Quotes About Isolation

They take away your shoelaces and your belt so you can't kill yourself no matter how bad it is. I guess making you live is part of the punishment.

If anyone could look into my head See or feel the dread that has captured Me or see within this sad, unhappy brain They would only turn away Turn away.

Through the long years of isolation and suffering, God had led me to an understanding of life and his love that only those who have experienced it can fathom. He had stripped away from me many of the external consolations, physical and religious, that men rely on and had left me with a core of seemingly simple truths to guide me. And yet what a profound difference they had made in my life, what strength they gave me, what courage to go on!

All around her was death and ruin, to which she had not been a participant but an angry witness. In a way, that was worse than dying. Even annihilation had been denied her.

Man stands alone in the universe, responsible for his condition, likely to remain in a lowly state, but free to reach above the stars.

Sometimes, when a person is truly lost in this world, suffocating inside her private bubble where all she can hear is her own droning heartbeat, a touch can be enough.

The outsider is necessarily ignorant, usually irrelevant and often meddlesome, because he is trying to navigate the ship from dry land.

Having jettisoned all my ballast, I concentrated on escaping.

Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world.

La soledad impuesta es desolación, la elegida es liberación.

La soledad es una decisión personal:

When thinking about companions gone, we feel ourselves doubly alone.

He had lost the bright gods, and he had not been accepted by the dark. He was in a no soul's land, and in its isolation his own soul was withdrawn, small and heavy as a stone within him, and about his evil deed. No wonder it could not take wing and make the heralding music. That was the whole of reality now, the little stone inside, and outside the cold, dark ravine and the inescapable watcher.

the north and south ends, there wasn't much to Bridger's Wells: Arthur Davies' general store, the land and mining claims office, Canby's saloon, the long, sagging Bridger Inn, with its double-decker porch, and the Union Church, square and bare as a New England meeting house, and set out on the west edge of town, as if it wanted to get as far from the other church as it could without being left alone.

Seated alone by shadowy bamboos, I strum my lyre and laugh aloud; None know that I am here, deep in the woods; Only the bright moon comes to shine on me.

You think such an attitude is admirable. Manly, heroic even. 'Lived harmlessly.' 'Kept to himself.' Hide away somewhere and your past will cease to exist. You won't have to account for it. You'll feel no obligation to explain your actions or justify them because you've gone away and you expect your victims to go away too. It's like leaving the scene of an accident . . . Or a marriage. Even a field of battle.

By four o'clock, I've discounted suicide in favor of killing everyone else in the entire world instead.

The difficulty in telling this story – my whole story, in fact – is that there is no way for me to communicate duration of time to you. It may have taken a minute for you to have read of my position in this punishment cell, but I was in this position for a whole month. How do I convey that notion to you? There are no markers with which I can measure. The only way for you to come close to experiencing this is to read the previous paragraph, over and

over, every minute of every day, for a whole month. But nobody could do that without going mad with frustration.

Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything.

But a wide sea voyage severs us at once. It makes us conscious of being cast loose from the secure anchorage of settled life, and sent adrift upon a doubtful world. It interposes a gulf, not merely imaginary, but real, between us and our homes--a gulf, subject to tempest, and fear, and uncertainty, rendering distance palpable, and return precarious.

I wasn't ready to feel as bad as I did. I'd never felt so lonely.

This world that I live in is empty and cold; the loneliness cuts me and tortures my soul.

Solitude is a chosen separation for refining your soul. Isolation is what you crave when you neglect the first.