Quotes About Isolation

Boredom was my bedmate and it was hogging the sheets.

Christ, I'm in Hell and they wear uniforms.

Typee was Melville's version of this American dream—not the dream of raising one's status in the world as it is, but the dream of starting over, getting out from under, and putting it all away to discover life anew. 6.

Exterior: the jungle. Interior: Dark night of the white man's soul.

On Fire Island, you drifted, floated in a lazy river of other people's pheromones and bodily fluids, toward whatever house or cock or ass or what, whatever you wanted, that the current brought you to.

He was a monk in an order of one.

By way of contrast, on uninhabited Wrangell Island, an isolated scrap of land in the Chukchi Sea north of Siberia, mammoths survived until about 4,000 years ago.

Most new species arise not from the insensibly gradual transformation of large populations but rather by the rapid differentiation of small, isolated populations at the periphery of the main group.

I'll go live in the woods," said Malone. "You'll be lonely," said Sutherland. "Even Thoreau went to town in the afternoon to gossip.

Now, at this moment, in this soft green twilight, this soft green Sunday evening, when the heart of the world seemed to lie beating in the palm of his hand, he sat in that huge house upstairs terrified that he would never live.

Homosexuality is like a boarding school in which there are no vacations.

During those snowy New England winters, besides learning to rise at five to study calculus and trudge two miles through the drifts for breakfast down the road, he had suppressed some tremendous element in himself that took form in a prudish virginity. While his life was impeccable on the surface, he felt he was behind glass: moving through the world in a separate compartment, touching no one else.

While his life was impeccable on the surface, he felt he was behind glass; moving through the world in a separate compartment, touching no one else.

He stopped visiting married friends. Married friends, he decided one evening after returning from a visit, depress me.

By the time he arrived each evening at 245 Wall Street—where he typed up that day's documents for a patent lawyer he never saw—the financial district was as deserted as the floor of a factory after the whistle has blown, and men were scurrying home to their own erotic dreams. By the time he left, there was no one abroad but homosexuals and thieves, and it was with these he wandered.

The boredom of the place had made of my mother such a devotee of television that I knew she would not come out to greet me if my arrival coincided with a dramatic moment on Donahue.

When I got home, the neighborhood would be so quiet that after a few weeks in other places, I'd want to yell at all the silent houses I drove past: What are you doing in there? Eating, shitting, watching TV—writing novels?

He's so lonely and such a gentleman. The old-fashioned kind, who would gladly fight a duel over you. He'll buy you a townhouse here, darling, and just fly up every month or so for some medical conference, take you to the best parties, and then fuck you to oblivion in the den afterward.

But Malone continued standing there, within the house of flesh, the Temple of Priapus, staring out at that sparkling snowfall. That was it. That was Malone - standing in the crush of voluptuous limbs, enthralled by the cold, lonely, deserted street.

It is a fact seldom observed that after a certain age a single man is a creature no one has a place for

When fear is allowed to flourish in its dark and lonely medium, then any evil that can be conceived by the fearful imagination will emerge.

If you've never lived outside London, and if you've always had a car, it's difficult to understand how dire bus services undermine your standard of living: from being able to get to work, meet friends in the pub, get the weekly shop or take the kids on a day out.

We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New, but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence, to be the last of your people to speak your native tongue, to have no way to pass on the wisdom of the elders, to anticipate the promise of the children. This tragic fate is indeed the plight of someone somewhere roughly every two weeks.