Quotes About Isolation

Number 4: the tall, derelict bird's nest of a house owned by her great-uncle Etienne. Where she has lived for four years. Where she kneels on the sixth floor alone, as a dozen American bombers roar toward her.

He translates one book of the Iliad, two of the Odyssey, plus an admirable slice of Plato's Republic. Five lines on an average day, ten on a good one, scribbled onto yellow legal pads in his crimped pencil-writing and stuffed into boxes beneath the dining table. Sometimes he believes his translations are adequate. Usually he decides they're terrible. He shows them to no one.

Between them was fifteen or so feet of frozen space, bounded by his window and hers, but it was as if the windows had liquefied, or else the air had, and his vision skewed and rippled and it was all he could do to put the Newport into gear and ease forward to let the next car in.

In the dormitory window one night, Frederick rest his forehead against the glass. "I hate them. I hate them for that.

He was failing at everything important. A room away his daughter was sitting with her face in her hands and he could not go to her.

Gulls pass, braying like donkeys, and in the distance the guns thud again, and the rattling of the truck fades, and Marie-Laure tries to concentrate on rereading a chapter earlier in the novel: make the raised dots form letters, the letters words, the words a world.

The only sound is the patter of the rain turning Saint-Malo into mud.

one with a rifle and the other wearing headphones.

When he last went out, almost twenty-four years ago, he tried to make eye contact, to present what might be considered a normal appearance.

How does a plague start inside a sealed disc that has had no contact with any other living thing for almost six and a half decades?

When the wind is blowing, which it almost always is, with the walls groaning and the shutters banging, the rooms overloaded and the staircase wound tightly up through its center, the house seems the material equivalent of her uncle's inner being: apprehensive, isolated, but full of cobwebby wonders.

Snowy, milky, chalky. A color that is the absence of color. Every morning he ties his shoes, packs newspaper inside his coat as insulation against the cold, and begins interrogating the world.

Werner looks up at the stone houses arrayed wall to wall, tall and aloof, their faces damp, their windows dark. No lamplight anywhere. No antennas. The rain falls so softly, almost soundlessly, but to Werner it roars.

when the hairy wildmen who lived there spoke, their words froze and their companions would have to wait for spring to hear what had been said.

It's as if the city has become a library of books in an unknown language, the houses great shelves of illegible volumes, the lamps all extinguished.

What is blindness? Where there should be a wall, her hands find nothing. Where there should be nothing, a table leg gouges her shin. Cars growl in the streets; leaves whisper in the sky; blood rustles through her inner ears. In the stairwell, in the kitchen, even beside her bed, grown-up voices speak of despair. "Poor child.

Werner turns the fine-tune dial fractionally, and abruptly the voice booms into his ears, Dvee-nat-set, shayst-nat-set, davt-set-adeen, nonsense, terrible nonsense, pipelined directly into his head; it's like reaching into a sack full of cotton and finding a razor blade inside, everything constant and undeviating and then that one dangerous thing, so sharp you can hardly feel it open your skin.

Marie-Laure will not see anything for the rest of her life. Spaces she once knew as familiar–the four-room flat she shares with her father, the little tree-lined square at the end of her street–have become labyrinths bristling with hazards. Drawers are never where they should be. The toilet is an abyss. A glass of water is too near, too far; her fingers too big, always too big.

He was numb forever. What clockless hours passed, what weeks and months? He didn't know.

Save yourself, the neighbors had told him. Save yourself. Joseph wonders if he is beyond saving, if the only kind of man who can be saved is the man who never needed saving in the first place.

she gazed at places but could not enter them, witnessed beauty but could not experience it. It was as though she had been excised neatly out of each moment. The world had become like an exhibit at Ward's museum: pretty and nostalgic and watered down, something old and sealed off you weren't allowed to touch.

You want to know? What it's like? To prop up the dam? To keep your fingers plugged in its cracks? To feel like every single breath that passes is another betrayal, another step farther away from what you were and where you were and who you were, another step deeper into the darkness

He slept there that night, without any of his guards.

This development has been presented as leaving Livia and her sons, Tiberius and Drusus, out in the cold.