Quotes About Isolation

Gain ten pounds and they put you in Solitary.

It's the unbroken calm, both within and without, that is getting to her. Real events happen to people, she thinks, why not me? And then there's her conviction that they are happening, all around her, but that they're being kept from her.

I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings, I can stroke myself, under the dry white sheets, in the dark, but I too am dry and white, hard, granular; it's like running my hand over a plateful of dried rice; it's like snow. There's something dead about it, something deserted. I am like a room where things once happened and now nothing does, except the pollen of the weeds that grow up outside the window, blowing in as dust across the floor.   Here

Why couldn't the two of them have gone on and on forever? Himself and Constance, sun and moon, each one of them shining, though in different ways. Instead of which he's here, forsaken by her, abandoned. In time, which fails to sustain him. In space, which fails to cradle him.

It was the central thing; it was the way you understood yourself; if it never happened to you, not ever, you would be like a mutant, a creature from outer space. Everyone knew that. Falling

She has never been in the presence, before, of two people who are in love with each other. She feels like a stray child, ragged and cold, with her nose pressed to a lighted window. A toy-store window, a bakery window, with fancy cakes and decorated cookies. Poverty prevents her entrance. These things are for other people; nothing for her.

Have they forgotten that I'm in here? They'll have to bring more food, or at least more water, or else I will starve, I will shrivel, my skin will dry out, all yellow like old linen; I will turn into a skeleton, I will be found months, years, centuries from now on, and they will say Who is this, she must have slipped our mind, Well sweep all those bones and rubbish into the corner, but save the buttons, no sense in having them go to waste, there's no help for it now.

For present purposes he's shortened the name. He's only Snowman. He's kept the abominable to himself, his own secret hair shirt.

There was old sex in the room and loneliness, and expectation, of something without a shape or name. I remember that yearning, for something that was always about to happen and was never the same as the hands that were on us there and then, in the small of the back, or out back, in the parking lot, or in the television room with the sound turned down and only the pictures flickering over lifting flesh.

Waiting is also a place: it is wherever you wait. For me it's this room. I am a blank, here, between parentheses. Between other people

I say, leave me alone, this is my winter, I will stay here if I choose

not the shore but an aquarium filled with exhausted water and warm seaweed

Illness had an element of shame to it; no one wanted to be contaminated by the illness of another. So the father of Oryx was pitied, but also blamed and shunned. His wife tended him with silent resentment.

A momentary psychotic break," I'd said. "The strain of being in a strange and debilitating environment, such as Canada, can have that effect.

I feared I might lose my faith. If you've never had a faith, you will not understand what that means. You feel as if your best friend is dying; that everything that defined you is being burned away; that you'll be left all alone. You feel exiled, as if you are lost in a dark wood. It was like the feeling I'd had when Tabitha died: the world was emptying itself of meaning. Everything was hollow. Everything was withering.

if you want people to leave you alone you should act crazy.

Maybe they'll just take her someplace else, like an island, with the other people on it who are like her. People who don't fit in, but not criminal elements. Surely that's what they'll do.

Vancouver is the suicide capital of the country. You keep going west until you run out. You come to the edge. Then you fall off.

I'm such a mess," he says. "Sometimes I think everyone's dead.

It's possible to go so far in, so far down and back, they could never get you out.

She sees where she is, she's here, by herself, she's stranded in the future. She doesn't know how to get back.

I could just sit here, peacefully. I could withdraw. It's possible to go so far in, so far down and back, they could never get you out.

A chair, a table, a lamp. Above, on the white ceiling, a relief ornament in the shape of a wreath, and in the center of it a blank space, plastered over, like the place in a face where the eye has been taken out. There must have been a chandelier, once. They've removed anything you could tie a rope to.

A place with no handholds,no landmarks,no past at all:That would have been too much like dying