Quotes About Isolation

I awoke at dawn, thrown up on a rock, the skeleton of a ship choked in its own sails.

Am I creating my own isolation? It seems to me that most of my acts are acts of integrity. So much takes place within me each day that by comparison I find a paucity, a stinginess, a silence in people which drives me to excess.

Will I really be able to accept my mental loneliness?

To escape him she had run away to the end of the world. To be free of him she had run away to places where he never went.

I am very near to madness. I imagine my isolation, and I go mad inside, a delirium of doubts and fears.

Now I have this big cheerless studio and I am the saddest man in the world. Everybody says: "What a wonderful place!" But for me it is hell. Hell de luxe, do you get me?

He gave one the feeling that the whole world was now shut out and only this sensual feast existed, that there would be no tomorrows, no meetings with anyone else – that there was only this room, this afternoon, this bed.

But we were lonely. we had nobody to play with. The gay child, the inventive child, the spirited and wild child, was lonely.

Every disconnection is death.

In America the vast spaces accentuate the vast spaces between people, deserts which stretch between human beings. It is a void which has to be spanned by the automobile. It takes an hour to reach a movie, two hours to reach a friend. So the coyotes howl and wail at the awful emptiness of mountains, deserts, hills.

Anaïs:] Your two letters on cellophane just arrived—of the 7th. Don't even sign your name now. No mention of my name. Not a word of love. If I hadn't received your cable I would be stark crazy by now.

For what always creates anxiety in me is the doubt of my own sanity. I always question myself: am I being over-sensitive, am I exaggerating? What I crave at this moment is to be where I am not cut off from the world, to find another thread of contact.

There are times when nobody can help you, not even the one you love. You have to be alone. You have to be ill, and wallow in your illness. Your soul needs it.

I underlined this: "The fundamental note which she sounds is that of pain. The pain of isolation. The very keynote of the artist's eternal rack.

Don't wait for it," I said. "Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. Create. And then the love will come to you, then it comes to you. It was only when I wrote my first book that the world I wanted to live in opened to me." "I feel doomed to

I smoke, get up, move about. I cannot bear my own company. I have not learned yet to replace introspection by thinking. I could meditate on Spengler, for instance, but in ten minutes I am again devouring myself.

Send for the doctor! I need a medicine man who will solder my body and soul together, which splits at every separation. The doctor says it is the flu. He cannot see the body is empty, the fire is gone, I am king without kingdom, and artist without a home, a stranger to luxury, to power, to bigness, to comfort. I lost a world, a small human world of love and friendship. I am not adventurer, I miss my home, familiar streets, those I love and know well.

I wonder if the life I am leading is a dream or a reality. I feel far away from everything and everybody.

Every other illness is understood, shared with other human beings. Not this one. It is mysterious and solitary, it is as ineffectual and unmoving to others as the attempted crying out of a mute person. Everybody understands hunger, physical pain, illness, poverty, slavery. But no one understands that this moment at which I crossed the street is more annhiliating than a concrete catastrophe. Anxiety is a woman screaming without a voice, out of a nightmare.

She would have liked to be like him, near to everyone, anyone, but she could not. It saddened her.

She was always storming alone, being angry alone, going through vast emotional upheavals in which he did not take part.

You're not dead, but you're not alive, either. You're a wintergirl, Lia-Lia, caught in between the worlds. You're a ghost with a beat- ing heart. Soon you'll cross the border and be with me. I'm so stoked. I miss you wicked.

In other people's company I felt I was dull, gloomy, unwelcome, at once bored and boring...

I had forgotten I was alone; I sat there, waiting for nothing, oblivious to the time.