Quotes About Isolation

The girl was huddled against the door on her side now, all folded in upon herself like an old woman, or like a child who'd fallen asleep on a long journey; she heard the sounds of him as if they were musical notes, each distinct and clear, and her shoulders moved slightly beneath her shirt, and her hands were jammed between her knees.

Oh, the loneliness, the loneliness. It lived inside her now like an illness, like a flu that could be ignored and then would suddenly overtake and overwhelm her.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell

The cold in her makes cold in me.

No one can be happy in eternal solitude.

Long have I dwelt forgotten here In pining woe and dull despair; This place of solitude and gloom Must be my dungeon and my tomb.

But this gives no proper idea of my feelings at all; and no one that has not lived such a retired stationary life as mine, can possibly imagine what they were: hardly even if he has known what it is to awake some morning, and find himself in Port Nelson, in New Zealand, with a world of waters between himself and all that knew him.

I flatter myself, at times, that though among them, I am not of them

I have often wished in vain,' said she, 'for another's judgment to appeal to when I could scarcely trust the direction of my own eye and head, they having been so long occupied with the contemplation of a single object as to become almost incapable of forming a proper idea respecting it.' 'That,' replied I, 'is only one of many evils to which a solitary life exposes us.

he dislikes me to have any pleasure but in himself, any shadow of homage or kindness but such as he chooses to vouchsafe: he knows he is my sun, but when he chooses to withhold his light, he would have my sky to be all darkness; he cannot bear that I should have a moon to mitigate the deprivation.

I have retired to the library, for I am very unhappy, and I want to be alone.

My soul is sick of solitude.

From henceforth he is dead to me. I want to know nothing. He has deserted me at my hardest time in my hour of need & I want to forget him tho' I wish him every joy & luck & happiness in this life…

It took some time for acceptance to be reached, and at first she was bitterly lonely ('It is not all a bed of roses to live in a strange country and I am as strange to the people and their ways as they are to me')

My interest is a lonely one. I cannot trot it out at cocktail parties. I feel sometimes as if I have spent a large part of my life learning a dead language that no one I know can speak.

One night when I was pregnant with Henry, I lay in bed thinking for some reason, about Treasure Island. I realized that from the entire book there was only one sentence I remembered verbatim, something that Ben Gunn, who has been marooned for three years, says to Jim Hawkins: Many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese -- toasted mostly. I repeated the last two words over and over again, like a mantra. Toasted, mostly. Toasted mostly.

Deep down, the young are lonelier than the old.

I've reached the point where I hardly care whether I live or die. The world will keep on turning without me, I can't do anything to change events anyway.

The reason for my starting a diary is that I have no real friend.

Who else but me is ever going to read these letters?

I get cross, then sad, and finally end up turning my heart inside out, and keep trying to find a way to become what I'd like to be and what I could be if....if only there were no other people in the world.

It must be awful to feel you're not needed.

Ordinary people simply don't know what books mean to us, shut up here. Reading, learning, and the radio are our amusements.

A person can be lonely even if he is loved by many people, because he is still not the One and Only to anyone.