Quotes About Isolation

Betrothed" We get to be alone by time, by luck, or by misadventure.

The Abandoned Valley" Can you understand being alone so long you would go out in the middle of the night and put a bucket into the well so you could feel something down there tug at the other end of the rope?

Love can leave you nowhere in New Mexico raising peacocks for the rest of your life.

You hear yourself walking on the snow. You hear the absence of the birds. A stillness so complete, you hear the whispering inside of you. Alone morning after morning, and even more at night. They say we are born alone, to live and die alone. But they are wrong. We get to be alone by time, by luck, or by misadventure. — Jack Gilbert, from "Betrothed," Collected Poems (Knopf, 2012)

Meanwhile" Loneliness is the mother's milk of America.

Imagine if suffering were real. Imagine if those old people were afraid of death. What if the midget or the girl with one arm really felt pain? Imagine how impossible it would be to live if some people were alone and afraid all their lives.

believed them to be aggressors. He would also roam the castle at night, howling like a wolf, and often hid in corners due to his belief that he was made entirely out of glass and

To her eyes, used to diversity, there was a troubling uniformity about them all, something that spoke of isolation, and a dull and thoughtless cruelty.

Bad enough I'm a goddamn burden to myself.

It was strange how, when there was nothing else in your life, sex was everything.

He was a killer, a thing that preyed, living on the things that lived, unaided, alone, by virtue of his own strength and prowess, surviving triumphantly in a hostile environment where only the strong survive.

An ocean with a single shore gets little traffic.

And I myself woke up one day and realized all the people in my old life hated me… but somehow I didn't care. We each became immune to the Blue Plague, which labels all resistance as racist, bigoted, Nazi scumbags.

Early on, if I was alone two three nights in a row, I'd start writing poems about suicide.

Early on, if I was alone two or three nights in a row, I'd start writing poems about suicide.

In hell it is difficult to tell people from other people.

Once a year, lock your office door and leave for a "think week"—ideally to a remote location with ample exposure to Mother Nature—and ruminate about the "day after tomorrow.

I don't read other science fiction. I don't read any at all.

Maybe everyone is crazy up in these mountains. Maybe the air up here makes you absurd, the scent of flowers and rock and snow. And I've never spoken like that to anyone in my life before. You're my only friend here, you know that? And you're fifty years away.

I've started to feel very odd within my own life. It's most peculiar to feel lonely inside your own life.

During this period I feel as if some part of myself has been banished to another part of the world.I feel as if I cannot live my life to the full and feel everything I'm capable of feeling unless I have this love. The pleasure goes from me; the delight goes. Nothing means anything.

I am lying to myself. I am always lying to myself and I really must stop it. I am alone. My friends don't know how to talk to me or write to me any more

Can anyone understand how it is to have lived in the White House and then, suddenly, to be living alone as the President's widow?

And so it seemed to her that he had always been a part of the landscape of her life, this great white bear. She brought him rosehips to sweeten his days, tried to explain how, once they had been flowers, but now were seeds. He had never seen a rose. He told her stories, coloured with every shade of white, and spoke of a sky that danced with lights. She felt that he understood how the world began, how it might end. And, even before they met, he walked in her dreams.