Quotes About Isolation

I wanted someone above me in the chain of life. I didn't want to be alone, a single blue egg in a crumbling nest.

Life in a Communist country is an intellectually empty life and we suffered the constant pangs of intellectual starvation.

I wouldn't accept your help if I was blind and needed guidance across a six-lane highway. Now please go away!

Each way to suicide is its own: intensely private, unknowable, and terrible. Suicide will have seemed to its perpetrator the last and best of bad possibilities, and any attempt by the living to chart this final terrain of a life can be only a sketch, maddeningly incomplete.

Profound melancholia is a day-in, day-out, night-in, night-out, almost arterial level of agony.

I understood very little of what was going on, and I felt as though only dying would release me from the overwhelming sense of inadequacy and blackness that surrounded me.

Given that, it turned out to be unnervingly easy to keep my friends and family at psychological bay: "To be sure," wrote Hugo Wolf, "I appear at times merry and in good heart, talk, too, before others quite reasonably, and it looks as if I felt, too, God knows how well within my skin. Yet the soul maintains its deathly sleep and the heart bleeds from a thousand wounds.

Patient reluctant to be with people when depressed because she feels her depression is such an intolerable burden on others";

Others would say to me, It is only temporary, it will pass, you will get over it, but of course they had no idea how I felt, although they were certain that they did. Over and over and over I would say to myself, If I can't feel, if I can't move, if I can't think, and I can't care, then what conceivable point is there in living?

I have no idea how I managed to pass as normal in school, except that other people are generally caught up in their own lives and seldom notice despair in others if those despairing make an effort to disguise the pain.

How could I tell him that my loneliness was crushing? How it felt awful to be lonely but not know how to reach out to people and fill the time I always had too much of? It wasn't that I didn't enjoy being alone, because I did, and could spend hours on solitary endeavors like reading or going for long walks without ever wishing for human companionship...sometimes I craved the presence of someone, especially if I could be myself.

For several weeks, I drank vodka in my orange juice before setting off for school in the mornings, and I thought obsessively about killing myself.

They can try acupuncture, they can try ECT, they can try a frontal lobotomy, none of it will work. I am a hopeless case. I have lost my angel. I have lost my mind. The days are too long, too heavy; my bones are crushing under the weight of these days.

The horror of profound depression, and the hopelessness that usually accompanies it, are hard to imagine for those who have not experienced them. Because the despair is private, it is resistant to clear and compelling description.

It's hard not to jump out instead of waiting to be found. It's hard to be alone so long and then hear someone come around. It's like some form of skin's developed in the air that, rather than have torn, you tear. Hide and Seek

No Names There are high places that don't invite us, sharp shapes, glacier- scraped faces, whole ranges whose given names slip off. Any such relation as we try to make refuses to take. Some high lakes are not for us, some slick escarpments. I'm giddy with thinking where thinking can't stick.

Hide and Seek It's hard not to jump out instead of waiting to be found. It's hard to be alone so long and then hear someone come around. It's like some form of skin's developed in the air that, rather than have torn, you tear.

Until recently, I didn't think that humans could choose loneliness. That there were sometimes forces more powerful than the wish to avoid loneliness.

Perhaps all humans are lonely. At least potentially.

Maybe all of us at Hailsam had little secrets like that -- little private nooks created out of thin air where we could go off alone without fears and longing.

At the same time, what was becoming clear to me was the extent to which humans, in their wish to escape loneliness, made maneuvers that were very complex and hard to fathom

Leave us, you were always on the outside of our love.

But who says I'm lonely? I'm not lonely.' 'Perhaps all humans are lonely. At least potentially.

Ruth had been right: Madame was afraid of us. But she was afraid of us in the same way someone might be afraid of spiders. We hadn't been ready for that. It had never occurred to us to wonder how we would feel, being seen like that, being the spiders.