Quotes About Isolation

When certain individuals feel severely threatened—emotionally, financially, physically—the lights on the horizon they use to orient themselves in the world might easily wink out. Life can then become a series of fear-driven decisions and compulsive acts of self-protection. People start to separate what is deeply troubling in their lives from what they see as good.

Then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

I was too much in solitude, and consequently was obliged to be in continual burning of thought, as an only resource.

Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, Alone and palely loitering?

I left poor Scylla in a niche and fled. My fever'd parchings up, my scathing dread Met palsy half way: soon these limbs became 640 Gaunt, wither'd, sapless, feeble, cramp'd, and lame.

The stars look very cold about the sky, and I have many miles on foot to fare.

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

To be thrown among people who care not for you, with whom you have no sympathies[-] [it] forces the Mind upon its own resources, and leaves it free to make its speculations [on] the differences of human character and to class them with the calmness of a Botanist...

Like a bitch in heat, I seem to attract a coterie of policemen and sanitation officials. The world will someday get me on some ludicrous pretext; I simply await the day that they drag me to some air-conditioned dungeon and leave me there beneath the fluorescent lights and soundproofed ceiling to pay the price for scorning all that they hold dear within their little latex hearts.

Too long have I confined myself in Miltonic isolation and meditation. It is clearly time for me to step boldly into our society, not in the boring, passive manner of the Myrna Minkoff school of social action, but with great style and zest.

The only problem that those people have anyway is that they don't like new cars and hair sprays. That's why they are put away. They make the other members of the society fearful. Every asylum in this nation is filled with poor souls who simply cannot stand lanolin, cellophane, plastic, television, and subdivisions.

John Kennedy Toole

I simply await the day that they drag me to some air-conditioned dungeon and leave me there beneath the fluorescent lights and soundproofed ceiling to pay the price for scorning all that they hold dear within their little latex hearts.

John Kennedy Toole

I really have had little to do with them, for I mingle with my peers or no one, and since I have no peers, I mingle with no one.

Ignatius spent the day in his room napping fitfully and attacking his rubber glove during his frequent, anxious moments of consciousness.

Stranded in this mill town railroad yard while the whole world was converging elsewhere, we seemed to be nothing but children playing among heroic men.

I alone was a dream, a figment which had never really touched anything. I felt that I was not, never had been and never would be a living part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply meaningful world around me.

I realized that all this explained him, and it wasn't the words he said which angered me. It was only that he was so ignorant, that he knew nothing of the gypsy summer, nothing of the loss I was fighting to endure, of skylarks and splashes and petal-bearing breezes, he had not seen Leper's snails or the Charter of the Super Suicide Society; he shared nothing, knew nothing, felt nothing as Phineas had done.

Like all old, good schools, Devon did not stand isolated behind walls and gates but emerged naturally from the town which had produced it. So there was no sudden moment of encounter as I approached it; the houses along Gilman Street began to look more defensive, which meant that I was near the school, and then more exhausted, which meant that I was in it.

No one cared, no one exercised any real discipline over us; we were on our own.

Sentivo che non ero, non ero mai stato e non sarei mai stato una parte vivente di questo mondo straordinariamente solido e profondamente significativo che mi circonda.

Nobody loves you when you're down and out.

I've never really been wanted.