Quotes About Isolation

Oh, but this,' I think I say, 'is perfect! This is all I have longed for! What are you gazing at? Do you suppose a girl is sitting here? That girl is lost! She has been drowned! She is lying, fathoms deep. Do you think she has arms and legs, with flesh and cloth upon them? Do you think she has hair? She has only bones, stripped white! She is as white as a page of paper! She is a book, from which the words have peeled and drifted--

I give myself up to darkness; and wish I may never again be required to lift my head to the light.

For was that all, she thought bleakly, that love ever was? Something that saved one from loneliness? A sort of insurance policy against not counting?

Perhaps, however, it is the same with spinsters as with ghosts; and one has to be of their ranks in order to see them at all.

My happiness is nothing to him," she said. "Only his books! He has made me like a book. I am not meant to be taken, and touched, and liked. I am meant to keep here, in dim light, forever!

They made her feel lonelier, suddenly, than she had ever felt before. She went creeping into her room and undressed without lighting a candle, then lay curled in bed in a ferment of misery. What was the use of her being alive? Her heart was some desiccated thing: a prune, a fossil, a piece of clinker. Her mouth might as well be filled with ashes. It was all utterly hopeless and futile . . .

No-one speaks. No-one moves (…). We glide, softly, in silence, into our dark and separate hells

There was a little padded seat beside the rattling panes and mouldy sand-bags, it was the coldest place in the room; but she kept there for an hour and a half, with a shawl about her, shivering, squinting at her stitches, and sneaking sly little glances at the road to the house. I thought, if that wasn't love, then I was a Dutchman; and if it was love, then lovers were pigeons and geese, and I was glad I was not one of them.

For she was the only one, of all of them, to have spared me a pleasant word; and suddenly I longed for time to pass, not for its own sake, but as it would take me back to her.

just as, when you were well, you never thought about being well, you could only really feel what it was like to be healthy for about a minute, when you stopped being sick. But when you were sick, it made you into a stranger, a foreigner in your own land. Everything that was simple and ordinary to everyone else became like an enemy to you. Your own body became like an enemy to you, plotting and scheming against you and setting traps…

For a time, all was still: for the yards there, like the grounds, are desperately bleak, all dirt and gravel—there is not so much as a blade of grass to be shivered by the breezes, or a worm or a beetle for a bird to swoop for.

She looked again at Julia's handsome, fragile figure and thought, What is it about Julia? Why is she always so alone?

That week was a terrible one. I had got my own mind back, the house seemed crueller than ever, and I saw how far I had sunk before in growing used to it.

We glide, softly, in silence, into our dark and separate hells.

What was the use of her being alive? Her heart was some desiccated thing: a prune, a fossil, a piece of clinker. Her mouth might as well be filled with ashes. It was all utterly hopeless and futile...

I did not care. I cared for nothing, now. I had kept up my nerve and my spirit, all that time. I had waited for my chance of escaping and got nowhere.

this feeling haunts and inhabits me, like a sickness. it covers me, like skin.

Sister Joan explained that this can mean having to shut down everything that has previously formed you, if required. To be a prophet is not self-serving and often means working in isolation with little recognition. "You're an agitator in a time of complacency." You do what has to be done precisely because no one else is doing it.

My self-destructive inclination when anxious has been to distance myself from the world. I'm really very good at extracting myself from those around me and hiding out until I think I'm a more bearable person to be around.

It's a gorgeous oddity of our existence – our loneliness is not caused by being on our own. Indeed, loneliness is best cured with aloneness, which is to say, a meaningful connection to ourselves.

Living with ADHD is like being locked in a room with 100 Televisions and 100 Radios all playing. None of them have power buttons so you can turn them off and the door is locked from the outside.

Bullets sound like hornets when they pass too close to your head. After a while, the world closes down. You can't hear much, you can't see much, just the way ahead, the next slat, the next open gate. All you know is running; the only place that's real is away.

A gun is a terrible thing. It's a dark hole pointed at you, and that hole swallows up everything else in the world, your friends, your nerve, until there's nothing but you and what's waiting in that little round space of dark.

At some point, the demands on these girls and the pressures they feel and carry inside increase to the point that they are over their heads. No one knows what is going on: not their families, not their teachers, not their friends, and not even themselves.