Quotes About Isolation

The goat herder was so unaccustomed to human company that he was short of words even in his inner speech. It was common knowledge that the Yugoslavs hated each other more than they could ever hate a foreigner or an invader. A guilty man wishes only to be understood, because to be understood is to appear to be forgiven. Atrocities are something nothing less than the vengeance of the tormented. The human heart likes a little disorder in its geometry. Love delayed is lust augmented.

I had to live among them secretly, like one who conceals leprosy.

All of my joys have been pulled out of my mouth like teeth. All my home is nothing but sadness and silence and ruin and memory. I have been reduced, I am my own ghost, all my own beauty and youth have shrilled away, there are no illusions of happiness to impel me. Life is a prison of poverty and aborted dreams, it is nothing but a slow progress to my place beneath the soil.

A time comes when you are all alone...when you've come to the end of everything that can happen to you. It's the end of the world, even grief, your own grief, doesn't answer you anymore, and you have to retrace your steps, to go back among people, it makes no difference who.

Voltei só para mim mesmo, muito contente de ser ainda mais infeliz do que fora, porque trouxera para a minha solidão uma nova forma de angústia e qualquer coisa que se parecia a sentimento verdadeiro.

I had always suspected myself of being almost purposeless, of not really having any single serious reason for existing. Now I was convinced, in the face of the facts themselves, of my personal emptiness.

Much of the study of history is a matter of comparison, of relating what was happening in one area to what was happening elsewhere, and what had happened in the past. To view a period in isolation is to miss whatever message it has to offer.

Somebody comin', he said softly. Five or six, maybe. His words were spoken over an empty fire, for each of us vanished ghostlike into the surrounding darkness. I, fortunately, had the presence of mind to retain my coffee. With the Ferguson rifle in my right hand, I drank coffee from the cup in my left.

Not that folks disliked me or that I ever went around being mean, but folks never did get close to me and it was most likely my fault. There was always something standoffish about me. I liked folks, but I liked the wild animals, the lonely trails, and the mountains better.

How lonely were these silent hills! How reaching out for the sounds of men, for I believe a land needs people to nurse its flesh and bring from it the goodness of crops.

feet on the deck over their heads and then the sound, far off but

Deadwood Gulch, a scattered, loosely knit series of communities, some of them hidden away in small hollows or scattered in other ravines connecting with this. White Rocks

Those who pursued me were dead, and some future traveler could mark their trail by their whitening bones and the sound of a desert wind moaning in their empty rib cages.

when a man was away from women for months he got to feeling it.

I was fed a little. I was given water. And I was visited by no one.

When I awakened I was cold, colder than I had ever been before.

It ain't so bad," he said. "There's nobody to write to. I never had nobody, Tell." "You had us, Shorty, and when we ride over the rim, we'll be lookin' for you. Keep an eye out, will you?

was lonely. I had to talk…to write to somebody, and there was no one." "There was. There was me.

This is a different world, Helen. You knew that, I could see it. Sometimes when there is nothing between you and nature you find out things you wish you didn't know…sometimes when you look at yourself you are smaller in the scheme of things than you thought you were." I shifted

For I say to you in all sadness of conviction, that to think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists. Only when you have worked alone—when you have felt around you a black gulf of solitude more isolating than that which surrounds the dying man, and in hope and in despair have trusted to your own unshaken will—then only will you have achieved.

There was something special about being in a strange place, all alone in a mass of people even if you had just screwed up your life, or perhaps especially if you had just screwed up your life.

She was on the outside here too, just like at school. Even in the circular room, with all the fish swimming around her, she was on the outside. She was in the middle, but on the outside.

How many onions do you think we've eaten?" he asked. Zero shrugged. "I don't even know how long we've been here." "I'd say about a week," said Stanley. "And we probably each eat about twenty onions a day, so that's…" "Two hundred and eighty onions," said Zero. Stanley smiled. "I bet we really stink.

Chalkers sat at his desk in the back of the room—last seat, last row. No one sat at the desk next to him or at the one in front of him. He was