Quotes About Isolation

She felt locked away in herself, but ignorant of her identity, and often she awoke suddenly in the night, without any idea of who she was; thinking, firstly, that she had died.

All that she saw and felt tired her, and she longed to shut out the world and be secure in the womb of her imagination.

One is left so much on one's own. People are shy of the bereaved. They don't quite know what to be.

But so little does the rest of the world seem to care if we act nobly or otherwise that no help came to her

For I'm afraid of loneliness; shiveringly, terribly afraid. I don't mean the ordinary physical loneliness, for here I am, deliberately travelled away from London to get to it, to its spaciousness and healing. I mean that awful loneliness of spirit that is the ultimate tragedy of life. When you've got to that, really reached it, without hope, without escape, you die. You just can't bear it, and you die.

The passion of being forever with one's fellows, and the fear of being left for a few hours alone, is to me wholly incomprehensible.

I's lonely to stay inside oneself.

But of what use is it to be whitewashed and trim outside, to have pleasant creepers and tidy shutters, when inside one's soul wanders through empty rooms, mournfully shivers in damp and darkness, is hungry and no one brings it food, is cold and no one lights a fire, is miserable and tired and there's no chair to sit on?

After tea, when both Mrs Fisher and Lady Caroline had disappeared again—it was quite evident that nobody wanted her—she was more dejected than ever, overwhelmed by the discrepancy between the splendour outside her, the warm, teeming beauty and self-sufficiency of nature, and the blank emptiness of her heart.

What a place for him who intends to pass an examination, to write a book, or who wants the crumples got by crushing together too long with his fellows to be smoothed out of his soul.

Nobody listened. Nobody took any notice of Mrs Wilkins. She was the kind of person who is not noticed at parties. Her clothes, infested by thrift, made her practically invisible, her face was non-arresting, her conversation was reluctant, she was shy. And if one's clothes and face and conversation are all negligible, though Mrs Wilkins – who recognised her disabilities – what, at parties, is there left of one?

Aveva scoperto che lasciare non dette le cose che si ritenevano più preziose procurava un terribile senso di solitudine.

Was it possible that loneliness had nothing to do with circumstances, but only with the way one met them?

May 2nd.—Last night after dinner, when we were in the garden, I said, I want to be alone for a whole summer, and get to the very dregs of life. I want to be as idle as I can, so that my soul may have time to grow. Nobody shall be invited to stay with me, and if any one calls they will be told that I am out, or away, or sick.

Sitting there in the dark, I felt very small, and solitary, and defenceless, alone in a great, big, black world.

The people I love are always somewhere else and not able to come to me.

The brief relief of seeing other people when I leave my room turns into a desperate need to be alone, and then being alone turns into a terrible fear that I will have no friends, I will be alone in this world and in my life. I will eventually be so crazy from this black wave, which seems to be taking over my head with increasing frequency, that one day I will just kill myself, not for any great, thoughtful existential reasons, but because I need immediate relief.

I wasn't just the madwoman in the attic--I was the attic itself. The past was all over me, all under me, all inside me.

In a typical mental health catch-22, the alienating nature of depression tends to keep its sufferers from finding their way to the very support groups that might help them.

I could not bear the deep freeze settling around my bones at the thought that yet another attempt to get out of my life alive would end in disappointment. Time became palpable and viscous. Every minute, every second, every nanosecond, wrapped around my spine so that my nerves tightened and ached. I faded into abstraction. A self-generated narcosis created a painful blank where my mind used to be.

They have no idea what a bottomless pit of misery I am.

I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong. Like all the drugs put together – the lithium, the Prozac, the desipramine, and Desyrel that I take to sleep at night – can no longer combat whatever it is that was wrong with me in the first place. I feel like a defective model.

After they had explored all the suns in the universe, and all the planets of all the suns, they realized there was no other life in the universe, and that they were alone. And they were very happy, because then they knew it was up to them to become all the things they had imagined they would find.

I am so tired of the girl in the infirmary, I am so sick of the girl who cries wolf all the time - even though not one of those cries was ever a false alarm. Not one of my pleas was ever less than truly urgent because when it's all in your mind, there always IS a wolf.