Quotes About Isolation

Everything turns inward in depression. A beautiful flower momentarily catches your attention, but within seconds the focus bends back into your own misery. You see loved ones who are celebrating a recent blessing, but before you can synchronize your feelings with theirs, you have doubled back to your own personal emptiness. Like a boomerang that always returns, no matter how hard you try, you can't get away from yourself.

All it takes is a tradition of demeaning, critical words from the right person. All it takes is nothing from the right person. No interest in you, no words spoken to you, no love. If you are treated as if you do not exist, you will feel shame.

Think about the nature of depression. Life is turned inward. You already have a sense that, for all practical purposes, God is not present. Add to that your relentless condemnation and pervasive self-criticism, which have persuaded you that God doesn't love you. You couldn't be a more obvious spiritual target if you painted a bull's-eye on your chest.

When your emotions feel muted or always low, when you are unable to experience the highs and lows you once did, the important question is not "How can I figure out what I have done wrong?" but it is, "Where do I turn—or, to whom do I turn—when I am depressed?" Some turn toward their beds and isolation; others turn toward other people. Some turn away from God; others turn toward him.

Here, though, there is nothing. Nothing at all. The sky seems empty even when I am looking at the moon and stars.

Instead I dreamt of walking out of the world, of spending all my time inside with no one to talk to, and no one to talk to me. All I wanted was a routine, a series of sterile acts that I could perform without dedication or effort, a life where everything was constantly the same, where every day passed exactly like the one before.

What if my becoming fully aware of the frequency of such moments makes me terrified to leave my house?

Distance can breed suspicion, and it can make enemies hardly worthy of consideration as human beings. Much easier to consider killing.

More and more, when faced with the world of men, the only reaction is one of individualism. Man alone is an end unto himself. Everything one tries to do for the common good ends in failure.

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.

Thus, too, they came to know the incorrigible sorrow of all prisoners and exiles, which is to live in company with a memory that serves no purpose.

Mother died today, or maybe it was yesterday.

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

This attempt to isolate cell constituents might have been a failure if they had been destroyed by the relative brutality of the technique employed. But this did not happen.

I used to go away for weeks in a state of confusion.

It is strange to be known so universally and yet to be so lonely.

A Journal of the Plague Year

My disease," she said, speaking fast, "dates back to Bible days. Leah had it, in the book of Genesis. It is wallfloweritis." "Huh?" broke in Harding, dazedly curious. "Wallfloweritis," she repeated stoutly. "An acute and chronic case of being a perennial wallflower. Oh, please don't be polite and silly and deny it!

We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness.

Ser poeta no es una ambición mía. Es mi manera de estar solo

La incomunicación es la mejor manera para que algo que existía deje de existir.

Estar a su lado (que creo es, justamente, donde deseo estar) equivale a estar aún más solo.

Así que floto, a la deriva, como si fuera una misión, mirando al cielo, pensando en eso de que uno se siente solo cuando está con gente; cuando uno está solo, en cambio, hasta puede que se sienta acompañado.