Quotes About Isolation

I've had to work by myself at combines before and forced myself to work out alone all the way back to high school. You have to be self-motivated.

If you are someone like Jeff Koons, and you have to work out how to make a big chrome heart or something, then there are lots of people and a big production involved. The money is more natural somehow. For me, I am just on my own in the studio, trying to make things work. One thing is sure: it doesn't make painting any easier.

In my 30s, I wrote in the back house of a ramshackle Spanish Revival we rented across from the ocean in the Santa Monica Canyon. I wrote thousands of pages there, but in order to see another adult human being, I had to steal out through the brambly side of the house, along the driveway down to the street.

But now Americans, they felt a sense of peace and protection because they've been separated by so many thousands of miles of ocean. And you know, the fact that it's come to the U.S. like this is so sad, and yet you know, what can you do? It's here.

The complicated, ambiguous milieu of human contact is being replaced with simple, scalable equations. We maintain thousands more friends than any human being in history, but at the cost of complexity and depth. Every minute spent online is a minute of face-to-face time lost.

Australian seafarers make an important contribution to national security in a country with thousands of kilometres of uninhabited coastline.

I think actually performing on stage when everyone's facing you and you're one person facing them, that is quite a lonely thing in a strange way. You have to be quite insular from everybody else, you've got thousands of people staring at you and you're just on your own.

When you have adversity and you have pain, you never feel more alone than you do at that moment. And you can be surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people.

The Internet is like walking into a room in your house you never knew was there and, like, it's full of thousands of people who have been listening to everything you've been doing and saying the whole time! Scary.

Lonely women destroy themselves; lonely men threaten the world.

I am not made to be pulled into the public as a person. I feel threatened there.

One of the things that people complain about is loneliness, disconnectedness. If you live in a society where your life is rarely threatened and most of your relationships are more on an economic exchange basis, then this could leave people feeling less connected.

We are threatened by long-unresolved issues between the melting pot of cultures that make up our nation. People are isolated, every day less united, and every day falling deeper into a new level of cultural despair.

I think for Beecher specifically, Keller was with him when his wife died. Beecher had decided after he first got into prison that he had to shut off everybody. You can't let anybody in and you have to become like them and you have to be threatening and all that.

When I was younger, I just lived my life on paper. I didn't really live in the real world very much. As a consequence, I couldn't cope with the real world and real people very well. That in itself became life threatening, so I had to stop drawing so much and learn how to cope with people.

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.

Voice work is fun. But about three-quarters of the things you enjoy about acting are just not there. You're not working with another actor; you're not working with an audience. You're just working with a bunch of writers and a microphone. It's very abstract.

I felt like I couldn't meet a single rich person. Regardless of where I live, they don't want to talk to me. I threw a barbecue and invited the whole neighborhood, and nobody showed up.

I didn't get to go to school functions growing up. I didn't get to go to dances. I was never invited to a party ever. Until I got to college and threw a party, I had never even been to one.

Receiving the National Medal of Science is the thrill of a lifetime, but good science does not happen in isolation.

The thrill of autograph collecting is getting close to a world you're not part of.

The earliest paintings I loved were always the most non-referential paintings you can imagine, by painters such as Mondrian. I was thrilled by them because they didn't refer to anything else. They stood alone, and they were just charged magic objects that did not get their strength from being connected to anything else.

I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.

I believe that dialogue is the key to breaking through our tendency to separate and isolate. Dialogue changes isolation and loneliness into connection and interdependence. This, I believe, is the essence of Buddhism.