Quotes About Isolation

Solitary. But not in the sense of being alone. Not solitary in the way Thoreau was, for example, exiling himself in order to find out where he was; not solitary in the way Jonah was, praying for deliverance in the belly of the whale. Solitary in the sense of retreat. In the sense of not having to see himself, of not having to see himself being seen by anyone else.

I walk around the world like a ghost, and sometimes I question whether I even exist. Whether I've ever existed at all.

The only person I knew how to be with now was myself - but I wasn´t really anyone, and I wasn´t really alive. I was just someone who pretended to be alive, a dead mean who spent his days translating a dead man´s book.

On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere. New York was the nowhere he had built around himself, and he realized that he has no intention of ever leaving it again.

The room was a machine that measured my condition: how much of me remained, how much of me was no longer there. I was both perpetrator and witness, both actor and audience in a theater of one. I could follow the progress of my own dismemberment. Piece by piece, I could watch myself dissapear.

But suddenly, after all this time, I feel there is something to say, and if I don't quickly write it down, my head will burst. It doesn't matter if you read it. It doesn't even matter if I send it - assuming that could be done. Perhaps it comes down to this. I am writing to you because you know nothing. Because you are far away from me and know nothing.

I became hypnotized by my own loneliness, unwilling to stop until my eyes wouldn't stay open anymore, watching the white line of the highway as though it was the last thing that connected me to the earth.

To feel estranged from language is to lose your own body.

I was in the book, and the book was in my head, and as long as I stayed inside my head, I could go on writing the book. It was like living in a padded cell, but of all the lives I could have lived at that moment, it was the only one that made sense to me. I wasn't capable of being in the world, and I knew that if I tried to go back into it before I was ready, I would be crushed.

Imagine knowing that you're good at something, so good that the world would be in awe of you if they could see your work, and then keeping yourself a secret from the world.

There was nothing to see, nothing to distract me from succumbing to my fears, and the longer I kept my eyes shut, the more terribly I saw my fears wanted me to see.

Once you turn against yourself, it's hard not to believe that everyone else is against you, too

They have trapped Blue into doing nothing, into being so inactive as to reduce his life to almost no life at all. Yes, says Blue to himself, that's what it feels like: like nothing at all. He feels like a man who has been condemned to sit in a room and go on reading a book for the rest of his life. This is strange enough - to be only half alive at best, seeing the world only through words, living only through the lives of others.

New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know its neighborhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost.

Perhaps when we shrink down to almost nothing, we will at last find one another. Life is, after all, very difficult. Most of us die here simply because we forget to breathe.

I have come to New York because it is the most forlorn of places, the most abject. The brokenness is everywhere, the disarray is universal. You have only to open your eyes to see it. The broken people, the broken things, the broken thoughts. The whole city is a junk heap.

For it is only in the darkness of solitude that the work of memory begins.

Toen hij de kluizenaar in de zachte aarde naast het beekje begroef, besefte hij dat alles mogelijk zou zijn voor hem op deze plek. Hij had voedsel en water; hij had een huis; hij had een nieuwe identiteit voor zichzelf gevonden, een nieuw en totaal onverwacht leven. Hij kon de ommekeer bijna niet vatten. Nog geen uur geleden had hij willen sterven. Nu beefde hij van geluk, niet in staat te stoppen met lachen toen hij de ene schop na de andere op het gezicht van de dode man wierp.

stranded in the awkward position of being against the ones who were against, which was a lonely place to be for a person who was also against the ones who were for.

New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know its neighbourhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost. Lost,

The boundaries of my world had shrunk, but I was still alive, and as long as I could go on breathing and farting and thinking my thoughts, what difference did it make where I was?

Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of a road in northern Wisconsin.

Don't be a writer; it's a terrible way to live your life. There's nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it. But don't expect anything from anybody.

He did not seem to be a man occupying space, but rather a block of impenetrable space in the forum of a man. The world bounced off him, shattered against him, at times adhered to him - but it never got through.