Quotes About Isolation

The sky is turning from black to gray and I stop to remember this melancholy moment for my acting. I huddle on a bench in my big thrift-store overcoat and my painful hair, watching my breath make clouds and thinking Holden Caulfield-y thoughts, like how come you never see any baby pigeons? This is what those people on black-and-white French postcards must feel like. I find myself craving a cup of coffee and a cigarette despite the fact that I neither drink coffee nor smoke.

Many animals experience pain, anxiety and suffering, physically and psychologically, when they are held in captivity or subjected to starvation, social isolation, physical restraint, or painful situations from which they cannot escape. Even if it is not the same experience of pain, anxiety, or suffering undergone by humans- or even other animals, including members of the same species- an individual's pain, suffering, and anxiety matter.

il n'est de pire solitude que celle qu'on eprouve quand on est deux

Deformación de un texto de Sartre en Huis clos, la frase original decía: El infierno es el Otro.

And so shalt thou confess, if thou dost observe it. For sooner mayst thou find a thing earthly, where no earthly thing is, than find a man that naturally can live by himself alone.

Efface imagination! Cease to be pulled as a puppet by thy passions. Isolate the present. Recognize what befalls either, thee or another. Dissect and analyze all that comes under thy ken into the Causal and the Material. Meditate on thy last hour. Let the wrong thy neighbour does thee rest with him that did the wrong;

the only truth is your own. The world you see is seen by you alone. What entices you and what repels you, what strengthens you and what weakens you, is part of a pattern that no one else shares.

An old homeless man confronts me quietly with his beard, his missing teeth, and his poverty.

A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.

I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.

Home is where the heart is, I thought now, gathering myself together in Betty's Luncheonette. I had no heart any more, it had been broken; or not broken, it simply wasn't there any more. It had been scooped neatly out of me like the yolk from a hard-boiled egg, leaving the rest of me bloodless and congealed and hollow. I'm heartless, I thought. Therefore I'm homeless.

You can forget who you are if you're alone too much.

The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives. We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.

You'd be surprised how quickly the mind goes soggy in the absence of other people. One person alone is not a full person: we exist in relation to others. I was one person: I risked becoming no person.

Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings...but there's something dead about it, something deserted.

A prison does not only lock its inmates inside, it keeps all others out. Her strongest prison is of her own construction.

It's Paradise, but we can't get out of it. And anything you can't get out of is Hell.

Come away with me, he said, we will live on a desert island. I said, I am a desert island. It was not what he had in mind.

If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart.

I would never blame a human creature for feeling lonely.

More and more I feel like a letter—deposited here, collected there. But a letter addressed to no one.

That room has been static for me so long: an emptiness. a void. a silence containing an unheard story ready for me to unlock. Let there be plot.

Snowman wakes before dawn.

You can mean more than one. You can mean thousands. I'm not in any immediate danger, I'll say to you. I'll pretend you can hear me. But it's no good, because I know you can't.