Quotes About Isolation

What a splendid king you'd make of a desert island-- you and you alone.

Mother and father marked out that rock to be my everlasting tomb—buried alive. Let me die there, where they tried to kill me.

Dark, dark! The horror of darkness, like a shroud, wraps me and bears me on through mist and cloud.

Blind, lost in the night, endless night that nursed you!

What grief can crown this grief? It's mine alone, my destiny—I am Oedipus!

I'd wall up my loathsome body like a prison, blind to the sound of life, not just the sight.

shorn of everything—you're their only hope.

Hopeless frustration devoured my youth.

Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. One keeps this anxiety at a distance by looking at the many round about who are related to him as kin and friends, but the anxiety is still there, nevertheless, and one hardly dares think of how he would feel if all this were taken away.

Boredom is the root of all evil - the despairing refusal to be oneself.

I have only one friend, and that is echo. Why is it my friend? Because I love my sorrow, and echo does not take it away from me. I have only one confidant, and that is the silence of night. Why is it my confidant? Because it remains silent.

I'm so misunderstood that people misunderstand me even when I tell them I'm misunderstood.

Silence is the demon's trap, and the more one is silenced, the more terrible the demon; but silence is also the divinity's mutual understanding with the single individual.

The specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair.

When you are one of several, then you have lost your freedom; you cannot send for your traveling boots whenever you wish, you cannot move aimlessly about in the world. ~ Either/Or

The genius differs from us men in being able to endure isolation, his rank as a genius is proportionate to his strength for enduring isolation, whereas we men are constantly in need of the others, the herd; we die, or despair, if we are not reassured by being in the herd, of the same opinion as the herd.

You should therefore say: alone in one's boat, alone with one's care, alone with one's despair, which one is craven enough to want rather to keep than submit to the pain of being healed.

One must see how no attack is so feared as that of laughter... because more than any other this attack isolates the one attacked.

The lyrical author is only concerned with his production, enjoys the pleasure of producing, often perhaps only after pain and effort; but he has nothing to do with others, he does not write in order that: in order to enlighten men or in order to help them along the right road, in order to bring about something; in short he does not write in order that.

Deepest within every person there is nonetheless an anxiety about being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household.

I don't belong to anything, nobody's listening to me and I don't have any levers that control my own life.

I spent my childhood alone, overweight and ugly, angry at everything, and knowing nothing of a life beyond this sadness.

two people can sleep in the same bed and still be alone when they close their eyes

It is a lonely life sometimes, like throwing a stone into the deep darkness. It might hit something, but you can't see it. The only thing you can do is to guess, and to believe.