Quotes About Isolation

und hinter tausend Stäben keine Welt. Der Panther

I have found it impossible to talk to anyone about my problems. I couldn't face the embarrassment, and anyway I lack the courage. Any courage I had was knocked out of me when I was young. But now, all of sudden I have a sort of desperate wish to tell everything to somebody.

Now that I am alone, I don't have to hide it; I don't have to hide anything any longer. I can let my face go because no one can see me; because there's twenty-one thousand feet between me and them... No, I don't have to press my teeth together or tighten the muscles of my jaw...

This, he thought, is what hell must be like. Hell without heat. There was something unholy about it all, something unbelievably diabolical.

Back in the cave

Dreams like being mixed,' the BFG answered. 'They is getting very lonesome all by themselves in those glassy bottles.

The young man clasped his hands together tight on his lap, hugging himself with his elbows. It seemed as though suddenly he was feeling very cold.

He would struggle with finding any value in himself and would despair at how he perceived the rest of humanity to be acting.

Edwards knew that the constant spending and deliberate time-wasting was taking a toll. 'I know that if I get to the end of this year I'll have no dignity left at all,' he said. 'It's all gone. I live in a big fantasy world... It's sad.' He'd often end the day drinking even more to block out the world and allow him to get to sleep.

NO RADIO; no movies; limited reading—little diversion between the hard day just past and the hard day just ahead. "Living was just drudgery then," says Carroll Smith of Blanco. "Living—just living—was a problem. No lights. No plumbing. Nothing. Just living on the edge of starvation. That was farm life for us. God, city people think there was something fine about it. If they only knew Ã¢â'¬Â¦

Johnson was insulated from reality by his hopes and dreams.

Animals can be driven crazy by placing too many in too small a pen. Homo sapiens is the only animal that voluntarily does this to himself.

Then I glanced at the ring on my finger. The Snake That Eats Its Own Tail, Forever and Ever. I know where I came from—but where did all you zombies come from? I felt a headache coming on, but a headache powder is one thing I do not take. I did once—and you all went away. So I crawled into bed and whistled out the light. You aren't really there at all. There isn't anybody but me—Jane—here alone in the dark. I miss you dreadfully!

Privacy is as necessary as company; you can drive a man crazy by depriving him of either.

There is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized or even cured. The only solution known to science is to provide the patient with an isolation room, where he can endure the acute stages in private and where food can be poked in to him with a stick.

I had never been much interested in Pluto, too few facts and too much isolation.

He did not expect reasonable conduct from human beings; he considered most people fit candidates for protective restraint and wet packs. He simply wished heartily that they would leave him alone!—all but the few he chose for playmates. He was firmly convinced that, left to himself, he would have long since achieved nirvana . . . dived into his own belly button and disappeared from view, like those Hindu jokers. Why couldn't they leave a man alone?

The Belt, for all its lonely reaches—or because of them—was as neighborly as a village. They gossiped among themselves, by suit radio. Out in the shining blackness it was good to know that, if something went wrong, there was a man listening not five hundred miles away who would come and investigate if you broke off and did not answer.

I know where I came from—but where did all you zombies come from? I felt a headache coming on, but a headache powder is one thing I do not take. I did once—and you all went away. So I crawled into bed and whistled out the light. You aren't really there at all. There isn't anybody but me—Jane—here alone in the dark. I miss you dreadfully!

I needed a space suit the way a pig needs a pipe organ.

But the physical danger was judged to be less important than the psychological stresses. Eight humans, crowded together like monkeys for almost three Terran years, had better get along much better than humans usually did.

Locked you in a padded cell, with a certificate signed by three doctors, and allowed you mail on alternate leap years.

Correct or not, he felt himself to be a useless pensioner, an impotent object of charity.

You really aren't here at all. There isn't anybody but me. Jane, here alone in the dark, I miss you dreadfully!