Quotes About Isolation

Naasir wasn't dark inside . . . but he was alone. The only one of his kind in the entire world. He had friends, had family, but he had no one who was like him. Mating wouldn't change that, but it would give him a person who belonged to him just as much as he belonged to her. And maybe one day, they'd have a cub and there would be another like him in the world.

All my loves leave me in the winter snow.

Blue stars crackled, spat. "Why they don't speak to me!

restaurants and shops close and it becomes a ghost town"—their words of warning only made the sisters

And maybe you were thinking that you thought you knew me well But no one ever knows the heart of anyone else I feel like Garbo in this Late Night Grande Hotel 'Cos living alone is all I've ever done well

Pioneers may be picturesque figures, but they are often rather lonely ones.

moments later, but she stayed far away from

I read more of Treasure Island to him, and it pleased him a great deal. It seems to me that there are so many lonely people in this world, and so little of life is kind and good. In a way, I am thankful for this flood, since without it, I might never have talked to him much, and Mason is a nice fellow.

Stay outside, looking in. See those two poor people. Sad girl. Sad boy. Sadder than a movie, two people parting. My heart was behind a huge concrete dam with no gates, no opening, not even a hairline crack. On this side those people only look sad. They feel no pain. On this side.

Sometimes I feel like a tree on a hill, at the place where all the wind blows and the hail hits the hardest. All the people I love are down the side aways, sheltered under a great rock, and I am out of the fold, standing alone in the sun and the snow. I feel like I am not part of the rest somehow, although they welcome me and are kind. I see my family as they sit together and it is like they have a certain way between them that is beyond me. I wonder if other folks ever feel included yet alone.

Yes. That's the way it is. No one's amazed by what you've been up to. For all these years, you've been performing those exhausting acrobatics not to a distant gallery, but to an empty house.

No, I stayed home. And yet, in one way or another -- by way of telephone conversations, letters, photographs, or simply memories -- all of these worlds were part of my day today.

Through no fault of their own, 20 percent of the American labor force was out of work by 1932. Average men woke to find themselves as outcasts, without the emblems of American male identity: jobs, homes, the means to provide for their families.

I am wild, if you like; but I stayed in my burrow a long, long time, - nibbling your straws and snapping at your fingers, but always just a little out of reach. Until at last I got to trust you so much that one day I ventured out for a minute, - and you threw rocks at me. And I will never come out again.

In his dark story collection Poachers, Tom Franklin, who once worked in a grit factory, offers the sad and sorry lives of people stuck in the back-waters of the Alabama River, who tend to subsist on a steady diet of moon-shine and stale crackers.

in a county where romantic partners were as scarce as yaks.

After my last call I hung up the telephone and cried softly. So many knew, but nobody helped.

Imprisoned by silence, my emotions turned to slush.

Pegg, cowering in her bedroom, asked her housekeeper to check on the ailing Varick. Then, willing herself in to a frenzy, she tore at her hair and clothes, weeping, her sobs accelerating in volume.

The only way for me to be safe and free was to be - be what my name decreed me. Enola. Alone.

interruption or a keep-behind-a-closed-door

This thing she did, her empathy and concern, turned out to have the unfortunate consequence of driving people away.

Sophie felt as if she were encased in a glass globe called summer.

I drew anything. Everything. Doodles at first. But I had a knack for reproducing what I saw, and soon my paper and pencil — and then later, my paints and charcoals — formed a strong, protective wall around me. They stood between me and everyone else in the world. I liked it that way. I liked being quiet, letting no one know what I thought, or how ferocious those thoughts were.