Quotes About Isolation

And I saw it didn't matter who had loved me or who I loved. I was alone. The black oily asphalt, the slick beauty of the Iranian attendant, the thickening clouds—nothing was mine. And I understood finally, after a semester of philosophy, a thousand books of poetry, after death and childbirth and the startled cries of men who called out my name as they entered me, I finally believed I was alone, felt it in my actual, visceral heart, heard it echo like a thin bell.

The reason that extended solitude seemed so hard to endure was not that we missed others but that we began to wonder if we ourselves were present, because for so long our existence depended upon assurances from them.

Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.

I used to sit near Marilyn Monroe in the Actor's Studio. She'd get dressed up because that was her identity. Sad. Those cameras wouldn't leave her alone. She didn't know where to hide.

If these walls started talking, the entire Island would be put under quarantine while the government moved in an army of psychiatrists.

Yeah, well my walking body abandoned me and flew south

showered, hating the sound of the rushing water; shaved, hating the buzz of the razor. He dressed quickly, not caring what he put on. He had no plan, only to get out of this room, to get away from the unremembered shape of his dreams.

While he was thinking of her, the bus had bumbled away and she was crossing the slant intersection, coming directly towards him. Not to him; she didn't know he was there in the high foggy dark. He saw her face again as she passed under the yellow fog light, saw that she didn't like the darkness and fog and loneness. She started down the California Incline; he could hear her heels striking hard on the warped pavement as if the sound brought her some reassurance.

He rang Laurel as soon as he reached the apartment. Before he fixed a drink, before even lighting a cigarette. There was no answer to the call. He rang her every fifteen minutes after that, and at six, when the dusk was moving across the open windows, and when there was still no answer to his call, he stepped out into the courtyard where he could look up at her apartment. But there were no lights in it.

There's nothing hard about it. But I get praised for the hardest of things I do, and I do some of the hardest of things. Things like waking up in the morning and going to sleep at night, all alone except for when I'm with someone; and it's getting harder and harder.

The minute your group gets so big you don't know anybody in it and they don't know you, there's hell to pay.

To the men exposed to his rule Lymond never appeared ill: he was never tired; he was never worried, or pained, or disappointed, or passionately angry. If he rested, he did so alone; if he slept, he took good care to sleep apart. "—I sometimes doubt if he's human," said Will, speaking his thought aloud. "It's probably all done with wheels.

But she knew that she had encountered one of the more devastating kinds of loneliness in existence: that of being in close contact with someone to whom she was a nonperson, and who thereby rendered her invisible and of no consequence.

I was passionate. I found something that I loved. I could be all alone in a big old skating rink and nobody could get near me and I didn't have to talk to anybody because of my shyness. It was great. I was in my fantasy world.

Maybe part of the problem of feeling like this life isn't my real life is that I have no connections, no real links to anyone.

But 'tis a sad thing that all one's happiness is only that the world does not know you are miserable.

However, when we are depressed, being reminded of other people's suffering only serves to increase our self-hatred.

It was awful to have no one belonging to you, and to belong to no one.

No matter how you resent other people's company, when you have it, you can't concentrate so fiercely upon your misery as you would without it.

There was nobody to help us. And nobody to stop us.

The capacity for not feeling lonely can carry a very real price, that of feeling nothing at all.

The time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself.

Forget sex or politics or religion, loneliness is the subject that clears out a room.

Forget about being world famous, it's hard enough just getting the automatic doors at the supermarket to acknowledge our existence.