Quotes About Isolation

Now, aware of my invisibility, I live rent-free in a building rented strictly to whites, in a section of the basement that was shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth century, which I discovered when I was trying to escape in the night from Ras the Destroyer. But that's getting too far ahead of the story, almost to the end, although the end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.

You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're part of all the sound and anguish

And yet, it was a strangely satisfying experience for an invisible man to hear the silence of sound.

Call me Jack-the-Bear, for I am in a state of hibernation.

They were blind, bat blind, moving only by the echoed sounds of their own voices.

I shivered in the hot street.

I'm an invisible man and it placed me in a hole—or showed me the hole I was in, if you will—and I reluctantly accepted the fact.

they could talk and agree with themselves, the world was nailed down, and they loved it. They received a feeling of security.

Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do? What else but try to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through? And it is this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?

Perhaps, like them, I was a throwback, a small distant meteorite that died several hundred years ago and now lived only by virtue of the light that speeds through space at too great a pace to realize that its source has become a piece of lead

There's nothing like isolating a man to make him think.

Well, I was and yet I was invisible, that was the fundamental contradiction. I was and yet I was unseen. It was frightening and as I sat there I sensed another frightening world of possibilities.

landed against a man who looked up with the anonymous familiarity of a drunk and shoved me hard away.

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.

But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and vulgar things.

Solitude is impractical and yet society is fatal.

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world.

I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.

Atom from atom yawns as far As moon from earth, or star from star.

Society we must have; but let it be society, and not exchanging news or eating from the same dish. Is it society to sit in one of your chairs? I cannot go to the houses of my nearest relatives, because I do not wish to be alone. Society exists by chemical affinity, and not otherwise.

The soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society.

But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime.

But how insular and pathetically solitary are all the people we know! Nor dare they tell what they think of each other when they meet in the street. We have a fine right, to be sure, to taunt men of the world with superficial and treacherous courtesies!

We walk alone in the world. Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables