Quotes About Isolation

Where the fuck are you? There's no noise." "In Cornwall." For a moment, Strike expected Shanker to ask where that was. Shanker was almost impressively ignorant of the country that lay beyond London.

He felt as though his capacity for loving had been blunted, the nerve endings severed. He

She was moving in circles where she felt alone.

Strike wondered whether Yasmin had lived in a virtual world of anonymous people for so long that probability and plausibility had fled from her reasoning processes.

The only thing left to her keeping were a bloody old rag and a creased photograph of the ocean which she held pressed to the hollow of her slender throat and had thrashed for and bit hands to protect like a madwoman risen from sleep to in her unformed state between wake and dream reproach the world tenfold.

withdrawn smugness of unexplained wealth.

I wasn't safe. I wasn't permanent. My life was a fiction I had created, like an alien who comes to earth and tries to pass as human. The affections of my friends meant nothing to me, directed, as they were, toward a person who wasn't there. There was nobody home.

If love drove people mad, what would lack of love do?

I know that I am not the only person who is alone in the world. I know that others sorrow in the night. That others pick up a razor and slice into their own skin, with greater or lesser success. I know that others look at their lives and see only silent failure and disconsolation, feeding the cat, checking their email, doing the crossword. I know that I am not the only person to have lived a life like mine. I am aware. (212)

Standing in the center of the crowd, his solitude was enormous. He felt that in all the vast and frozen space in which he lived his life - every hand needy, every heart wanting something from him - everybody had a reason to be and a place to land. Everybody but him. For him there was nothing. In all the cold and bitter world, there was not a single place for him to sit down.

Sometimes she sat and let her mind go blank and her eyes go out of focus, so that she watched the slow, jerky movements of the motes that floated across her pupils. They amazed her as a child. Now she saw them as a reflection of how she moved, floating listlessly through the world, occasionally bumping into another body without acknowledgment, and then floating on, free and alone.

She had no one in the world. Her whole world, what was left of it, was here, and there was no way to get back to where she had been before. The

Hell could be like this. ...It could be cold enough to sear the skin from your bones.

Radical individualism, radical egalitarianism, omnipresent and omni-incompetent government, the politicization of the culture, and the battle for advantages through politics shatter a society into fragments of isolated individuals and angry groups.

When it is bad… I go into the night and the night eats me

I could almost hear my books in the living room, boarded up in their Jefferson bookcases, crying out to me, like someone stuck in an elevator, or a coffin: "Let us out of here. We're suffocating. Let us out. Let us OUT!" And I started to laugh. "I'll be down in a minute," I said.

At the heart of excessive individualism is a broken heart

In one sense, (Duchamp's) "The Large Glass" is a glimpse into Hell; a peculiarly modernist Hell of repetition and loneliness.

they offered him a new suite of offices several miles away from the main campus. The pompous professor took the bait. He was delighted to have so much space; his colleagues were even more pleased because they now rarely saw or heard from him after he moved to his new digs.

it's sometimes wise to add rather than remove communication barriers—and physical distance is one of the most protective barriers.

Negative silence is the silence of a man in pain. Negative silence tells you that you are being the "wrong" silent type. Your silence keeps you locked in and others locked out. Your loyalty to an image and to your silence demands a high price. The silent son makes his monthly payments loyally, but he's never paid up; the quieter he becomes, the more he owes.

The event happened at noon on May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit, Utah. That moment was a pivotal episode in world history as Leland Stanford pounded a golden spike with a silver hammer and in an instant ended the isolation of California and the Great West from the eastern half of the United States.

Richard went to his room. Everything

on being somewhat antisocial- "You have less people at your funeral but you get more reading time.