Quotes About Isolation

As a goalkeeper, you have so much time back there where you're alone, and you're talking to yourself in your head.

I don't like talking to celebrities.

People think in Hollywood there's a family, where everybody gets together talks about stuff and we all know each other, and it's just not that way at all to me.

Nobody actually talks to anybody anymore. People in cubicles next to each other, they e-mail each other.

No stranger ever comes up and talks to me. I'm the invisible woman.

My first year in Japan was very tough, just like my first year in the minors. But at least there I had a lot of Dominican people and Latin people I can talk to. If you don't have anybody to talk to, you can get depressed. But if you find someone who talks your language, it's easier.

At school I was always taller than the rest of my class, and because I was an only child, I was comfortable with adults but shy and awkward with other kids. I was quiet, bookish, and in spite of my size, hopeless at sports. In short, I was different. And even in the earliest grades, I got pounded for it.

If Antarctica were music it would be Mozart. Art, and it would be Michelangelo. Literature, and it would be Shakespeare. And yet it is something even greater; the only place on earth that is still as it should be. May we never tame it.

I spent my whole childhood trying to find places to be on my own. I used to sit on the water tank in the attic or in the dog's kennel. I was quite a strange child.

You might come here Sunday on a whim. Say your life broke down. The last good kiss you had was years ago. You walk these streets laid out by the insane, past hotels that didn't last, bars that did, the tortured try of local drivers to accelerate their lives. Only churches are kept up. The jail turned 70 this year. The only prisoner is always in, not knowing what he's done.

If you are really strange you are always in enemy territory, and your constant concern is survival.

Confession is a difficult discipline for us, because we all too often view the believing community as a fellowship of saints before we see it as a fellowship of sinners. We feel that everyone else has advanced so far into holiness that we are isolated and alone in our sin.

Some days you exist like the last speaker of an extinct language. These are the silences that litter the heart.

The heart sags. My footprints forget me. I don't think anything will ever be the same. This is the edge of the cliff and you can't move, can't jump. Everything is vertical. With binoculars you can see where you'll be in an hour. Raindrops collect on the lens. A fine mist. It hides us. It drifts into clocks. Gravity presses your hands. Some hurts never get said. Some get smuggled.

Can you imagine a silence so desperate to be heard?

Those times we refused each other, we seemed to disappear. — Richard Jackson, from "Unable to Refuse," The Heart as Framed: New and Select Poems (Press 53, 2022)

I have only these words that seem as if they climbed up from the bottom of a dry well.

How long has it been since I've seen sunlight? Down in the asshole of creation, it was a dim, perpetual crimson-and-magenta twilight.

Whoever said Hell is other people was wrong. Hell is other people in your house .

She looks like she just saw a ghost, a unicorn, and Hello Kitty having a three-way in a clown car and they didn't invite her.

I knock on the door and Flicker yells, "Come in." It's dark inside. The only illumination comes from an old Philco Predicta TV. She's watching The Tingler with someone or something else. I mean, it's person shaped but completely black. No face or anything else. It's like a kind of human void next to her on the battered red sofa.

Geryon looks at me like I'm a moldy ham sandwich someone forgot in the back of the fridge at work.

I consider going to Bamboo House and drinking myself horizontal, but that's what I always do, and where has it gotten me? Pretty much where I am now—standing in a hallway talking to myself about things and people I don't understand anymore.

The 405 is one breakdown away from turning into the Donner Party.