Quotes About Isolation

'Community,' that loaded word so beloved of politicians, is simply not a reality in most people's lives. It's normal for us to be cut off from each other.

He needed his solitude at times, but he wasn't a hermit. He did a lot of socializing. Sometimes I think it was like he was storing up company for the times when he knew nobody would be around.

Unlike Muir and Thoreau, McCandless went into the wilderness not primarily to ponder nature or the world at large but, rather, to explore the inner country of his own soul.

Immediately after graduating, with honors, from Emory University in the summer of 1990, McCandless dropped out of sight. He changed his name, gave the entire balance of a twenty-four-thousand-dollar savings account to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet. And then he invented a new life for himself, taking up residence at the ragged margin of our society, wandering across North America in search of raw, transcendent experience.

Antarctica has this mythic weight. It resides in the collective unconscious of so many people, and it makes this huge impact, just like outer space. It's like going to the moon.

Sometimes I think it was like he was storing up company for the times when he knew nobody would be around

I have some good friends here, but no one really understands why I am here or what I do. I don't know of anyone, though, who would have more than a partial understanding; I have gone too far alone.

If this adventure proves fatal and you don't ever hear from me again, I want you to know you're a great man. I now walk into the wild. ALEX.

While tentbound high on Everest, Mallory and his companions would read aloud to one another from Hamlet and King Lear

When I rest I feel utterly lifeless except that my throat burns when I draw breath.… I can scarcely go on. No despair, no happiness, no anxiety. I have not lost the mastery of my feelings, there are actually no more feelings. I consist only of will. After each few metres this too fizzles out in unending tiredness. Then I think nothing. I let myself fall, just lie there. For an indefinite time I remain completely irresolute. Then I make a few steps again. Upon

Alaska topraklar? merhametsizdir, ne umutlar? ne de özlemleri umursar.

He drifted past saguaros and alkali flats, camped beneath escarpments of naked Precambrian stone. In the distance spiky, chocolate-brown mountains floated on eerie pools of mirage.

For a few minutes the roof of the bus remains visible among the stunted trees, a tiny white gleam in a wild green sea, growing smaller and smaller, and then it's gone.

Solitude was a rare commodity on Everest, and I was grateful to be granted a bit of it on this day, in such a remarkable setting.

In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do East Coast family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley.

Handwritten in neat block letters on a page torn from a novel by Nikolay Gogol, it read: S.O.S. I NEED YOUR HELP. I AM INJURED, NEAR DEATH, AND TOO WEAK TO HIKE OUT OF HERE I AM ALL ALONE, THIS IS NO JOKE. IN THE NAME OF GOD, PLEASE REMAIN TO SAVE ME. I AM OUT COLLECTING BERRIES CLOSE BY AND SHALL RETURN THIS EVENING. THANK YOU, CHRIS MCCANDLESS. AUGUST?

he found himself woefully unprepared for the flat pitch of life out of uniform. "I discovered that I couldn't really speak to civilians," he continued. "My marriage fell apart. All I could see was this long dark tunnel closing in, ending in infirmity, old age, and death. Then I started to climb, and the sport provided most of what had been missing for me in civvy street—the challenge, the camaraderie, the sense of mission.

He'd successfully kept Jan Burres and Wayne Westerberg at arm's length, flitting out of their lives before anything was expected of him. And now he'd slipped painlessly out of Ron Franz's life as well.

Allison asked him, "Has this happened before?…" "No! Never!" Donaldson sobbed. "This is the first time anything has ever happened to me like this. Ever!…I

And now it was time to commence the dreaded ritual of emerging from the warmth of my goose-down cocoon into the withering cold of 21,300 feet.

Shining my headlamp on a dime-store thermometer clipped to the parka I'd been using as a pillow, I saw that the temperature inside the cramped two-person tent was seven degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence.

Alaska ejerce una atracción magnética sobre los soñadores e inadaptados que creen que los enormes espacios inmaculados de la Última Frontera llenarán el vacío de su existencia.

He did a lot of socializing. Sometimes I think it was like he was storing up company for the times he knew nobody would be around