Quotes About Isolation

You would have thought I'd feel brittle too, being such a bitter, angry bitch. But I didn't. I felt nothing, really, just the sense that now the circle I'd always kept small was a little smaller. Maybe Chris could be saved that easily. But not me. Never me.

I was the only one who ever went in there, and when I did the air always smelled stale and strange, pent up like the sorrow my mother carried in her shoulders, her heart, and her face.

But I didn't hear her, couldn't, was already gone, turning and walking out the door with the food in my hands to the parking lot before I even knew what was happening. Over the years I had perfected removing myself from situations. It was kind of like automatic pilot; I just shut down and retreated, my brain clicking off before anything that hurt could sink in.

I was drowning in broad daylight and no one could tell.

Far, far easier to batten down the hatches and lock the world out than take a chance.

What if she never made any friends and she spent her lunches hiding in the girls' bathroom trying not to turn into a bitten?

Once or twice a day, I am enveloped inside what I like to call the Impenetrable Shield of Melancholy. This shield, it is impenetrable. Hence the name. I cannot speak. And while I can feel myself freeze up, I can't do anything about it.

how many days without a radio it will take to get my songs back?

What a strange place it was in which there could be no running water, no dishwasher, no computer, no telephone, no supermarket, none of the things she took for granted, other than the ubiquitous TV aerial, yet the houses were painted to look like jewellery boxes and the people in them clothed themselves to look like jewels.

I marvel at these young people: drinking their coffee, they tell clear, plausible stories. If they are asked what they did yesterday, they aren't embarrassed: they bring you up to date in a few words. If I were in their place, I'd fall over myself. It's true that no one has bothered about how I spend my time for a long while. When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell something: the plausible disappears at the same time as the friends.

Hell is other people

La Solitude est un condition necessaire de la liberte.

we are abandoned in the world ... in the sense that we find ourselves suddenly alone and without help. Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

Lo que me asombra es sentirme tan triste y tan cansado.

Supongo que uno no puede prever los inconvenientes de la soledad.

Ya no puedo recibir de estas soledades trágicas nada más que un poco de pureza vacía.

I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity.

The challenge of modern freedom, or the combination of isolation and freedom which confronts you, is to make yourself up. The danger is that you may emerge from the process as a not-entirely-human creature. (Referenced in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young)

Shall I run back into the desert ... and stay there until the devil has passed out of me and I am fit to meet human kind again without driving it to despair at the first look? I haven't had enough desert yet.

Society is what beats me. Alone I can be pretty good, but let me go among people and there's the devil to pay.

I have begun in old age to understand just how oddly we all are put together. We are so proud of our autonomy that we seldom if ever realize how generous we are to ourselves, and just how stingy with others. One of the booby traps of freedom--which is bordered on all sides by isolation--is that we think so well of ourselves. I now see that I have helped myself to the best cuts at life's banquet.

You had to talk with yourself in the daytime and reason with yourself at night. Who else was there to talk to in a city like New York?

These were his friends of the business community; a man in business had to have such, and he visited and entertained but neither touched nor was touched, ever.

Cunado uno se vuelve contra sí mismo, tampoco los demás significan ya nada para él