Quotes About Isolation

None of the patients could say the experiments didn't yield some benefits. It was the way the experiments were conducted that grated: with cold, clinical detachment. Masks, gloves, and carbolic acid were the order of the day fora ll staff, and while this may have been prudent it only made isolated people feel even more isolated.

It slowly dawned on the volunteers that they were not patients but subjects; separated from their friends and community in Kalaupapa, they felt like outcasts among outcasts.

Beyond the light was that distant line of horizon she had glimpsed from on high—a line like a solitary prison bar, needing no intersection with other bars to keep her jailed. And she decided then and there that she would not stay here and be mocked; she would not.

Her depression had given way to a characteristic determination. "I may never leave Kalaupapa," she told Kenji, "but a part of me is damn well getting out of here." Her husband agreed. Once he'd aspired to make his mark on the world. "This," he admitted, "is the only way I ever will.

Rachel barely noticed any of it, and not just because she was insulated by the press of bodies on every side fo her. She paid little mind to the deck buckling beneath her like a maddened mule, or even to the stink of feces and urine that the exiles were forced to void where they sat. She was simply numb, her mind having absorbed all the fear it could, like a sponge saturated with water: after a while the fear became a constant, cold companion, a simple fact of existence.

It was exciting and intellectually gratifying to speculate on what might lie waiting in the black gulfs when one was behind the business end of a telescope, quite another to do so isolated on an unpleasant little speck of a world such as this, confronted by a ship of non-human manufacture that uncomfortably resembled a growth instead of a familiar device for manipulating and overcoming the neat laws of physics.

I will remove these restraints. And leave this cell, with the door open, and retire to my living quarters. I will speak of this encounter to no one.

was certain: His former colleagues would not understand, no matter how hard he tried to explain. No one fled the First Order and lived. The sand sucked at his feet as he stumbled toward the rising smoke. "Poe! Say something if you can hear me! Poe!" He did not expect a response, but he hoped for one. Flame had joined smoke

Two surviving human beings on the entire planet, Ruslan thought, and they can't stand each other. A fitting metaphor for the entire species.

Nobody came to Jakku.

Alone . . . alone . . . It echoed in her mind as she sat there. Under the weight of the loneliness Han's voice seemed to fade, and Maz Kanata's as well, until there was nothing surrounding her but a silence as deep and profound as the distant reaches of space itself.

You've been so lonely, he murmured as he searched for what he needed. So afraid to leave. A thin smile crossed his face. At night, desperate to sleep, you'd imagine an ocean. I can see it . . . I can see the island.

She needed him. And he was nowhere to be found. There was no else she could rely on. No one like her brother. No one else at all.

Home at that moment was a starless night, a steady wind, not a human to be seen.

You Americans think you can fix everything by throwing money at it," she added. "But your friend was right. This is like the Stone Age. Because no one will let us get past the Stone Age. Not when there is nothing but war. Do you understand? The best thing you can do to help us is leave us alone.

Outside, beyond where the light from our window fell, there was a deep inner well. The roof in which these rooms were built dropped steeply away, and facing us across the void were other similar dormers, unlit, their windows open into shadowy stillness. Above the roofline the sky was amorously transformed by the pink glare of the London dusk.

I was applying myself to the subtler connoisseurship of the out-of-season, days without warmth and nights without encounters, empty pleasure-grounds and the violence of the tides.

If you were to find yourself suddenly and completely isolated from your whole social circle because you no longer believe something that all of them believe, you wouldn't be any less lonely because you could mutter to yourself that they weren't real friends after all. You might even come to think that not-real friends are better than no friends at all.

It may seem strange, perhaps even socially archaic, but I strongly believe that people ought to reach out to each other in this way, neighbor to neighbor, stranger to stranger, because our failure to do so has warped the social fabric into one of conjoined loneliness and all its attached sufferings.

For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.

each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own.

The abundances caused by isolation are stifled by the same isolation

Only when the traveler communicates with the city of departure does he realize he has entered a new domain of time...It is then the traveler learns that he is cut off in time, as well as in space. No traveler goes back to his city of origin.

Roschach's Journal: October 12th, 1985 Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout Save us!... and I'll look down and whisper No.