Quotes About Isolation

A foghorn sounding through fog makes the fog seem to be everything.

I stopped watching. I forgot about Nudes. I lived my life, which felt like a switched-off TV. Something had gone through me and out and I could not own it.

You will see me, like a mountain animal, bitter little animal

I've worked very hard, you know," she confided to him, "and I've planted some kind of-I've been lucky enough, I guess, to plant a star-and then people wanted to either get in the act or else they wanted to rob me emotionally or financially, whatever. And then walk away and it's always lonely

Val is a bachelor farmer in his seventies, so he should, by rights, be half mad.

After three more years, she was released from the asylum, rattling with pills – a much reduced, soon to be terminally ill woman who was invisible, on the street, to those who passed her by.

Of course I am bland, she thought. You too would be bland if you grew up with one gas pump in front of the house and nothing else except a view that stretched over half the world. Landscape made me bland, bears poking in the garbage can stunted my individuality, as did plagues of horseflies, permafrost, wild-fire, and the sun setting like a bomb. So much sky makes one bewildered - which is the proper way to be.

Oh yes, thank you, Kitty,' she said and then sat and looked at her food. At one point she keeled forward and laid her cheek along her cigarette arm, which was stuck out straight across the tabletop. She was weeping. If such a thing can be said of someone who was making no sound and shedding no tears. Then she straightened up, pushed the palm of her hand up across her cheek and resumed her cigarette, ate through exhaled smoke, and poured herself some red wine.

If Kafka had been a woman, then Gregor Samsa would not have turned into an insect, he would not have had to. Gregor would be Gretel and she would wake up one morning pregnant. She would try to roll over and discover she was stuck on her back. She would wave her little hands uselessly in the air.

People aren't locked doors. You can get through to them if you want. But no one did. No one reached out a hand to Tulip. Nobody tried to touch her. I hear them whispering and they sicken me. 'Bus seats!' grumbles Mrs Bodell. 'Locker doors!' complain the teachers. 'Chicken sheds!' say the farmers. 'Greenhouses! Dustbins!' moan the neighbours. And Mum says, 'A lovely old hotel!' But what about Tulip? I shall feel sorry for Tulip all my life. And guilty, too. Guilty.

You can be lonely even when you are loved by many people, since you are still not anybody's one and only.

She says everyone around her drank or took drugs. She fell into the same pattern and gradually succumbed to despair.

I am afraid of being infected," they tell him, "but I am even more afraid of being left alone.

Ici, je me cache quand je veux. Je puis me cacher des jours et des jours, sans qu'on sache si j'existe ou non, et, sans que je le sache bien moi-même. Je m'enferme là-haut. Je lis, je dors, je rêve. Je ne bouge plus.

And his eyes frighten me, too. They're the eyes of an old man, an old man who's seen so much in life that he no longer cares to go on living. They're not even desperate... just quiet and expectant, and very, very lonely, as if he were quite alone of his own free choice.

invite a person to a log cabin in the woods for a weekend. The true personality emerges every time.

Shutter all the windows, bar the door - Pain is what a house is for. Close your eyes when other eyes beseech, turn away from arms that reach. There is no commitment without cost - nothing is loved but can be lost. Better not to meet than have to part - there is no armor for the heart. But always light seeps in through cracks, and dust. No house is built that you can trust, So you may wake one day to find you care a little too much for a chair.

No one is fine on his own. People just say they are.

No one knocked on his door the next day. Nor the day after. Nor the one after that. But that didn't mean he was unaware of what was happening. Someone had carried a plate of those fucking biscuits past his room, and even the oak door had provided no barrier for the smell. Not for anything of hers.

When you are alone - at sea, in the polar dark - an absence can keep you alive. The one you love maintains your mind. But when she's merely across the city, this is an absence that eats you to the bone.

I was fifteen years old when I began to hate people.

I myself am opaque, for some reason. Their eyes cannot see me. Yes, that's it: The world is autistic with respect to me.

It was not something you could call friendship; it was at once less and more. The sharing of such experiences created a bond and set them apart from all others. It was not something that could be told to another person. There were no words with a meaning both could understand which would impart the physical horror or the heights and depths of emotion.

Writers, as they gain success, feel like outsiders because writers don't come together in real groups.