Quotes About Isolation

One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul, and yet no one ever comes to sit by it.

When I sit in my bedroom with a book and a bottle of vodka, I do it because I'm sad, not because I think it's cool. I do it because I want to forget what I am thinking about.

It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.

People have separated from each other with walls of concrete that blocked the roads to connection and love. and Nature has been defeated in the name of development.

So here I am in step with everyone now, and yet I'm still separate from everyone. I am still trembling all over from the agitation I endured, like a bridge after an ancient train has rumbled over it. I am aware of myself. And, of course, the only things that are aware of themselves and conscious of their individuality are irritated eyes, cut fingers, sore teeth. A healthy eye, finger, tooth might as well not even be there. Isn't it clear that individual consciousness is just sickness?

The moon hangs alien, heavy, like a lock on a door; the door is tightly shut. ("The North")

Now... what I feel these in my brain is just like... some kind of foreign body... like having a very thin little eyelash in your eye. You feel generally okay, but that eye with the last in it-you can't get it off your mind for a second.

O, mighty, divinely delimited wisdom of walls, boundaries! I is perhaps the most magnificent of all inventions. Man ceased to be a wild animal only when he build the first wall. Men ceased to be a wild man only when we built the Green Wall, only when, by means of that wall, we isolated our perfect machine world from the irrational, ugly world of trees, birds, and animals...

N-no-o, all that excitement, it wouldn't reach us,' Timosha spoke gloomily. 'We're like the sunken city of Kitezh, living at the bottom of the lake. We do not hear a thing, and the water over us is muddy and sleepy. And on the surface, way above - why, everything's in flames, and the alarms are ringing.' ("A Provincial Tale")

And it seems to me that everyone is like me—they're all afraid of the slightest movement . . . Everyone's sitting all closed up in his own glass cage waiting for something.

It just goes against nature for a thinking and seeing being to live among these irregularities and unknown X's. It is as if someone blindfolds you and then makes you walk around like that and you feel your way around, stumbling, and you know that there is an edge somewhere very nearby and that it would only that one step for the only thing left of you to be a flattened, mangled piece of meat. Isn't that just about the same thing I'm going through?

Without her the sun of tomorrow will be merely a tin circle, and the sky, tin painted blue, and I myself.

Haven't written here in several days, I don't know how many: All the days seem like one. All the days have one color—yellow, like parched, fiery sand. And there isn't a shred of shade, nor a drop of water, and no end of the yellow sand.

What does it matter to you that I'll stay here alone? What does it matter to you if I don't want others to want on my behalf, but want to want for myself-if I want the impossible .....

Picture this: a human finger, cut off from its body, its hand...a separate human finger, running hopping along, all hunched over, on a glass sidewalk. I am that finger.

Picture this: a human finger, cut from its body, its hand...a separate human finger, running hopping along, all hunched over, on a glass sidewalk. I am that finger.

I walked alone through the twilit street. The wind was whirling, driving, carrying me like a slip of paper. Fragments of cast-iron sky flew and flew-they had another day, two days to hurtle through infinity… The unifs of passersby brushed against me, but I walked alone. I saw it clearly: everyone was saved, but there was no salvation for me. I did not want salvation …"(c)

A human being is made as absurdly as these preposterous "apartments"; human heads are opaque, with only tiny windows in them—the eyes.

The moon, our own, earthly moon is bitterly lonely, because it is alone in the sky, always alone, and there is no one to turn to, no one to turn to it. All it can do is ache across the weightless airy ice, across thousands of versts, toward those who are equally lonely on earth, and listen to the endless howling of dogs. ("A Story About The Most Important Thing")

This need for recognition and glory must have its roots in human loneliness.

They were lonely and sad people, all three of them, and they would not make one another less sad, but they could, with great care, make a world that would accommodate their loneliness.

she knew that in all stories she must be left out-the life she had made for herself was a life of flight, of discarding the inessential and the essential alike, making use of the stolen pieces and memories, retreating to the lost moments of other people's lives.

recluse, I have begun to understand, is not a person for whom a connection with another person is unattainable or meaningless, but one who feels she must abstain from people because a connection is an affliction, or worse, an addiction.

Reading, however, is a kind of private freedom: out of time, out of place.