Quotes About Isolation

Sorrow you can hold, however desolating, if nobody speaks to you. If they speak, you break down.

Some men want to have religion like a dark lantern, and carry it in their pocket, where nobody but themselves can get any good from it.

My misfortune is doubly painful to me because I am bound to be misunderstood; for me there can be no relaxation with my fellow-men, no refined conversations, no mutual exchange of ideas, I must live alone like someone who has been banished.

Dear Bea—Can't make it today—sorry. Parent arriving lunch per. to ask why son got 35% on Midterm. Must answer him. How? Sylvia Dear Syl—Don't try. There's no communication; no one really listens. Every man is an island. Give him a container of coffee instead. Bea

I don't have a dime left. I am dependent on my friends for food and a small old-age pension.

I guess I'm pretty much of a lone wolf. I don't say I don't like people at all but, to tell you the truth I only like it then if I have a chance to look deep into their hearts and their minds.

A national survey ongoing since 1974 has shown that Americans have never been less likely to be friends with their neighbors as they are now. The lowest levels of neighborliness were recorded in the suburbs.33

I have become such a solitary, and not in the Aristotelian sense: not a beast, not a god. Rather, a loner troubled by longings, incapable of finding a suitable language and despairing at the impossibility of composing messages in a playable key--as if I no longer understood the codes used by the estimable people who wanted to hear from me and would have so much to reply if only the impediments were taken away.

Can we find nothing good to say about TV? Well, yes, it brings scattered solitaries into a sort of communion. TV allows your isolated American to think that he participates in the life of the entire country. It does not actually place him in a community, but his heart is warmed with the suggestion (on the whole false) that there is a community somewhere in the vicinity and that his atomized consciousness will be drawn back toward the whole.

I texted Nightingale to let him know our change in disposition and then I picked up my Pliny, because nothing says stuck all alone in your flat like a Roman know-it-all

Driving yourself insane on the Internet is as easy as checking the weather.

There's almost nothing more discouraging than the sunset on a day when you've hardly gone outside.

Now that I have found someone, I'm feeling more alone... than I ever have before.

You always notice the holidays more when you feel the most alone.

She couldn't save them, she couldn't save anyone but herself, which made her presence here the worst sort of self-indulgence, her mission a long-running fantasy.

I felt lonely, and in full possession of my loneliness. It was the first time I had owned anything of value.

There is hardly one in three of us who live in the cities who is not sick with unused self.

carefully combed and scented vulture waiting to swoop down from the side lines." Evening after evening between 6 o'clock and midnight he drifts in and out of the lobby, up and down Randolph Street and takes up his position at various points of vantage where crowds pass, where women pass. I've watched him. No one ever talks to him. There are no salutations. He is unknown and worse. For the women, the rouged and ornamental ones, know him a bit too well. They

It was worse than having a sinking feeling; I was a sinking feeling, an unplayable adagio for strings; internal distances expanded and collapsed when I breathed.

What could be lonelier than a child in space?

It's like leaving a version of myself alone with the pain, abandoning him.

The trauma was perpetual when you were left in it alone.

Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.

Kellyanne opened the car door and crawled into my bedroom. Her face was puffy and pale and fuzzed-over. She just came in and said: "Ashmol, Pobby and Dingan are maybe-dead." That's how she said it.