Quotes About Isolation

This truth--to prove, and make thine own: Thou hast been, shalt be, art, alone.

Yes: in the sea of life enisl'd, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortal millions live alone.

Yes, in the sea of life enisled,With echoing straits between us thrown,Dotting the shoreless watery wild,We mortal millions live alone.

We mortal millions live alone.

Yes: in the sea of life enisl'd, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortal millions live alone .

No, thou art come too late, Empedocles! And the world hath the day, and must break thee, Not thou the world. With men thou canst not live, Their thoughts, their ways, their wishes, are not thine; And being lonely thou art miserable, For something has impair'd they spirit's strength, And dried its self-sufficing font of joy.

Nonetheless, America has left you feeling like an unwanted cat or dog tossed out of the family SUV at a distant highway rest stop.

The moral of the story: The guy who is starving you may sincerely be trying to feed you, but his best efforts might not be enough. In the end, if you are penned in, you can be killed by simple starvation and neglect, requiring no directly malign intention by your captors. Starvation just happens naturally when insufficient food is coming

Losing him would, she realised, be unlike anything she had ever experienced before. A marriage is a conspiracy, a shared aspect toward the rest of the society, a code devised over a long history of negotiation and habit. That code would vanish. Her thoughts would be unobserved, her memories would be hers alone, without the heft that comes from sharing them with another. She would become insubstantial to herself.

One way to combat it was to force sailors to stay on ships for forty days after anchoring, only allowing them to come ashore if they were well after forty days—thus the term quarantine (from the word for forty).

The most devastating form of loneliness is not to be without friends; rather, it is to be surrounded by friends and never to be truly known.

We have become people of the device.

It would be lovely if we could gather up all the evil people and put them together on one island, leaving them to self-destruct in their collective sinfulness.

Darkness is a kind of visual silence, and monks love it.

The most important people in this man's life - the people who have mattered to him most - aren't my Mother or his wives or me or Anna or Allie. The people who matter most are the people in his head. That is loneliness.

The food is awful," Jan wrote, "and cooked in such a way that no civilized white man can stand it for more than a week or two … Almost all the food is fried. They feed us fried green bananas, boiled rice, and foul-smelling salt fish. It rains so much that honest to goodness my hat is getting mouldy on my head… I haven't had on a pair of dry shoes in weeks.

At some point within the first month I started talking to myself, which wouldn't have been so bad if it weren't for the fact that I was also answering myself. I'd never imagined how crucial English was to my sense of a unified self—part

And there I was with the stars hanging above my house like live wires and the night sky the color of stockings. I stuck out my tongue to taste the sky but could not taste. I inhaled deeply but could not smell. I used to look to the sky for comfort and now there was nothing, not even a seam, and I looked down and saw that it did not even reach the ground. And my only company was the satellites counting their sleep

She tried to imagine what it would feel like to have always been alone. She decided that being alone to begin with would be easier than being left alone. Everything would be easier than that.

How not to search that space where, for a time span lasting from dusk to dawn, two beings have no other reason to exist than to expose themselves totally to each other- totally, integrally, absolutely- so that their common solitude may appear not in front of their own eyes but in front of ours, yes, how not to look there and how not to rediscover "the negative community, the community of those who have no community"?

My sense of touch was floating six feet away from me; if anyone entered my room, I would cry out, but the knife was serenely cutting me up. Yes, I became a skeleton. At night my thinness would rise up before me to terrify me. As it came and went it insulted me, it tired me out; oh, I was certainly very tired.

Between them, the fear, the fear shared in common, and, through the fear, the abyss of fear over which they join one another without being able to do so, dying, each alone, of fear.

I feel myself dead – no; I feel myself, living, infinitely more dead than dead.

He would never know what he knew. That was loneliness.