Quotes About Isolation

She lived here for a while until she couldn't stand having strangers stand outside and shout, "Rachel! Rachel, send down your chair" any longer.

Abuse is rejection. It is painful and toxic.

But this is the slowed-down season held fast by darkness and if no one comes to keep you company then keep watch over your own solitude. In that stillness, you will learn with your whole body the significance of cold and the night, which is otherwise always eluding you. — Patricia Fargnoli, closing lines to "Winter Grace," Winter (Hobblebush Books, 2013)

I need solitude for my writing; not like a hermit—that wouldn't be enough—but like a dead man.

I have Graham Greene's telephone number, but I wouldn't dream of using it. I don't seek out writers because we all want to be alone.

I feel I stand in a desert with my hands outstretched, and you are raining down upon me.

Girls are born with more sensitivity to isolation and fear; boys are born with more sensitivity to arousal and shame.

My greatest fear is being somewhere without a book.

My brother William is a fisherman, and he tells me that when he is in the middle of a fog-bound sea the water is a color for which there is no name.

Dot is lonely. Are you surprised? It's hard to find friends when you're only Dot-sized.

Long time I been on my own, but now really I'm alone. I survive the killing, the starving, all the hate of the Khmer Rouge, but I think maybe now I will die of this, of broken heart.

Most of all, I am afraid of life outside this place

When most folks think about the problems of growing up in the hood, they think about what it must feel like to be poor, or hungry, or to have your lights cut off. The struggle nobody talk about is what it feel like to be invisible, or to know in your heart the nobody cares. Mama didn't want to be famous, she wanted to be seen.

My world has always been so small, hidden behind walls.

It seems as though the only things causing pain around here are these ridiculous walls we keep building.

She was built along the lines of a General Electric refrigerator and looked like a cross between Caligula and a cockatoo. Mother Burnside had beady little eyes, an imperious beak of a nose, sallow skin, and bad breath. She wore a stiff black wig and a stiff black dress and she sat all day long in a darkened drawing room, her pudgy hands - encrusted with dirty diamond rings - folded over her pudgy belly.

It's horrible being laughed at,' he said. 'People say you should be a good sport and get used to it, but the laughter never seems friendly and one never gets used to it. Or I don't.

Listening to the neoconservatives, Bush invaded Iraq, united the Arab world against us, isolated us from Europe, and fulfilled to the letter bin Laden's prophecy as to what we were about.

My blood was boiling, which is not a good thing for a coldblood. Dracula was dead. Rex was dying or dead. Breakfast was dying. And I was caring about it all. Meanwhile, that blasted Gunnar did nothing but sit and stare at his teevee all day. He was the reason we were all here, the reason we were suffering and dying, and he barely noticed us. I hissed so hard it hurt.

Life in a box was unbearable. How did humans stand it?

I asked Dahmer why he started keeping the heads. He answered that it was a shame to go through all the trouble of meeting them, bringing them home, killing them, and cutting them up, just to throw everything away. He wanted to keep some part of the men with him. Besides, he could then bring out the skulls later and masturbate while thinking of the time he had spent with each lover.

For the first time in his life, he was in complete control. He knew what he did was wrong, but there weren't any consequences, no punishment, no one to answer to. How could there be? No one knew but him.

According to Ralph Waldo Emerson, most people live lives of quiet desperation.

it's easier to avoid people than to spend time with them,