Quotes About Isolation

I hate it here. I hate everyone here. I hate that I am so different. I love it here and I want to belong and I know that I never will.

Sleeping is much safer than the nightmare I'm living. When I sleep I feel nothing and I do nothing and I see nothing and nothing matters and no one cares. There's no one to hurt or disappoint or notice when I'm low and I don't need to face anyone not anyone in the world or not even myself.

Words. I'm surrounding by thousands of words. Maybe millions...Deep within me, words pile up in huge drifts. Mountains of phrases and sentences and connected ideas. Clever expressions. Jokes. Love songs...I have never spoken one single word. I am almost eleven years old.

His was a lonely, unorthodox conviction that war was man's ultimate failure.

to live apart from the comforts of clan and kin, surrounded by strangers upon whom she must depend for what day-to-day gentleness one human being might have from another.

Loving-kindness challenges those states that tend to arise when we think of ourselves as isolated from everyone else—fear, a sense of deficiency, alienation, loneliness.

I believe that there is only one kind of love—real love—trying to come alive in us despite our limiting assumptions, the distortions of our culture, and the habits of fear, self-condemnation, and isolation that we tend to acquire just by living a life.

The costs of keeping secrets include our growing isolation due to fear of detection and the ways we shut down inside to avoid feeling the effects of our behavior. We can never afford to be truly seen and known—even by ourselves.

India's villages were not self-reliant republics that lived in blissful isolation. They were networked and connected, and it was the destruction of Indian industry that forced people to retreat and focus on farming

He wanted to die, too, and I didn't even really know him. I don't think anybody did. How are you supposed to know someone who stares at his hands all day, and cracks his head open on a concrete wall?

I know that we're not on a ship and there is no water around us, but I can't help wonder how long before my friend is cast into the sea.

It's not any fun in the dark," he said, and she saw his eyes brimming with tears that glistened in the moonlight. She really felt sorry for him—even she. For what could be more pitiful than a voyeur in the dark?

Love has failed us. We are essentially, irrevocably alone. Anything that seems to combat that loneliness is a trap-Love is a trap:

Each of them, withdrawn and apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others: his children and his particular friends form the whole human species for him; as for dwelling with his fellow citizens, he is beside them but he does not see them. . . .

Lately I feel that I'm living in a badly written, badly directed foreign movie that's running on late-night TV in black-and-white with lots of static and inadequate subtitles.

It was so quiet, a reservation kind of quiet, where you can hear somebody drinking whiskey on the rocks three miles away.

But a person can be genocided-can have every connection to his past severed- and live to be an old man whose rib cage is a haunted house built around his heart.

For the rest of our lives, all we can hear are our names chanted over and over, until we are deaf to everything else.

You have to get very comfortable with the idea of being lonely. For all of human history, we've always run away from being lonely and now there are even more distractions. But that's the thing—if you're going to make the decision to rebel against your tribe, you're going to get very lonely.

Estranged from the tribe that gives no protection, What happens to the soul that hates its reflection?

I had left the tribe, and I was being punished for that.

But despite the fact that Reardan is a tiny town, people can still be strangers to each other.

If the government wants to hide somebody, there's probably no place more isolated than my reservation, which is located approximately one million miles north of Important and two billion miles west of Happy.

I am a zero on the rez. And if you subtract zero from zero, you still have zero. So what's the point of subtracting when the answer is always the same?