Quotes About Isolation

And though the pack in every direction appeared to stretch in endless desolation

It lay exactly 42 miles away; only 20 miles beyond it lay what had been their destination, Paulet Island.

Wild, with six men, was sent back to the ship to salvage anything of value.

In some ways they had come to know themselves better. In this lonely world of ice and emptiness, they had achieved at least a limited kind of contentment. They had been tested and found not wanting.

In all the world there is no desolation more complete than the polar night. It is a return to the Ice Age— no warmth, no life, no movement. Only those who have experienced it can fully appreciate what it means to be without the sun day after day and week after week. Few men unaccustomed to it can fight off its effects altogether, and it has driven some men mad.

This, then, was the Drake Passage, the most dreaded bit of ocean on the globe—and rightly so. Here nature has been given a proving ground on which to demonstrate what she can do if left alone. The results are impressive.

This, then, was the Drake Passage, the most dreaded bit of ocean on the globe—and rightly so. Here nature has been given a proving ground on which to demonstrate what she can do if left alone. The

A forbidding-looking place, certainly, but that only made it seem the more pitiful. It was the refuge of twenty-two men who, at that very moment, were camped on a precarious, storm-washed spit of beach, as helpless and isolated from the outside world as if they were on another planet. Their plight was known only to the six men in this ridiculously little boat, whose responsibility now was to prove that all the laws of chance were wrong—and return with help. It was a staggering trust.

It was as if they had suddenly emerged into infinity. They had an ocean to themselves, a desolate, hostile vastness. Shackleton thought of the lines of Coleridge: Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide wide sea.

He seems so near, and yet so far.

She left the web, she left the loom,She made three paces thro' the room,She saw the water-lily bloom,She saw the helmet and the plume,She look'd down to Camelot.Out flew the web and floated wide;The mirror crack'd from side to side."The curse is come upon me," criedThe Lady of Shalott.

The lion on your old stone gatesIs not more cold to you than I.

Connectedness is of the essence of all things of all types. It is of the essence of types, that they be connected. Abstraction from connectedness involves the omission of an essential factor in the fact considered. No fact is merely itself. The penetration of literature and art at their height arises from our dumb sense that we have passed beyond mythology; namely, beyond the myth of isolation.

The knowing consciousness is a form of the social consciousness, and should not therefore be viewed in isolation from psychology and human history.

Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness; and if you are never solitary, you are never religious.

de los placeres de un solitario, el más grande es hacer el ridículo sin que nadie lo vea.

The spell of these terrible solitudes ... cannot leave any mind untouched, any mind, that is, possessed of the higher imaginative qualities.

And, with the dark, the Forest came up boldly and pressed against the very walls and windows, peering in upon them, joining hands above the slates and chimneys.

He loved the gigantic peace the Desert gave him. The world was forgotten there; and not the world merely, but all memory of it. Everything faded out. The soul turned inwards upon itself.

Fear, to put it plainly, hovered close about that little camp, and though all three would have been glad to speak of other matters, the only thing they seemed able to discuss was this—the source of their fear. They tried other subjects in vain; there was nothing to say about them.

The world was forgotten there; and not the world merely, but the memory of it. Everything faded out. The soul turned inwards upon itself.

The dark side of life, and the horror of it, belonged to a world that lay remote from his own select little atmosphere of books and dreamings.

For the worst is this after all; if they knew me, not a soul upon earth would pity me.

In a land of sand and ruin and gold There shone one woman, and none but she