Quotes About Isolation

To wait - only to wait - without even the final merciful deprivation of hope. Sometimes I think that some secret court must have tried and condemned me, unheard, to this heavy sentence.

He saw the young man's face in the mirror up on the wall, he saw the thick wind-ruffled hair and the little scar on the cheekbone. The face moved in the mirror and when he looked round he could not see it anywhere in the room, and when he wanted to call out the sickness choked him, and now he tried to fight the icy sickness, but like whales the waves of it fell on him till he was pounded and drowned, and while he froze suffocating and could not move or breathe...

Hell had at least been familiar; she knew that, if she'd been capable of feeling anything, she would have felt afraid of this irresistible force that had picked her up like a scrap of paper and was sweeping her into the void, right out of the world as she knew it, as if whirling her off the earth altogether.

The years passed like the steps of a staircase leading lower and lower. I did not walk any more in the sun or hear the songs of larks like crystal fountains playing against the sky. No hand enfolded mine in the warm clasp of love. My thoughts were again solitary, disintegrate, disharmonious – the music gone. I lived alone in a few pleasant rooms, feeling my life run out aimlessly with the tedious hours: the life of an old maid ran out of my fingertips.

The whole room is as black as pitch. In fact, I'm not at all sure that it is a room. Something suggests to me now that I'm on board ship; I might be floating adrift on some tranquil sea. And yet there's no sound, no motion, nothing to indicate either sea or land. Like a ghost train my life streams through my head, and I don't know which point of the compass I'm facing. How dark it is. The moon must have stolen away secretly.

Since he'd gone, the world had become unnervingly strange. There was nothing she could do and nowhere she could go. She felt lost, lonely, dazed, deprived of everything, even of her identity, which was not strong enough to survive without his constant encouragement and reassurance.

It's lonely? Sure, it's lonely. That's what you asked for, didn't you? After all, if you hadn't been too superior for the gang, you wouldn't be here. And think how much more distinguished it is to be on your own, or with one or two individualists like yourself, than to be an ordinary gregarious animal going about with the herd.

In this nameless place nothing appears animate, nothing is close, nothing is real; I am pursued by the remembered scent of dust sprinkled with summer rain.

Don't you like the sea any more?' she asked. [...] 'No,' said the man. 'I don't think so. I think I hate it.' But then, feeling the hollow, vague coldness inside the glass, and going away from the sea, there was nothing at all left and nothing mattered at all. 'I don't feel anything about it,' he said. 'I don't feel anything about anything.

When everything's said and done, unfortunately, we find ourselves in the position of children whose parents have gone to the theatre, leaving them alone in the dark house. Yes, we are forced, if we are honest, to make the saddest of all admissions when it comes to the last resort: Alas, we do not understand these things.

I was about to become the world's best-kept secret; one that would never be told. What a thrilling enigma for posterity I should be!

I said I wanted to see her. 'You can't.' He turned the key, dropped it into his pocket, threw a pistol down on the table. 'She's dead.' A knife went through me. All other deaths in the world were outside; this one was in my body, like a bayonet, like my own.

The world had become an arctic prison from which no escape was possible, all its creatures trapped as securely as were the trees, already lifeless inside their deadly resplendent armour.

Society than solitude is worse And man to man is still the greatest curse.

Men don't even ask me out. I can't remember the last time I was asked out on a date, and I'm talking years here. I spend my life more and more alone.

I have been alone since my husband died. I stay in my home. I don't date. It's hard to date when you're at home. Nobody knows you.

One of the most oft-quoted records of the siege, scribbled in pencil over the pages of a pocket address book, is that kept by twelve-year-old Tanya Savicheva: 28 December 1941 at 12.30 a.m. – Zhenya died. 25 January 1942 at 3 p.m. – Granny died. 17 March at 5 a.m. – Lyoka died. 13 April at 2 a.m. – Uncle Vasya died. 10 May at 4 p.m. – Uncle Lyosha died. 13 May at 7.30 a.m. – Mama died. The Savichevs are dead. Everyone is dead. Only Tanya is left.

Wiser councils prevailed, and today a solitary Khmelnytsky slices the uncomplaining air on a traffic island outside Santa Sofia Cathedral. It is hard to make out

Once, back then, a young riverman had even publicly cursed the camp. He was immediately arrested and locked up in the camp for several weeks so that he saw firsthand what was going on inside there. When he got out, he looked strange and didn't answer a single question people asked him. He eventually found work on a barge, and later, his relatives said, he moved to Holland for good—a story that astounded the entire village back then.

His few friends and his former teachers might be watched, as well as his brothers and those dearest to him. The entire city, a dragnet. And he was already in it. He had to slip though its meshes. But by now he was really done in.

Darkness was already coming down like a cloak on the deserted streets,

You do not feel like dancing and there are no daffodils, only walls, your bedroom door, and the quiet of the house, tucked asleep in the night's thick cover. You wait for dawn. You wait for your dreams. You wait in the night, and you hunger.

Loneliness sends you into your body instead of your brain.

Remote and oblivious and lost in contemplation.