Quotes About Isolation

Being alone has a power over me that never fails. My interior dissolves (for the time being only superficially) and is ready to release what lies deeper. When I am willfully alone, a slight ordering of my interior begins to take place and I need nothing more.

But sleep? On a night like this? What an idea! Just think of how many thoughts a blanket smothers while one lies alone in bed, and how many unhappy dreams it keeps warm.

2 November. This morning, for the first time in a long time, the joy again of imagining a knife twisted in my heart.

I can't feel a thing; All mournful petal storms are dancing inside the very private spring of my head.

Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one's ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.

What do I have in common with Jews? I don't even have anything in common with myself.

Writing is a deeper sleep than death. Just as one wouldn't pull a corpse from its grave, I can't be dragged from my desk at night.

It would be very unjust to say that you deserted me, but that I was deserted, and sometimes terribly so, is true.

I carry the bars within me.

Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often — and in my inmost self perhaps all the time — I doubt whether I am a human being.

the poisonous world flows into my mouth like water into that of a drowning man

The fact that no one knows where I am is my only happiness. If only I could prolong this forever! It would be far more just than death. I am empty and futile in every corner of my being, even in my unhappiness.

There sat I, a faded being, under faded leaves.

One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous bug…

But Gregor understood easily that it was not only consideration for him which prevented their moving, for he could easily have been transported in a suitable crate with a few air holes; what mainly prevented the family from moving was their complete hopelessness and the thought that they had been struck by a misfortune as none of their relatives and acquaintances had ever been hit.

Lost among these entirely strange people.

There can be no more beautiful spot to die in, no spot more worthy of total despair, than one's own novel.

No, I didn't imagine my being alone with you the way you do. If I want the impossible, I want it in its entirety. Entirely alone, dearest, I wanted us to be entirely alone on this earth, entirely alone under the sky, and to lead my life, my life that is yours, without distraction and with complete concentration, in you.

Don't you want to join us? I was recently asked by an acquaintance when he ran across me alone after midnight in a coffeehouse that was already almost deserted. No, I don't, I said.

I am fond of lovers but I cannot love, I am too far away, am banished

I am away from home and must always write home, even if any home of mine has long since floated away into eternity.

Conversations bore me, to visit people bores me, the sorrows and joys of my relatives bore me to my soul.

However, Gregor had become much calmer. All right, people did not understand his words any more, although they seemed clear enough to him, clearer than previously, perhaps because had gotten used to them

Gregor's serious wound, from which he suffered for over a month - the apple remained imbedded in his flesh as a visible souvenir since no one dared to remove it - seemed to have reminded even his father that Gregor was a member of the family, in spite of his present pathetic and repulsive shape, who could not be treated as an enemy; that, on the contrary, it was the commandment of the family duty to swallow their disgust and endure him, endure him and nothing more.