Quotes About Isolation

Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for.

The major producer of the social chaos, the indeterminacy of thought and values that rational knowledge is supposed to eliminate, is none other than science itself. And what Phaedrus saw in the isolation of his own laboratory work years ago is now seen everywhere in the technological world today. Scientifically produced antiscience—chaos.

The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance, and in Montana and Idaho the physical distances are big but the psychic distances between people are small, and here it's reversed.

Appena arrivata credeva in cima ai grattaceli ci stessero dei tizi che vedevano tutto quello che succedeva e non sarebbero mai scesi a parlarle. Poi aveva scoperto che non c'è nessuno che sa quello che succede.

Now I have something to tell you, her brother said. Every time I've had to take part in anything with other people, something of genuine social concern, I've been like a man who steps outside the theater before the final act for a breath of fresh air, sees the great dark void with all those stars, and walks away, abandoning hat, coat and play.

Whether you look at no men at all, or look at every single one - it comes to the same thing. You can throw yourself at their hearts, because you've gone mad from being always a stranger; from not being able to understand how you can even bear to hold their hands in your own any longer than you have to.

The world seems almost physically wider when up to just now the right-hand side was always obscured by the proximity of someone else; and all of a sudden you stand there, astonished, in a wide semi-circle: alone.

Ein tiefer Graben unweltlicher Herkunft schien sie und ihn in ein Nirgendland einzuschließen.

Isn't it greatly in my favor that I don't belong here but in jail?

There's no longer a whole man confronting a whole world, only a human something moving about in a general cultural-medium.

That summer we had been absolutely alone, together, even when people were around, the only inhabitants of the kind of floating island or magic carpet which being in love is.

She cleared them out, and fast. The car went off down the gravel road with the springs flat on the rear axle and human flesh oozing out the windows, then the evening quiet descended upon us.

He thought of night coming on. He thought of the loneliness of tonight, this first night in the ground. This, he thought, was the moment when the dead must first feel truly alone. This was the moment when the dead, in loneliness, feel the first stirrings of the long penance of decay. This was the moment when the dead realize the truth: This is it, it will never be different. To be dead, he thought, that was to know that nothing would ever be different.

Jack Burden could read those words, but how could he be expected to understand them? They could only be words to him, for to him the world then was simply an accumulation of items, odds and ends of things like the broken and misused and dust-shrouded things gathered in a garret. Or it was a flux of things before his eyes (or behind his eyes) and one thing had nothing to do, in the end, with anything else.

The wind would come down a thousand miles and pound on the house and the sash would rattle and inside him something would be big and coiling slow and clotting till he would hold his breath and the blood would beat in his head with a hollow sound as though his head were a cave as big as the dark outside. He wouldn't have any name for what was big inside him. Maybe there isn't any name.

The burden of intelligence: you can always imagine all those wonderful places where you can never belong.

During one wave, I suddenly found myself cramped over in front of my tent, stark naked, painful, liquid acidic craps, and, the humiliation of it all, surrounded by six elephants, silent, quizzical, polite, murmuring, almost solicitous, their trunks waving in the air investigating my actions and moans. They watched my agonized shitting as if it were an engrossing, silent Shakespearean tragedy performed in the round.

They say this is the richest era of human existence; but I think a man can be richer in knowing every atom of a single golden island in a blue sea than by spending his days striding among all the worlds.

It is a good thing, The Man in the Maze will suggest, that we are insulated from each other: we are wounded by living, by mere existence, and we could not stand the stink of each other's souls.

Architecture doesn't exist in isolation. It is, in effect, like joining an existing conversation. Architecture should be responsive to its context, purpose, and moment in time.

my mom felt more and more alone with no one to turn to.

Very few people have the luxury of at least one year to sit and just think and be with yourself.

I've come home in love with loneliness

She had never before minded being alone. Now she dreaded it. When she was alone now she felt so dreadfully alone.