Quotes About Isolation

She hardly knew what she had been seeking, or why the failure to find it had so blotted the light from her sky: she was only aware of a vague sense of failure, of an inner isolation deeper than the loneliness about her.

It was a long time since any one had spoken to him as kindly as Mrs Hale. Most people were either indifferent to his troubles, or disposed to think it natural that a young fellow of his age should have carried without repining the burden of three crippled lives. But Mrs Hale had said 'You've had an awful mean time, Ethan Frome,' and he felt less alone with his misery.

There was money enough... but she asked so much of life, in ways so complex and immaterial. He thought of her as walking bare-footed through a stony waste. No one would understand her- no one would pity her- and he, who did both, was powerless to come to her aid.

But there was something more miserable still—it was the clutch of solitude at her heart, the sense of being swept like a stray uprooted growth down the heedless current of the years.

The blast that swept him came off New Hampshire snow-fields and ice-hung forests. It seemed to have traversed interminable leagues of frozen silence, filling them with the same cold roar and sharpening its edge against the same bitter black-and-white landscape. (The Triumph Of The Night)

There was in him a slumbering spark of sociability which the long Starkfield winters had not yet extinguished. By nature grave and inarticulate, he admired recklessness and gaiety in others and was warmed to the marrow by friendly human intercourse.

Ethan looked at her with loathing. She was no longer the listless creature who had lived at his side in a state of sullen self-absorption, but a mysterious alien presence, an evil energy secreted from the long years of silent brooding. It was the sense

Whenever she was unhappy she felt herself at bay against a pitiless world, and a kind of animal secretiveness possessed her.

More than half a lifetime divided them, and she had spent the long interval among people he did not know, in a society he but faintly guessed at, in conditions he would never wholly understand.

Mas o silêncio terrível e o vazio pareciam simbolizar seu futuro – era como se a casa, a rua, o mundo estivessem todos vazios, e ela era a única pessoa consciente um universo sem vida.

I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters

Since then there has been no farther communication between them, and he had built up within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned among his secret thoughts and longings

You like so much to be alone?" "Yes; as long as my friends keep me from feeling lonely.

He pulled the sash down and turned back. Catch my death! he echoed; and he felt like adding: But I've caught it already. I am dead--I've been dead for months and months.

The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend.

She herself was large and saturnine, with a battlemented black lace cap, and so deaf that she seemed a survival of forgotten days, a Rosetta Stone to which the clue was lost.

You like so much to be alone? Yes; as long as my friends keep me from feeling lonely. She

What was the use of being beautiful and attracting attention if one were perpetually doomed to relapse again into the obscure mass of the Uninvited?

To a torn heart uncomforted by human nearness a room may open almost human arms, and the being to whom no four walls mean more than any others, is, at such hours, expatriate everywhere.

Was she beautiful—or was she only someone apart?

she did not suffer from her geographic isolation.

It seemed to her the diabolical instrument of their estrangement.

La verdadera soledad consiste en vivir entre toda esa gente encantadora que sólo te pide que finjas!

When I had been there a little longer, and had seen this phase of crystal clearness followed by long stretches of sunless cold; when the storms of February had pitched their white tents about the devoted village and the wild cavalry of March winds had charged down to their support; I began to understand why Starkfield emerged from its six months' siege like a starved garrison capitulating without quarter.