Quotes About Isolation

I guess it's easy to lose yourself in a book," Leo said quietly, "when the real world doesn't feel so friendly.

This was what was left of a human individual when you took away his home,his family, his friends, his city, his country,his world: a being without context, whose past had faded, whose future was bleak, an entity stripped of name, of meaning,of the whole of life except a temporarily beating heart.

But if a peacock dances in the jungle, there is nobody to see its tail.

After they stopped torturing him they locked him in the jail cell again and pretended they would forget him... Then, eventually, and unexpectedly, release. Into ignominy, oblivion, married life.

Unashamed, accustomed to solitude, he began to enjoy his near-invisibility. From his position at the edge of the school around him, he took vicarious pleasure in the activities of those around him, silently celebrating the rise or fall of this or that playground emperor, or the examination failures of particularly unappetizing class-fellows: the delights of the spectator.

Her parents were killed in their private helicopter. An elite death but at the moment of dying we are all penniless. She never spoke of it. It would be generous to understand her behavior, willful, remote, abstract, as her way of expressing grief.

you lost parents. Your grief defines you and shuts you off from other people. That's what I think.

The blues is just another name for not having any place

Sometimes he thinks the walls are throbbing, as if the water-stained concrete has developed a tic, and then he allows himself to close his eyelids which are as heavy as iron shields, so that he can tell himself who he is.

When you have earned the high horizon it isn't easy to go back into your box, into a narrow island, an eternity of anticlimax.

I spoke no Spanish, so I was unable to haggle with the taxi-drivers. 'Benengeli,' I said, and the first cabbie shook his head and walked away, spitting copiously. The second named a number that had no meaning for me. I had come to a place where I did not know the names of things or the motives for men's deeds. The universe was absurd. I could not say 'dog', or 'where?', or 'I am a man'. Besides, my head was thick, like a soup.

To be imprisoned by the need to be loved was to be sealed in a cell in which one experienced an interminable torment and from which there was no escape.

Fear was a solipsist, a narcissist, blind to everything except itself.

He listened unhappily until at length the blind man asked the thin air a question: 'I hope, perhaps, you may also remember me? A little? On occasion?' Then came a silence; a dry laugh; the sound of a man sitting down, heavily, all of a sudden.

When you were your own quarry, when the material you were dredging up lay buried in the caverns of the self, a time came when there was only an emptiness left.

Trapped inside a metaphor, I've often felt the need to re-describe it, to change the terms. This isn't so much a balloon, I've wanted to say, as a bubble within which I'm simultaneously exposed and sealed off.... depriving me of reality, reducing me to an abstraction.... [NY, Dec. 1991; Columbia Graduate School Of Journalism Speech]

The problem with religion, because it's been sheltered from criticism, is that it allows people to believe en masse what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation.

Have you ever traveled, beyond all mere metaphors, to the Mountain of Shame and stayed for a thousand years? I do not recommend it.

I feel bad about my outlook, how I feel about people and society, and that I'll never be part of society the way I should.

I was from the bush, watching Greg Norman on TV, but it was a world away.

No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength

Solitude is strength; to depend on the presence of the crowd is weakness. The man who needs a mob to nerve him is much more alone than he imagines.

This is a fact: Strength in the pursuit of peace is no vice; isolation in the pursuit of security is no virtue.

I know I have great inner strength; I always have. I can blank things out, cut people out, and I know that I can go and live in a cave on my own if necessary.