Quotes About Isolation

It actually felt harder, not easier, to be with people. The toughest challenge was my face; maintaining a 'normal' expression was utterly exhausting.

Life was getting dark around the edges. It was like he was moving through a tunnel that was becoming narrower and blacker and more choked and airless, and soon there would be nothing left for him to breathe and no room for him to move.

Darkness at Blacklands is scary.

The cure for loneliness is solitude.

Thought I appear unaware of my surroundings, I hear her words. They're cruel and hurt me deeply...I know the state I'm in, but I also know that I didn't bring it on myself and I can't get out of it. (103)

It wasn't night, it was simply darkness, with me in the middle hoping all the while that time was carrying on flowing, that something would crop up, me all alone in the middle, with my veins and my muscles dissolving rapidly into nothingness, me made of molecules of flesh and thought, dispersing in a cloud (a process of expansion as sudden as that of the room, a nebula of bedroom and me, between limits that grew dimmer by the moment).

He could have a twenty-minute discussion with a semiliterate horticulturalist who spoke a dialect so thick it could not be called English, but he couldn't start a conversation with Lillian about love. Instead, he offered only this: "Barbuda's got pink sand, and seventeen miles of unbroken beach.

and I'd die of his emptiness even more than I'm dying of my own.

the fact that nobody liked me at school began to fade out of my mind like blue magic marker reminders scrawled on the back of a greasy fist." greasy fist." - Marilyn Manson

My grandfather had been the ugliest, darkest, foulest, most depraved figure of my childhood, more beast than human, and I had grown up to be him, locked in the basement with my secrets as the rest of the family reveled in the petty and ordinary upstairs. Down there, I saw my black, ancient, ineluctable core exposed, like a crab forced out of its shell--dirty, vulnerable, and obscene. For the first time in my life, I was truly alone.

It was a source of both terror and comfort to me then that I often seemed invisible — incompletely and minimally existent, in fact. It seemed to me that I made no impact on the world, and that in exchange I was privileged to watch it unawares.

What an embarrassment that was, being somewhere because there was nowhere else for you to be.

You best keep to yourself, except you never can.

She had told herself more than once not to call it loneliness, since it wasn't any different from one year to the next, it was just how her body felt, like hungry or tired, except it was always there, always the same.

Her name had the likeness of a name. She had the likeness of a woman, with hands but no face at all, since she never let herself see it. She had the likeness of a life, because she was all alone in it. She lived in the likeness of a house, with walls and a roof and a door that kept nothing in and nothing out.

It is, as she said, difficult to describe someone, since memories are by their nature fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary as glimpses one has at night through lighted windows.

But when folks are down to the one thing that keeps them alive, that one thing can be meanness. It makes you feel like you're there, you're doing something.

Doll may have been the loneliest woman in the world, and she was the loneliest child, and there they were, the two of them together, keeping each other warm in the rain.

I don't know why solitude would be a balm for loneliness, but that is how it always was for me in those days

Perhaps, pious as they were, these ladies did not wish to see me pass into that sad and outcast state of revelation where one begins to feel superior to one's neighbors.

An intensely lonely man for whom life had not gone well - I believe this was your language.

An intensely lonely man for whom life has not gone well - I believe this was your language.

And she would feel that sharp loneliness she had felt every long evening since she was a child. It was the kind of loneliness that made clocks seem slow and loud and made voices sound like voices across water. Old women she had known, first her grandmother and then her mother, rocked on their porches in the evenings and sang sad songs, and did not wish to be spoken to.

my father in law] told me I was nothing but trouble. I felt the truth of that. I really am nothing. . . . Nothing with a body. I create a kind of displacement around myself as I pass through the world, which can fairly be called trouble. This is a mystery, I believe. . . . It's why I keep to myself. When I can.