Quotes About Isolation

They say when you're lonely you start to lose words.

There is a story about a prisoner in Alcatraz who spent his nights in solitary confinement dropping a button on the floor then trying to find it again in the dark. Each night, in this manner, he passed the hours until dawn. I do not have a button. In all other respects, my nights are the same.

In those last weeks, we drove without talking, trying to outride the heat, each alone in the dream the city had become. I was afraid to speak, to touch his arm even.

What's keeping you here?" he says. Please, I think, but no, I can't even look at him. All these people. I have so many people, you wouldn't believe it.

Aboard the Belgica, off Antarctica, May 20, 1898: Explorer Frederick Cook

Before I was born, they had traveled around the world together, and sometimes it seemed that they went away again and forgot me.

Withdrawal to the desert is called anachoresis in Greek.

The reason to have a home is to keep certain people in and everyone else out. A home has a perimeter. But sometimes our perimeter was breached by neighbors, by Girl Scouts, by Jehovah's Witnesses. I never liked to hear the doorbell ring. None of the people I liked ever turned up that way.

The baby's eyes were dark, almost black, and when I nursed her in the middle of the night, she'd stare at me with a stunned, shipwrecked look as if my body were the island she'd washed up on.

When she tells people she might move to the country, they say, But aren't you afraid you're going to get lonely? Get?

There is a story about a prisoner at Alcatraz who spent his nights in solitary confinement dropping a button on the floor then trying to find it again in the dark. Each night, in this manner, he passed the hours until dawn. I do not have a button. In all other respects, my nights are the same.

A dreary sense of loneliness came over him as he realized how everything he had brought with him from home and from the old days seemed to fall away from him and let him go his own way, forgotten and forsaken. The door to the past was barred, and he stood outside, empty-handed and alone; whatever he needed and desired he must win for himself--new friends and new shelter, new affections and new memories.

The literary text seems like "a fortified medieval town –foreigners and outsiders are repelled, or allowed in only after rigorous checks, but within all is bustling life; exchange, mutual interdependence and influence are the rule.

But my social circle had dwindled. Hell, all I had was a social dot—just me on a one man continuum.

Loneliness is a hell of a drug. A week prior I'd misted up when a grocery clerk told me, "Take care.

Loneliness is a hell of a drug.

But when faced with eternity… Separation from connection is hell. And

I am an introvert, but I hate solitude. I do now, at least. The quiet of it. My inner voice, without external input, can get lost in chaos.

A celibate, like the fly in the heart of an apple, dwells in a perpetual sweetness, but sits alone, and is confined and dies in singularity.

The theologian Paul Tillich wrote that "loneliness can be conquered only by those who can bear solitude." Because the borderline finds solitude so difficult to tolerate, she is trapped in a relentless metaphysical loneliness from which the the only relief comes from of the physical presence of others. So she will often rush to singles bars or with crowded haunts, often with disappointing--or even violent--results.

When the borderline is alone, continuity and connectedness cease. Like sand falling through her fingers, her confidence - even her sense of reality - slip away.

He may attempt suicide, often not with the intent to die but to feel something, to confirm he is alive.

Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That's what I wanted—to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. —From Long Day's Journey into Night, by Eugene O'Neill

Borderline individuals are the psychological equivalent of third-degree burn patients. They simply have, so to speak, no emotional skin. Even the slightest touch or movement can create immense suffering."1