Quotes About Isolation

VaroluÅŸun ham nabz?ndan koptuÄŸunu ac? içinde hissettiÄŸi yerden art?k uzakt?.

He was alone," as James Joyce wrote of Stephen Dedalus, his artist as a young man. "He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.

There are so many people in the world, and I want to know them all but I don't even know my next-door neighbor's name.

Al was referring to the time during the Cuban missile crisis that he left his five-months-pregnant wife home alone with no food or access to money and in desperation she had to call her mother and sister for help. "Oh!

On the outside, Tony said, not wanting to spend time with your criminally insane neighbors would be a perfectly understandable position. But on the inside it demonstrates you're withdrawn and aloof and you have a grandiose sense of your own importance.

Tony said just being here can be enough to turn someone crazy.

My Caprice was a spacious cruiser, well insulated from the world—one motored along the highways as if sitting in a middle-class living room equipped with an engine and tires.

My heart floated dead and cold in my chest.

Le auto sono come le persone. Ogni giorno andiamo in giro in mezzo alla ressa, corriamo di qua e di là, arrivando quasi a toccarci ma in realtà c'è pochissimo contatto. Tutti quegli scontri mancati. Tutte quelle opportunità perse. E' inquietante, a pensarci bene. Forse è meglio non pensarci affatto

Os carros são como as pessoas. Movemo-nos em círculos todos os dias, corremos daqui para ali, passamos a centímetros uns dos outros, mas há muito pouco contacto real. Tantos desencontros. Tantos «podia ter sido». É assustador, quando pensamos nisso. Provavelmente, o melhor é não pensar.

Obsessions, of course, can never be shared.

You're hiding from the world because it frightens you. I frighten you.

You people sit in your yamen [headquarters], and your horizon is your window sill,' he went on. `You are ignorant because no one dares to correct you. You might lose face and, what's more, some one might lose his head. You've retreated into your intellectual rat holes, having exposed only a posterior of vanity. Goddamn it, sir, you've all become insufferably stupid!

Mr. Franzen said he and Mr. Wallace, over years of letters and conversations about the ethical role of the novelist, had come to the joint conclusion that the purpose of writing fiction was "a way out of loneliness." (NY Times article on the memorial service of David Foster Wallace.)

The first thing that reading teaches us is how to be alone.

Everything he'd done with regard to her in the last three years had been calculated to foreclose the intensely personal sort of talks they'd had when he was younger: to get her to shut up, to train her to contain herself, to make her stop pestering him with her overfull heart and her uncensored self. And now that the training was complete and she was obediently trivial with him, he felt bereft of her and wanted to undo it.

And if the world refused to square with his version of reality then it was necessarily an uncaring world, a sour and sickening world, a penal colony, and he was doomed to be violently lonely in it. He bowed his head at the thought of how much strength a man would need to survive an entire life so lonely.

Power, power, power: how could the world be organized around the struggle for a thing so lonely and oppressive in the having of it?

Simply being a social isolate as a child does not, however, doom you to bad breath and poor party skills as an adult. In fact, it can make you hypersocial. It's just that at some point you'll begin to feel a gnawing, almost remorseful need to be alone and do some reading - to reconnect to that community.

As she left her parents' neighborhood, the houses got newer and bigger and boxier. Through windows with no mullions or fake plastic mullions she could see luminous screens, some giant, some miniature. Evidently every hour of the year, including this one, was a good hour for staring at a screen.

Her heart was full and her senses were sharp, but her head felt liable to burst in the vacuum of her solitude.

The following afternoon, alone in their room, and oppressed by not yet having made the promised call to Connie...

the first lesson reading teaches us is how to be alone.

Two empty hours were a sinus in which infections bred.