Quotes About Isolation

14. 61 horas (61 Hours)

absolute stillness. The highway was deserted. There was no traffic.

It was very common then. It was a bad time, and a bad area. We found that out, later. Either our guide didn't know, or didn't care. We found out that there were more than twenty people killed on that route in a year. For fun. Some of them in horrible ways. Raoul was lucky, just to be shot. Some of them, their screams could be heard for miles, across the desert, in the darkness. Some of the girls were carried away and never seen again.

completely deserted.

The cell was very dark. I could just about see a bunk bed, a sink and a john.

A quarantined unit, Sinclair had said, and it felt like it. Three guys in a room, shut away from the outside world, because they were all infected, with an alibi. —

Wiley was waking up, in his bedroom, the same place he had woken up for the last three months. In his rented apartment on the waterfront. The new development. A village within the city. But not really. It was actually a giant dormitory, full of incurious people who rushed in and out in the dark, and slept the few hours between. He had never seen his neighbors, and as far as he knew they had never seen him. Perfect. He

You know you've got a problem when baristas greet you by name. You know you've got another problem when it's the warmest social interaction of your day.

Life as a writer was not what I expected. I knew no other writers. I knew no writing teachers or editors. I had to draw every last bit of strength from the exalted notions I nursed about myself.

Not anymore—not exactly." If I'd had more words, I'd have described Greenstone's last operational motel, the Voyageur, a peeling L-shaped heap with scraggy whirlwinds of litter roaming the parking lot. Though technically "open," the Voyageur is always full, its rooms permanently occupied by the owner's grown children who failed to rise on the outside.

His sadness seemed complete. It had left him nothing, no proper enjoyment, no Saturday mornings. Sadness wore him like a tailored suit.

Burdens accrue in isolation.

Frankly, you're the most homeless person--emotionally--I ever met.

Loneliness is Europe's malaria, Rae said. No one can really be immune.

must be lonesome, being bright and witty and aware

The attempt to make man absolutely at home in this world ended in man's becoming absolutely homeless.

You are pitiful, isolated individuals! You are bankrupts. Your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on – into the dustbin of history!

My reputation as a ladies' man was a joke that caused me to laugh bitterly through the ten thousand nights I spent alone.

Chemicals were easier to procure than friends, and when I wanted to play with them they never said they had to stay home to wash their hair or, less politely, that they didn't associate with weirdos.

The Germans, therefore, practiced them. In order not to be eaten alive by the next round of legislation, virtually everyone joined or identified himself with a group (since an isolated individual had no chance against large, vocal blocs). And every group knew only one policy: to demand new economic benefits from the government and/or new legislative sanctions against the other groups.

Doing time creates a demented darkness of my own imagination.... Doing time does this thing to you. But, of course, you don't do time. You do without it. Or rather, time does you. Time is a cannibal that devours the flesh of your years day by day, bite by bite.

From time to time they move you around from one cell to another, and that's always a big deal in your life. Your cell is just about all you've got, your only refuge. Like an animal's cage, it's your home — a home that would make anyone envy the homeless.

I can barely make out my own handwriting in the semidarkness, but no matter. I don't know if anyone will ever read this. Maybe someone will. If so, that someone can only be you. I try to imagine who you might be and where you might be reading this. Are you comfortable? Do you feel secure? Let me write these words to you, then, personally. I greet you, my friend. Thanks for your time and attention, even your curiosity. Welcome to my world. Welcome to my iron lodge. Welcome to Leavenworth.

He was like a man who awoke too early in the darkness while everyone else was still asleep. —Dmitry Merezhkovsky