Quotes About Isolation

Nothing ever happens to me.

Children ask me sometimes what book I'd take to a desert island, but I think I couldn't go to a desert island unless it had a library.

By November, you wish you were dead. You want nothing more. Every day, every fucking day, you run up the steps of the house, breathing hard, swing open the cupboards, thinking: You pitiful little bitch. Fucking cow. Greedy pig. All day, your stomach pinches and spits up its bile. You sway when you walk. You begin to get cold again.

Hospitalizations in general are blurry. The days are the same, precisely the same. Nothing changes. Life melts down to a simple progression of meals. They become a way of life fairly quickly. You may welcome this transition. It may seem inevitable to you. You have been removed from the world. It is all right, in a way, because there is nothing so sure, so safe, as routine.

Crazy isn´t always what they say it is. It´s not always the old woman wearing sneakers and a skirt and a scarf, wandering around with a shopping cart, hollering at no one, nothing, tumbling through years in her head. No. Sometimes it is a girl wearing boots and jeans and a sweater, arms crossed in front of her, shivering, wandering through the streets at night, all night, murmuring to no one, nothing, tumbling through the strange unreal dimensions in her head.

My brain sometimes departs from the agreed-upon reality, and my private reality is a very lonely place. But in the end, I'm not sure I wish I'd never gone there.

Me and my needs were driving my mother away. Me and my needs retreated to my closet, disappeared into fairy tales. I started making up a world where my needs wouldn´t exist at all.

There are a lot of times the heart burrows deeper, goes tunnelling into itself for reasons only the heart itself seems to know.They are times of isolation, of hibernation, sometimes of desolation. There is a bareness that spreads out over the interior landscape of the self, a bareness like tundra, with no sign of life in any direction, no sign of anything beneath the frozen crust of ground, no sign that spring ever intends to come again.

You never come back, not all the way. Always, there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier, thin as the glass of a mirror. You never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad.

When we believe ourselves to be alone, we have no responsibility to this world and are answerable to no one.

Am I ultimately alone? How many of us have asked that question—drunk or sober—when we've wondered if there was a God or when we've decided that there was none? And the universe reels around us, more vast than we could begin to comprehend and more apparently empty. But it's only when we overlook the fairly obvious fact that we are human beings on a planet packed with human beings that we can entertain the fairly self-indulgent idea that we are, in fact, alone.

If a woman stands in a kitchen rubbing her eyes and pouring coffee with no one there to see her, does she exist? I

I look out into the dark, which is made of velvet so soft and heavy you could gather it up in your hands if you weren't locked in.

You never come back, not all the way. Always there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier thin as the glass of a mirror, you never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and no one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad.

My god! people say. You have so much self-control! And later: My god. You're so, so sick. When people say this, they turn their heads, you've won your little game. You have proven your thesis that no-body-loves-me-every-body-hates-me, guess-I'll-just-eat-worms. You get to sink back into your hospital bed, shrieking with righteous indignation. See? you get to say. I knew you'd give up on me. I knew you'd leave.

The great omission in American life is solitude; not loneliness, for this is an alienation that thrives most in the midst of crowds, but that zone of time and space, free from the outside pressures, which is the incubator of the spirit.

For every five well-adjusted and smoothly functioning Americans, there are two who never had the chance to discover themselves. It may well be because they have never been alone with themselves.

The great omission in American life is solitude. . . that zone of time and space, free from the outside pressures, which is the incinerator of the spirit.

When it´s bad I feel like I´ve been hit by an anvil, shattered like cartoon characters but without the instant recovery. That´s the deep pit where I feel all lost and alone. But when it´s good, it´s as if all my nerve endings are deliciously electrified; I´m on fire inside and swept off my feet by the passion and energy that washes over me. That´s the pinnacle where I am truly alive

The most serious cause of illness that we may face as we proceed to the twenty-first century is increasing human isolation.

The pain of being alone is completely out of this world, isn't it? I don't know why, but I understand your feelings so much, it actually hurts.

The pain of being alone is completely out of this world, isn't it? I don't know why, but I understand your feelings so much, it actually hurts.

What You Need… One only needs an island alone and lost at sea. One only needs one person, but this to have is key.

To create, and to confront, one has to be an outcast.