Quotes About Isolation

Narrowness and pragmatism are characteristic of the dominant ways of thought under capitalism, where the individualism of economic man is a model for the autonomy and isolation of all phenomena, and where a knowledge industry turns scientific ideas into marketable commodities—precisely the magic bullets that the pharmaceutical industry sells people.

He felt the sadness of Lucifer.

Normal persons deprived of sensation progress from having mild to severe hallucinations, starting out with what looks very much like form constants (geometric patterns, mosaics, lines, rows of dots) and building to more developed, dream-like juxtapositions of perceptions the longer they remain in isolation.

Wilde had to live his life twice over, first in slow motion, then at top speed. During the first period he was a scapegrace, during the second a scapegoat. For the three and a half years he lived after his release from prison, he saw pass before him, mostly in dumb show, a multitude of people he had known earlier, who evaded him.

Next morning, when I got up, the inside temperature was 300 below zero. The new arrangement was working quite nicely indeed.

It's hard knowing that one bag of heroin, one mile away, would help me forget it all.

If loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure.

Thinking hard about you I got on the bus and paid 30 cents car fare and asked the driver for two transfers before discovering that I was alone.

Forsaken, fucking in the cold, eating each other, lost runny noses, complaining all the time like so many people that we know

But if it is crazy to turn down the 100 bets, the logic of Samuelson's argument is just reversed; you should not turn down one! Shlomo and I called this phenomenon "myopic loss aversion". The only way you can ever take 100 attractive bets is by first taking the first one, and it is only thinking about the bet in isolation that fools you into turning it down.

There he lived in solitary grandeur, eating and sleeping alone (and these were his principal occupations), and communing with his own dignity

And he pictured her down below, turning slowly in the currents, her skin pale blue in the cold rays of sunlight slanting down through the water, her hair flowing lazily around her face.

That sort of aloneness gives you goosebumps scurrying up your spine. It makes your scalp crawl.

Man is a coward in space, for he is by himself.

No longer will you be a weird Robinson Crusoe, imprisoned on an island of night surrounded by oceans of death.

Despite everything he had or might have (except, of course, another human being), life gave no promise of improvement or even of change. The way things shaped up, he would live out his life with no more than he already had. And how many years was that? Thirty, maybe forty if he didn't drink himself to death. The thought of forty more years of living as he was made him shudder

For he was a man and he was alone and these things had no importance to him.

I don the robe of hermit without a cry.

Se estrecha el círculo. Un nuevo terror nacido de la muerte, una nueva superstición que invade la fortaleza del tiempo. Soy leyenda.

This, he knew, was courage, the truest, ultimate courage, because there was no one here to sympathize or praise him for it. What he felt was felt without the hope of commendation.

The last man in the world was irretrievably stuck with his delusions.

Cornered again, Mr. Cook reluctantly made a third duplicate; then a fourth, a fifth. The city, albeit large, soon became thick with William O. Cooks. He would come upon himself at corners, discover himself asking himself for lights, end up, quite literally, beside himself.

All right, little boy, he tried kidding himself, calm down now. Santa Claus is coming to town with all the nice answers. No longer will you be a weird Robinson Crusoe, imprisoned on an island of night surrounded by oceans of death.

He knew he should burn up the paper plates and utensils too, and dust the furniture and wash out the sinks and the bathtub and toilet, and change the sheets and pillowcase on his bed; but he didn't feel like it. For he was a man and he was alone and these things had no importance to him.