Quotes About Isolation

I'm surrounded by silence but at the same time I'm drowning in words and it hardly ever leaves me, that sense of disconnection.

On the one hand, they're monstrous egotists. Self-confidence, self-examination, self-hatred even … but it's all about self. All those hours on their own! And yet at the same time, they're genuinely altruistic. All they want to do is please other people. I've often thought it must demand a sort of deficiency to be a writer.

It was as if she had been locked up in a lunatic asylum for so long that she had forgotten she was actually mad.

You can call it that if you like, but what was I to do? I was desperate. I would have had to move out. I had no job, no income, nowhere to go. Philip was in the cemetery and nobody cared about me.

It's one of the paradoxes of being a writer that, physically, there's not a huge difference between the debut novelist and the international best-seller: they're each stuck in a room with a laptop, too many Jaffa Cakes and nobody to talk to. I once worked

Given that Alderney isn't exactly a whirl of social activity, I'm assuming you weren't invited.

And you've never met me, so don't bother me with your condolences. I've got no use for them.

My mum and dad were Jehovah's Witnesses, which I know sounds crazy but it's the truth. Mum used to go round the island, distributing copies of The Watchtower, door to door.' He paused. 'Do you know what her biggest tragedy was? She ran out of doors.

I couldn't see myself as some twenty-first century Shirley Valentine, sitting on the rocks, a thousand miles from the nearest Waterstones.

The life went out of his eyes and it suddenly occurred to me that murderers are the loneliest people on the planet. It's the curse of Cain – the fugitive and the vagabond driven out from the face of the earth.

that moment, Fraser was utterly aware of the smallness of the room, the hopelessness of a life broken.

It occurred to him that Blakiston was an outcast. He was in exile from himself.

Blakiston was an outcast. He was in exile from himself

You're having the party, Charles. Nobody knows who I am and nobody gives a damn. You can manage without me. Just try not to wake me when you come upstairs.

separated from the cave by an inlet, the waves pounding

It often seemed to Eric that he was trapped and that he had been from the moment of his birth.

garden where they used to live. She can't trust anyone. Raymond Clunes has just ripped her off. Her beloved son has pissed off and gone to America. She's got so few friends that after she was killed it took two whole days for anyone to notice she was dead and even then it was only the cleaner. It struck me from the start that she must have been pretty bloody miserable. And that's why she was thinking of doing herself in …

It was probably because they sensed her unhappiness. Clarissa was all on her own. She had never married. She seemed to spend half her life in the church. He was always seeing her coming in and out. To be fair to her, she often stopped to have a chat with him but then of course she didn't really have anyone to talk to unless she was on her knees. She looked a bit like her brother, Sir Magnus

He once said to me that it was like being in one of those Russian prisons where they lock you up without telling you the length of your sentence.

To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self.

was finished the moment I came to this country,' he said quietly. 'I was twelve years old and I didn't want to be here. Nobody wanted me to be here. I was trash – Romanian trash – and the first chance they got, they threw me in this place and forgot about me. You think anyone will read this letter? You think anyone will care? No! I could die in here.

The worst time to feel alone is when you're in a crowd.

You're my closest friend and you're thousands of miles away.

The loneliest Chinese man I ever met lived halfway up the Three Gorges, in Sichuan Province.