Quotes About Isolation

With no one to share it with, success would be just another reminder that she was alone.

He hunched his shoulders and tried to make himself smaller in the seat. He wanted to disappear, to fade away, not to exist.

They have never known pain, he thought. The realization made him feel desperately lonely.

And it was lonely, to yearn, all alone.

If he had stayed, he would have starved in other ways.

I don't know what she is now. A stranger, mostly. It's as if she has become a part of a different world, one that doesn't include me anymore....

There's much more. There's all that goes beyond—all that is Elsewhere—and all that goes back, and back, and back. I received all of those, when I was selected. And here in this room, all alone, I re-experience them again and again. It is how wisdom comes. And how we shape our future." He rested for a moment, breathing deeply. "I am so weighted with them," he said.

If you put pussy willows in water, they'll blossom and then die. Just put them in the vase alone, and they'll stay beautiful forever.

Most of the people on the night crew had not even been given spouses because they lacked, somehow, the essential capacity to connect to others, which was required for the creation of a family unit.

For a contributing citizen to be released from the community was a final decision, a terrible punishment, an overwhelming statement of failure.

If he had stayed, he would have starved in other ways. He would have lived a life hungry for feelings, for color, for love.

He sat in his dwelling alone, watching through the window, seeing children at play, citizens bicycling home from uneventful days at work, ordinary lives free of anguish because he had been selected, as others before him had, to bear their burden.

I feel a little sorry for him," Jonas said, "even though I don't even know him. I feel sorry for anyone who is in a place where he feels strange and stupid.

FOR THE first time in his twelve years of life, Jonas felt separate, different.

Jonas reached the opposite side of the river, stopped briefly, and looked back. The community where his entire life had been lived lay behind him now, sleeping. At dawn, the orderly, disciplined life he had always known would continue again, without him. The life where nothing was ever unexpected. Or inconvenient. Or unusual. The life without color, pain, or past.

The Receiver was the most important Elder. Jonas had never even seen him, that he knew of; someone in a position of such importance lived and worked alone.

And what is your current complaint? I don't like Barrayar, I want to go home, my father-in-law wants to murder my baby, half my friends are running for their lives, and I can't get ten minutes alone with my husband, whom you people are consuming before my eyes, my feet hurt, my head hurts, my soul hurts... It was all too complicated. The poor man just wanted something to put in his blank, not an essay. Fatigue, Cordelia managed at last.

People are the only mirror we have to see ourselves in. The domain of all meaning. All virtue, all evil, are contained only in people. There is none in the universe at large. Solitary confinement is a punishment in every human culture.

She was alone, uninhabited, she was herself again, after five months of that strange doubled existence.

Bree looked up at Mikkel. Please, she said. Just go away. Pretend you neve found us. No. He spit out the word. Sail on home. Leave us behind. No, Mikkel said again.

how it's possible to be both lonely and terrified of social encounters at the same time.

just walked away.

But the lonely fancy that had not fact to feed on, nor the fancy of any other for fellowship, was for its loneliness mad.

The lonely fancy that had not fact to feed on, nor the fancy of any other for fellowship, was for its loneliness mad.