Quotes About Isolation

Isolation is the raw material of greatness; being alone is hazardous to our health. Few other conditions produce such diametrically opposing reactions, though of course genius and craziness often share a fence line. Sometimes even voluntary solitude can send a person over to the wrong side of the fence.

Some items had been in place for so long that the trees grew around them. A claw hammer was nearly swallowed by a tree trunk, impossible to remove, and Hughes said that this hammer, more than anything, made him realize how long Knight had lived there.

Depressive episodes closed around him like curtains and could hang there for weeks.

If you're born a human oddity, says the introductory chapter of Very Special People, every day of your life, starting in infancy, you are made aware that you are not as others are. When you get older, it continues, things are likely to get worse. You may hide from the world, advises the book, to avoid the punishment it inflicts on those who differ from the rest in mind or body.

One recalls the literary writer who, after grasping a story of a Mars voyage as a metaphor for isolation and the precariousness of relationships, realized that at a deeper, more subtle level it might even be a story about an actual trip to Mars!

Imagine someone sitting alone in a room without television, radio, computer or phone and with the door closed and the blinds down. This person must be a dangerous lunatic or a prisoner sentenced to solitary confinement. If a free agent, then a panty-sniffing loser shunned by society, or a psycho planning to return to college with an automatic weapon and a backpack full of ammo.

Only Robinson Crusoe got it all done by Friday!

You can put a drug addict in the middle of the Sahara Desert and somehow they'll find drugs.

No, she's in Spain, too, they're all in Spain, there's no one here... Am I in Spain? No, I'm not in Spain, dear, I'm in agony. That's where I am.

James Baldwin's "Stranger in the Village" (1953) describes a winter's stay in an isolated Swiss hamlet called Leukerbad. I have known that essay almost as long as I've known Faulkner's own work, and I never reread it without a sense of profound discomfort, an uneasiness with American life and my own cushioned place within it.

To be brutally honest, for much of that time, I was the only person in the world with Parkinson's. Of course, I mean that in the abstract. I had become acutely aware of people around me who appears to have the symptoms of Parkinson's disease, but as long as they didn't identify with me, I was in no rush to identify with them. My situation allowed, if not complete denial, at least a thick padding of insulation.

This is what my lifelong search for room to maneuver had come to: a box of water in a lightless, windowless nine-by-sixteen-foot room—afraid to leave my artificial womb, to go outside where I could only cause trouble, disappoint my family and myself. Best, I thought, to stay right here where I couldn't fuck anything up. And stay I would, day after day, sometimes three or four times on weekends, for hours at a time, just trying to keep my head below water. Connecticut—Christmas

There were times when I had great times with my brothers, pillow fights and things, but I was, used to always cry from loneliness.

To be successful you have to be selfish, or else you never achieve. And once you get to your highest level, then you have to be unselfish. Stay reachable. Stay in touch. Don't isolate.

He stood at the edge of town feeling very small, powerless. Night in the mountains could do that to you, reminding you of your place in the world and laughing at any sense of self-importance.

So much water. It just went on and on and on, a sight that squeezed the soul. He felt so damn small out here. And that felt good. Maybe that was strange, but it felt good. He was insignificant. The world was too big to care about his decisions. There was no weight here, no burden.

The walls were bare wood now, unadorned by the maps and photographs. All that remained was the thumbtacks, which protruded in all directions, tilting like gravestones in a forgotten cemetery.

Everyone's alone in their world, because everybody's life is different. You can send people letters, and show them photos, but they can never come to visit where you live. Unless you love them. And then they can burn it down.

Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, only a look and a voice, then darkness again and silence. —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying. —ARTHUR C. CLARKE

Barbara, shut up," said her son Luker. "You know very well why it's a private funeral." "Why?" "Because we are the only people in Mobile who would have come. There's no point in advertising a circus when everybody hates the clown.

Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains, by an Englishwoman named Isabella Bird.

country highway. He sensed that he was

He begins by quoting Thoreau: 'The mass of men lead quiet lives of desperation.