Quotes About Isolation

Always I thougt that I would know brother, regardles the years that past, but like the ocean he would not know me

A German goldsmith covered a bit of metal with cloth in the 14th century and gave mankind its first button. It was hard to know this as politics, because it plays like the work of one person, but nothing is isolated in history -- certain humans are situations.

We crossed a wide river and then everything changed. There were no more fields, no houses, no trees, not even telephone poles. Even the colours were gone, all of them except brown and grey and blue of the late-afternoon sky. The world got emptier and emptier until it looked like a brown ocean of dead velvet, just emptiness covered with short dry grass and low scrub.

Did Mr. Poe write as a boy? Dear me, yes. It was all he had, what with losing his mother as a toddling child and then being cast aside by his foster father. I think sometimes his pen was his only friend in the world

When you by nature subscribe to the view that everyone except yourself is a berk or a wanker, it is hard to bond with anybody in any rational common cause.

You spent five years in a research tub at Radio RX-1 with the Kefahuchi Tract hanging over your shoulder like a huge boiling face, stripped, raw, heaving with some emotion you couldn't recognise. It's been fun,. It's been heartbreak all the way. It's never been less than a trip.

Everything else pales next to the fact that he's going to outlive us all. It's probably safer for him not to have intimate friends. I don't care how old you get, Sehvi said. It's never safer to have no friends.

Assim é que cada louco furioso era trancado em uma alcova na própria casa, e não curado, mas descurado até que a morte o vinha desfraldar do benefício da vida.

Tu, minha Eugénia, é que não as descalçaste nunca; foste aí pela estrada da vida, manquejando da perna e do amor, triste como os enterros pobres, solitária, calada, laboriosa, até que vieste também para esta outra margem... O que eu não sei é se a tua existência era muito necessária ao século. Quem sabe? Talvez um comparsa de menos fizessse patear a tragédia humana.

A Casa Verde é um cárcere privado – disse um médico sem clínica.

I descended into physical and moral immobility, and my body became a plant, a stone, mud, nothing at all…

No dia seguinte entrou a dizer de mim nomes feios, e acabou alcunhando-me  Dom Casmurro. Os vizinhos, que não gostam dos meus hábitos reclusos e calados, deram curso à alcunha, que afinal pegou. 

They are very young. And on their earth, as they call it, they never communicate with other planets. They revolve about all alone in space. Oh, the thin beast said. Aren't they lonely?

It was the same way with silence. This was more than silence. A deaf person can feel vibrations. Here there was nothing to feel.

There was no light. The darkness was deep and there was no dazzle.

I heard a doctor say that the living tend to withdraw emotionally from the dying, thereby driving them deeper into isolation. Not to withdraw takes tremendous strength. To pull back is a temptation; it doesn't hurt nearly as much as remaining open.

Yet there are times when for no logical reason I feel an almost unbearable sense of isolation. Not only am I divided in myself, my underwater and above-water selves separated, but I feel wrenched away from everybody around me. This is part of being human, this knowing that we are all part of one another, inextricably involved; and at the same time alone, irrevocably alone.

The most memorable books from our childhoods are those that make us feel less alone

The writing of a book may be a solitary business, it is done alone. The writer sits down with paper and pen, or typewriter, and, withdrawn from the world, tries to set down the story that is crying to be written. We write alone, but we do not write in isolation. No matter how fantastic a story line may be, it still comes out of our response to what is happening to us and to the world in which we live.

We are all strangers in a strange land.

I do hope I wasn't born in some dreadful mitochondrion which lives in some horrible isolated human host on a lonely planet like yours.

One definition of hell is having your own way all the time.

I felt so insufferably alone. I remembered Miss Myra Turnbull telling us once that this desperate need we have to belong to someone goes back to our earliest forebears, the lowest form of animal life, the amoeba, each individual particle of which has to be joined to other particles to make a whole. Then

What did other people think? What did other children think when they weren't with Cecily? And that was funny. Cecily had never realized that they thought at all when they weren't with her.