Quotes About Isolation

America is proud of what it does to its writers, the way it breaks and bedevils them, rendering them deluded or drunken or dead by their own hands. To overpower its tender spirits makes America feel tough. Careers are generally short.

Being photographed was dead time for the soul. Can the head think, while it does the same half smile under the same light frown? If this was all true, then Richard's soul was in great shape. No one photographed him any more, not even his wife. When the photographs came back from an increasingly infrequent holiday. Richard was never there..an elbow or earlobe on the edge of the frame, on the edge of life and love..

Now they were all moving to no effect-just moving, just switching things off and switching things on, just picking things up and putting things down and picking things up and stroking the cat and counting the mugs and fighting for air. It seemed that everything they did had already been done and done, and that everything they thought had already been thought and thought, and that this would never end. Excuse me said panic to each of them in turn. They had no mouth and they had to scream.

I think: you deserve to be what you are if you could bare to get that way. You must have seen it coming. And now there's nothing for you here. No one will protect you, and people won't see any reason not to do you harm.

But you've got to do it in the end. You have to end up with somebody. Because otherwise you go mad, or you start worrying about going mad, which is even worse. You can't go on sleeping alone.

Left alone in an interrogation room, some men will look as though they're well into their last ten seconds before throwing up. And they'll look that way for hours. They sweat like they just climbed out of the swimming pool. They eat and swallow air. I mean these guys are really going through it. You come and tip a light in their face. And they're bugeyed - the orbs both big and red, and faceted also. Little raised soft-cornered squares, wired with rust. These are the innocent.

Suffering doesn't concern itself with the scale of other sufferings. It has no community sense. It isn't relative, is it.

Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing.

Suicide is the night train, speeding your way to darkness.

I try to like the way the world is changing, but there seems to be no extra room for me inside.

When we enter the arctic labyrinth known as Late James, the retreat from the reader, the embrace of introversion, is as emphatic as that of Joyce, and far more fiendishly prolonged.

Suffering doesn't concern itself with the scale of other sufferings. It has no community sense. It isn't relative, is it. I can't be the only one to have noticed that. Whoever said it first – did they have more to say? The

My theory is - we don't really go that far into other people, even when we think we do. We hardly ever go in and bring them out. We just stand at the jaws of the cave, and strike a match, and quickly ask if anybody's there.

Now I have to lie on the bed for a few minutes and let the solitude gather round me once more.

And I still surfed on Manhattan static.

I used to have a big dog, a rottweiler, to guard the place. One night I was working late, and he was outside barking in the snow. He wouldn't stop. Then he stopped. I went out ten minutes later with a lamp, and there was a ring of wolves eating my dog.

In London, too, there's always someone dropping in, but not here - it's too awkward a place to get to. I like people to come and stay. I'm not anti-social; I'm just unsocial.

Excessive brightness drove the poet into darkness. (essay : Hölderlin And The Essence Of Poetry, chapter from my copy of The origin of the work of art)

August este singur pe vîrful unui munte; sînt ultimele sale zile. Poetul spune: "El sta aici si asculta vidul pur. Totul e ciudat, o nalucire. Pe mare (cîndva, August calatorise adesea pe mare) se misca totusi ceva; acolo exista sunet, ceva ce se putea auzi, un cor al apelor. Aici — nimicul se întîlneste cu nimicul într-o absenta fara hotare. Nu-ti ramîne decît sa dai din cap, plin de resemnare.

In anxiety one feels uncanny .

The meeting of the solitary ones can happen only in solitude.

It was chilling to wake up at forty years of age to find she had no friends, no interests and no investments in anything unconnected to her work.

He had always felt that he lived on the edges of life, Constantine realized, watching everyone else living, sometimes helping them do it.

Aloneness is not always the same thing as loneliness.