Quotes About Isolation

The most attractive feature of Alaska, I say, is its small, insignificant human population.

Most of my wandering in the desert I've done alone. Not so much from choice as from necessity—I generally prefer to go into places where no one else wants to go.

Somewhere in the depths of solitude, beyond wilderness and freedom, lay the trap of madness.

There's another disadvantage to the use of the flashlight: like many other mechanical gadgets it tends to separate a man from the world around him. If I switch it on my eyes adapt to it and I can see only the small pool of light it makes in front of me; I am isolated. Leaving the flashlight in my pocket where it belongs, I remain a part of the environment I walk through and my vision though limited has no sharp or definite boundary.

most of my wandering in the desert i've done alone. not so much from choice as from necessity - i generally prefer to go into places where no one else wants to go. i find that in contemplating the natural world my pleasure is greater if there are not too many others contemplating it with me, at the same time.

So I lived alone. The first thing I did was take off my pants. Naturally.

If industrial man continues to multiply his numbers and expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making.

One mile farther and I come to a second grave beside the road, nameless like the other, marked only with the dull blue-black stones of the badlands. I do not pause this time. The more often you stop the more difficult it is to continue. Stop too long and they cover you with rocks.

The red dust and the burnt cliffs and the lonely sky- all that which lies beyond the end of the roads.

The night flows back, the mighty stillness embraces and includes me; I can see the stars again and the world of starlight. I am twenty miles or more from the nearest fellow human, but instead of loneliness I feel loveliness. Loveliness and a quiet exultation.

An under-privileged juniper tree, living not on water and soil but on memory and hope. And almost alone. To the

No one listened to the music, no one cared, drunk or sober; the noise was not meant for entertainment but for the sustaining of a certain psychological atmosphere, the pervasion of space, the dispersal of unseemly silences. So that a man without anything to say and unable to think could still imagine himself at the vortex of an activity, however meaningless.

There is something about the desert that the human sensibility cannot assimilate, or has not so far been able to assimilate. Perhaps that is why it has scarcely been approached in poetry or fiction, music or painting;

Yet their song, if not a mating call or a warning, must be what it sounds like, a brooding meditation on space, on solitude. The game.

Plainly, she is not coming back. I can tell by the pattern of the cracks in the plaster. There's a code there, a message. Like the secret message in the final bars of Shostakovich's fifteenth and last symphony. Faint cryptic signals, like the clicking of a telegraph key, against the remote and sustained monotone of the violins—a song from outer space. What was he trying to tell us?

In the mixture of starlight and cloud-reflected sunlight in which the desert world is now illuminated, each single object stands forth in preternatural though transient brilliance, a final assertion of existence before the coming of night: each rock and shrub and tree, each flower, each stem of grass, diverse and separate, vividly isolate, yet joined each to every other in a unity which generously includes me and my solitude as well.

There's another disadvantage to the use of the flashlight: like many other mechanical gadgets it tends to separate a man from the world around him. If I switch it on my eyes adapt to it and I can see only the small pool of light which it makes in front of me; I am isolated. Leaving the flashlight in my pocket where it belongs, I remain a part of the environment I walk through and my vision though limited has no sharp or definite boundary.

I am twenty miles or more from the nearest fellow human, but instead of loneliness I feel loveliness. Loveliness and a quiet exultation.

When you get old, you can't talk to people because people snap at you.... That's why you become deaf, so you won't be able to hear people talking to you that way.

Aloneness is inevitable in being human. People cannot accept this. They should be aware of it and use it. It heightens your perceptions.

When I saw that things which were to me so intolerable moved them not at all, that words that melted my heart to speak had only offended them with the speaker, I was at first stunned and then overcome with a desperate sickness and faintness at the heart

I had not been stranded upon the shore of this strange world to find myself alone and companionless.

Have you ever remarked, that people who live the most by themselves reflect the most upon others; and that he who lives surrounded by the million never thinks of any but the one individual — himself?

Punctuality is a virtue, If you don't mind being lonely.