Quotes About Isolation

The minute I knew help was at hand something had collapsed inside me. Whatever had been holding me together had gone. Now I could not think for myself, let alone crawl! There was nothing to fight for, no patterns to follow, no voice, and it frightened me to think that, without these, I might run out of life.

There is a peculiar anonymity about being in tents. Once the zip is closed and the outside world barred from sight, all sense of location disappears.

Mason had once driven that road all the way to Liberal, Kansas. Eight hours of seamless prairie, thinking about the pioneers who had dared to cross that land 150 years ago. There must have been moments when they looked in every direction, finding nothing to reveal where they were, where they'd been, or where they were going.

She was theirs, in body if not in spirit. And yet she had abandoned them, after they had abandoned her. They valued what Kresnov was, but they did not value her. Nor did they value the others of her kind, her friends among them.

I get scared thinking about the yawning void of space and the maddening smallness of our solar system in it, and the smallness of our planet in that solar system and of my own voice in the dark.

Kill your darlings, die alone.

The United States, with all her time zones and logos, was the home to so many lonely souls, but none at that particular moment felt such an extraordinary loneliness as Blue Gene Mapother, who felt like someone had just signed the divorce papers that would separate himself from himself.

When you do, you realize there are six billion people wandering around, six billion chances to form connections, friendships, shared experiences." He shrugged. "If you shut yourself away from everyone and say 'I'm lonely', it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, when the rest of the world is waiting outside that door.

The strong man is strongest when alone.

Loneliness isn't the physical absence of other people, he said—it's the sense that you're not sharing anything that matters with anyone else. If you have lots of people around you—perhaps even a husband or wife, or a family, or a busy workplace—but you don't share anything that matters with them, then you'll still be lonely.

It isn't the drug that causes the harmful behavior—it's the environment. An isolated rat will almost always become a junkie. A rat with a good life almost never will, no matter how many drugs you make available to him. As Bruce put it: he was realizing that addiction isn't a disease. Addiction is an adaptation. It's not you—it's the cage you live in.

The difference between being online and being physically among people, I saw in that moment, is a bit like the difference between pornography and sex: it addresses a basic itch, but it's never satisfying.

How do we start to rebuild a society where we don't feel so alone and afraid, and where we can form healthier bonds? How do we build a society where we look for happiness in one another rather than in consumption?

Every one of the social and psychological causes of depression and anxiety they have discovered has something in common. They are all forms of disconnection. They are all ways in which we have been cut off from something we innately need but seem to have lost along the way.

When they added up the figures, John and other scientists found that being disconnected from the people around you had the same effect on your health as being obese—which was, until then, considered the biggest health crisis the developed world faced.

This showed that loneliness isn't just some inevitable human sadness, like death. It's a product of the way we live now.

extremely depressed people have become disconnected from a sense of the future, in a way that other really distressed people have not.

Loneliness hangs over our culture today like a thick smog.

Being deeply lonely seemed to cause as much stress as being punched by a stranger.

The vitally important corollary is that evolution shaped us not only to feel bad in isolation, but to feel insecure." It's a beautiful theory.

Becoming acutely lonely, the experiment found, was as stressful as experiencing a physical attack.

We are living, she has come to believe, in a culture where people are not "getting the connections that they need in order to be healthy human beings," and that is why we can't put down our smartphones, or bear to log off. We tell ourselves that we live so much of our lives in cyberspace because when we are there, we are connected—we are plugged into a swirling party with billions of people.

Twitter makes you feel that the whole world is obsessed with you and your little ego-- it loves you, it hates you, it's talking about you right now. The ocean makes you feel like the world is greeting you with a soft, wet, welcoming indifference. It's never going to argue back, no matter how loud you yell.

Loneliness, he concluded, is causing a significant amount of the depression and anxiety in our society.