Quotes About Isolation

She didn't need to see more people, she took money from hundreds of people at the bakery, men who stared at her indecently, old women who tweezed coins from cloth pouches as if picking a nose with thumb and finger.

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.

gli parve di essere sbucato fuori non solo dagli acquitrini, ma anche dalla domenica, e di essere finito tra le dune di un ottavo, anonimo giorno della settimana che lui era l'unica persona al mondo a conoscere.

I had a private, intense relationship with Snoopy, the cartoon beagle. He was a solitary not-animal animal who lived among larger creatures of a different species, which was more or less my feeling in my own house.

The only way to avoid despair was not to involve himself at all.

The first thing that reading teaches us is how to be alone ~~Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen

The first thing reading teaches us is how to be alone

Not only had Mr. Butcavage's questions been reasonable, he also had an unfortunate name and no friends in his neighborhood. He was probably a lonely person like her mother, and Pip felt helplessly compassionate toward anyone who reminded her of her mother.

His inner life now consisted of little but obsessing about his image on an Internet that felt like death to him; of

Along the deserted road to the gas station were mercury-vapor lights that seemed weaker than those in New Prospect, as if Navajo impoverishment extended even to amperage.

Il grimpa l'escalier menant à son appartement dont il avait été si éloigné durant les deux ans et demi passés que le lieu semblait s'être retourné contre lui, ne plus vouloir être son chez-lui.

him under house arrest was in his head. Hearing

I segreti erano potere. I soldi erano potere. Essere necessari a qualcuno era potere. Potere, potere, potere: com'era possibile che il mondo girasse intorno alla lotta per una cosa che creava solitudine e angoscia in chi la possedeva?

Nowhere is more nowhere than this place, I agree.

Cuando te quedas en tu habitación y te encolerizas o adoptas una actitud de desdén o te encoges de hombros, como hice muchos años, el mundo y sus problemas te intimidan de manera extraordinaria. Pero cuando sales y estableces una relación real con personas reales, o incluso con animales reales, existe el peligro muy real de acabar queriendo a alguno de ellos.

You wake up one day and realize you are a different person. That seems to be how life happens, how it establishes its patterns. The adult becomes a stranger to the boy he used to be. You become distant from everybody, especially yourself, even if, in the secrecy of your heart, you feel mostly unchanged.

How strange it began to seem that cars have bodies that never are supposed to touch, a disaster if they do.

I was famously in love with a woman who had no time to spare, not even a breath, for she dwelled in a place beyond time or the reach of anyone's Rolodex, her every breath measured out of pressurized tanks.

This was before cell phones. The desolate spaciousness between humans, between human moments, not yet filled in with chattering ghosts of reassurance. You could hear yourself not think.

I am exiting the wider world, to return to my homeland of bullying, psychosis, and bad taste. Forgive me. It is a medical matter. Once

Television had elected itself, I figured. It could watch itself too, for all I cared. I read my book.

She reassembled her deranged silent treatment of the whole of the twentieth century, but it quit before she could fire it.

The house on The Crescent, stepped into the hillside, had no face. In