Quotes About Isolation

I've kept the jasmine and rotted horseflesh separate, knowing you'll do the honours. Destiny will greet us. After that you're on your own.

All I wanted was to be left alone. They abhor a vacuum, other people. You find a quiet corner where you can hunker down in peace, and the next minute there they are, crowding around you in their party hats, tooting their paper whistles in your face and insisting you get up and join in the knees-up.

What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipwrecked and stranded in the limitless wastes of a boundless and indifferent ocean.

Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.

being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left

This is the way it is with me, always looking in or looking out, a chilly pane of glass between me and a remote and longed-for world.

Supposedly nobody outside the group knew there was a group. Of course we all knew that wasn't true. High school was like the little clear plastic tunnels that Paul's hamsters lived in: you could run a long way but never get out, and always, everyone could see you.

In Genesis, it says that it is not good for a man to be alone but sometimes it is a great relief.

I have always been very obsessed with time. Time's passage makes us all very vulnerable and because we all experience it in our own way, it can make us feel very alone.

Loneliness is not being alone, It's loving others to no avail.

If there were not a bridge from Venice to Europe, Europe would be an island

Don't you feel cut off?" I asked. "Cut off from what?" she replied. "No, on the whole I'd say we rather enjoy our separateness.

Savannah was invariably gracious to strangers, but it was immune to their charms. It wanted nothing so much as to be left alone. Time

Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.

Two daiquiriswithdrew into a corner of the gorgeous roomand one told the other a lie.

This world is gradually becoming a place Where I do not care to be any more.

I sniff a fire burning without outlet, consuming acrid its own smoke. It's me.

I have lived now for over a century, yet I can still say with complete confidence that no one can claim to have plumbed the depths of human misery who has not shared the fore-ends of a submarine with a camel.

Apart from Scientologists and born-again Christians, junkies are probably the worst people in the world to live with. Even other junkies will tell you that.

Theodore became a hermit, lived for two years in a cave, and then for a time inhabited an iron cage. (This sort of flamboyant asceticism was common in the Christian East.)

Only those who have stood within the bars and heard the din of devils and the appalling sounds of despair can imagine the horrors of the hold of a convict ship.

It's as if she understood completely the condition of loneliness and how it undermines us all, forcing us to make choices that we know are wrong for us.

Being a writer in a library is rather like being a eunuch in a harem.

For each one of us stands alone in the midst of a universe.