Quotes About Isolation

You'll find that great artists don't love, live, fuck or even die like ordinary people. Because they always have their art. It nourishes them more than any connection to people. Whatever human tragedy befalls them, they're never too gutted, because they need only to pour the tragedy into their vat, stir in the other lurid ingredients, blast it over a fire. What emerges will be even more magnificent than if the tragedy had never occurred.

No matter what time of day or amount of work to be done, someone with Tahiti could close his eyes and the reality of moody lawnmowers, scruffy lawns, threats of termination of employment would recede and in seconds he'd simply be in Tahiti, stark naked and drinking from a coconut, aware only of the percussion of the wind and girlish sighs of the ocean. (Few

She was lost now, she'd been silenced- another dead branch on Cordova's warped tree.

We're living longer, we social network alone with our screens, and our depth of feeling gets shallower.

The church's entrance was strewn with the dark immobile forms of men in bulky overcoats, asleep on cardboard boxes. They might have been dark whales, caught unaware by a tide that suddenly receded, leaving them stranded on the steps.

He could barely open his eyes. 'Hello? You there, God? It's me Judy.' 'Kipling. Can you hear me?' 'I'd like to order room service, please. I'd like the spaghetti Bolognese.' He rolled off the raft into the pool, sinking. I pulled off my shoes and raincoat and dove after him, finding him drifting motionless along the bottom. Madly I kicked back to the surface. 'Kipling! Can you hear me? 'It's the final countdown,' He sang, his eyes slits. I was the lone nurse working in a madhouse.

As I scaled some rocks, I didn't move out of the way in time as a wave crashed to shore and I got soaked up to my shins in icy water. I could forget about a Russian vor; I was going to look like Tom Hanks in goddamn Cast Away by the time I arrived.

I think I've heard this story before. He died alone? Everyone dies alone.

There were no street signs along Benton Hollow Road, no house numbers, no streetlights, not even any lines—just my car's faded headlights, which didn't so much push back the advancing dark as nervously rummage through it.

Increasingly the United States found itself isolated. Having for two decades enjoyed its status as champion of the free world, it was increasingly the target of bitter criticism abroad and at home, where a growing number of prominent intellectuals and church leaders denounced the bombing campaign as barbaric. The military might disdain the fickle nature of public sympathy, but a democracy cannot sustain a war effort without it, and moral revulsion was growing.

ISO, FIRST TO GO! LAST TO KNOW!

It was hard to overestimate the desire of a man living in isolation to talk.

The sad truth is that we live in a world that encourages selfishness, independence, convenience, isolation, and using people rather than loving them.

Implicit and explicit throughout the text is the understanding that meditative wisdom does not have to be isolated from daily life. Our need to expand awareness beyond our isolated egos is as necessary in relationships as it is in meditation.

I do not like strangers because I do not like people I have never met before. They are hard to understand.

Usually people look at you when they're talking to you. I know that they're working out what I'm thinking, but I can't tell what they're thinking. It is like being in a room with a one-way mirror in a spy film.

companionship refused is worse than loneliness.

And it was exactly like having flu that time because I wanted it to stop, like you can just pull the plug of a computer out of the wall if it crashes, because I wanted to go to sleep so that I wouldn't have to think because the only thing I could think was how much it hurt because there was no room for anything else in my head, but I couldn't go to sleep and I just had to sit there and there was nothing to do except to wait and hurt.

I took the little radio from the kitchen and I went and sat in the spare room and I tuned it halfway between two stations so that all I could hear was white noise and I turned the volume up really loud and I held it against my ear and the sound filled my head and it hurt so that I couldn't feel any other sort of hurt, like the hurt in my chest

And so, if you get lost in time it is like being lost in a desert, except that you can't see the desert because it is not a thing.

How often did he feel it now, this gorgeous, furtive seclusion? In the bath sometimes, maybe. Though Jean failed to understand his need for periodic isolation and regularly dragged him back to earth mid-soak by hammering on the locked door in search of bleach or dental floss.

Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life.

Maybe George was fooling himself. Maybe old people always fooled themselves, pretending that the world was going to hell because it was easier than admitting they were being left behind, that the future was pulling away from the beach and they were standing on their little island bidding it good riddance, knowing in their hearts that there was nothing left for them to do but sit around on the shingle waiting for the big disease to come out of the undergrowth.

And I remember looking at the two of you and seeing you together and thinking how you were really differant with him. Much calmer. And you didn't shout at one another. And it made me so sad because it was like you didn't really need me at all. And somehow that was even worse than you and me arguing all the time because it was like I was invisible. And I think that was when I realised you and your father were probably better off if I wasn't living in the house.