Quotes About Isolation

The farther away you get from the literary traffic, the closer you are to sources.

Sometimes, I feel like one who is on the sidelines, who has missed life itself.

Although I am a gregarious person, I love solitude even more.

I did not have an unlimited library to choose from on Robben Island. We had access to many unremembered mysteries and detective novels and all the works of Daphne du Maurier, but little more.

My bans extended to meetings of all kinds, not only political ones. I could not, for example, attend my son's birthday party. I was prohibited from talking to more than one person at a time. This was part of a systematic effort by the government to silence, persecute and immobilize the leaders of those fighting apartheid and was the first of a series of bans on me that continued with brief intervals of freedom until the time I was deprived of all freedom some years later.

Prison is a still point in a turning world, and it is very easy to remain in the same place in jail while the world moves on.

What struck me so forcefully was how small the planet had become during my decades in prison;

Only humans, cursed with the knowledge of their own mortality and that of those whom they loved, were truly alone; each trapped in an ivory tower of skull and bone peeking out through the windows of the soul.     THE

For her the room turned cold, the colorful people surreal, as if normalcy was a gift others shared without her.

My life is a Stephen King novel," she whispered. "Everything gets worse. And worse. And worse. When it finally can't get any worse, everybody dies.

The place was a mausoleum. Anna was reminded of Great Expectations, of the old woman in her decaying wedding dress presiding over a feast long go eaten by mice and worms.

Soon she was going to have to relinquish her self-image as a hermit.

From long experience she knew that she wore her loneliness like armor. Very few people ever recognized it for what it was. To the casual observer it looked very much like arrogance. Sometimes it was.

Prison would kill him. Not neatly or cleanly or quickly, It would kill him with ten thousand days of gray, each taking a bite of his sanity until all that remained was huddled terror with the body of a man wrapped around it.

You could be completely isolated by man from that which you are conscious of being; yet you would, in spite of all human barriers, effortlessly draw to yourself all that you were conscious of being. The man who is conscious of being poor does not need the assistance of anyone to express his poverty. The man who is conscious of being sick, though isolated in the most hermetically sealed germ-proof area in the world, would express sickness.

By shifting his gaze slightly, he saw frame in the sitting room window, a landscape aloof from man. Its beauty was perfectly articulate yet utterly remote. Against his will he was moved by it as an unmusical listener may be profoundly disturbed by sound forms that he is unable to comprehend.

He loved the strange privacy of being different.

Window panes that rattled under the lash of the wind for two months on end, rain that leaked beneath the doors, her husband out and drinking, electricity cut off and the radio shut down, the boredom, the quiet and incredible loneliness - Margaret Looney would remember when she first discovered love and wonder at how immense it must have been to be lasting so long.

the overwhelming sheer aloneness that hangs in the air in rural Ireland is a potent force. It is at once the greatest positive and negative thing about the countryside. For with it comes not only the peacefulness of life here, the undeniable sense of the spiritual, but also the consequent darker aspects of hopelessness and madness.

I want to stay hidden in this apartment forever. I want to be kept like a house cat.

In a way it's like too serene or whatever - too empty. I feel that familiar feeling of being a dark smudge on this otherwise pristine white canvas. There's just no way to blend in out here.

There is this crazy fear I have of being rejected by anyone - even people I don't really care about. It's always better to leave them first, cut all ties, and disappear. They can't hurt me that way - no one can.

It's the outside world that's the prison. The outside world of jobs and cars and cell phones and apartments and grocery stores. Appropriate clothing, plans for a Saturday night, loneliness.

Having to be sober was like being a forty-year-old trapped in a young adult's body. How could I relate to any of my peers? It was like I'd come from a totally different planet.