with our juice and coffee, wait for the all-clear. Cars began to mount the grassy incline at the edge of the road, creating a third lane of severely tilted traffic.

Forse in quella metropoli la folla era davvero essenziale all'individuo, perché senza di essa non c'era nulla contro cui rivolgere la propria rabbia, mancava l'eco del proprio dolore, si dissolveva ogni prova concreta dell'esistenza di persone ancora più sole al mondo.

I didn't call Marian. I felt a loneliness, for lack of a better word, but that's the word in fact, a thing I tried never to admit to and knew how to step outside of, but sometimes even this was not means enough, and I didn't call her because I would not give in, watching the night come down.

What drove him to kill himself, she says, was realizing that he would never have what I now possess–a life beyond the pursuit of art–because being an artist, a writer, means isolating yourself in a room for hours, days on end, going into the darkest parts of yourself, and really, what sane person would want to do that?

Now and then, especially at night, solitude loses its soft power and loneliness takes over. I am grateful when solitude returns.

When you live on your own for a long time, however, your personality changes because you go so much into yourself you lose the ability to be social, to understand what is and isn't normal behavior. There is an entire world inside yourself, and if you let yourself, you can get so deep inside it you will forget the way to the surface. Other people keep our souls alive, just like food and water does with our body.

They are lonely. I'm not talking about lonely for a lover or a friend. I mean lonely in the universal sense, lonely inside the understanding that we are tiny people on a tiny little earth suspended in an endless void that echoes past stars and stars of stars.