Quotes About Isolation

Please try to understand this: I have always thought that if there was a big corkboard and on that board was a pin for every person who ever lived, there would be no pin for me.

on some very fundamental level, I feel invisible in the world.

he was an old man who was talking to himself on a wharf in Portland, Maine, and he could not—Jack Kennison, with his two PhDs—he could not figure out how this had happened.

it was new, what he saw on the Internet, the cool statements of superiority so deeply believed in, that anyone not white should, as one person had written, "be exterminated as easily as we do rats." Gerry didn't share with his wife the things he read. "Cowards," he did say. "You can be anonymous, that's what's the trouble with the Internet." Each night now Gerry took a sleeping pill.

My childhood had been a lockdown.

Não gostava de estar sozinha. Mas gostava ainda menos de estar com gente.

We are alone in these things that we suffer.

And—I know the defensiveness in this sentence—my parents and my sister and my brother never wrote me, or called me, and when I called them it was always hard; I felt I heard in their voices anger, a habitual resentment, as though they were silently saying You are not one of us, as though I had betrayed them by leaving them.

Verdriet is zoiets- o, het is zoiets éénzaams; dat is het beangstigende ervan, denk ik. Het is alsof je langs de glaswand van een heel hoog gebouw naar beneden glijdt terwijl niemand je ziet.

What she could not possibly have known was that even as I stood before all those people and read and answered questions, I still felt oddly—but very truly—invisible.

It was terrible, though, when you couldn't tell people things. Olive felt this keenly as the days went by.

Oh, she was a crazy woman, privately.

did not feel that I mattered. Because in a way I have never been able to feel that. And so the days were hard.

Oh, she was a crazy woman, privately. Absolutely nuts. She was so mad at Jim O'Casey. She was so mad, she went into the woods and hit a tree hard enough to make her hand bleed. She cried down by the creek until she gagged.

there was nothing to explain what he felt was happening to him, that he'd been put into a transparent plastic capsule that rose off the ground and was tossed and blown and shaken so fiercely that he could not possibly find his way back to the quotidian pleasures of his past life. Desperately, he did not want this.

I have always thought that if there was a big corkboard and on that board was a pin for every person who ever lived, there would be no pin for me. I feel invisible is what I mean.

Please try to understand this: I have always thought that if there was a big corkboard and on that board was a pin for every person who ever lived, there would be no pin for me. I feel invisible, is what I mean. But I mean it in the deepest way. It is very hard to explain. And I cannot explain it except to say—oh, I don't know what to say! Truly, it is as if I do not exist, I guess is the closest thing I can say. I mean I do not exist in the world.

there is a cultural blank spot that never ever leaves, only it is not a spot, it is a huge blank canvas and it makes life very frightening.

Il silenzio, là dove avevano riecheggiato per tanti anni il suono della voce di Pam, le sue chiacchiere, le risate, le opinioni taglienti, gli improvvisi scoppi di pianto. L'assenza di tutto questo, il silenzio di una doccia che non scorreva, di cassetti che non si aprivano, perfino il silenzio di se stesso, che quando rientrava in casa non parlava, non raccontava a nessuno la sua giornata. Quel silenzio quasi lo uccideva.

I did not feel that I mattered.

bodies becoming like prisons with the person stuck inside. Screaming, or not screaming, but staring at you like you should do something.

The privacy of sorrow.

Americans really did not understand desperation.

My whole childhood was a lockdown. I never saw anyone or went anywhere.