Quotes About Isolation

Just spinning around, lost in their own little world. Doing so much, accomplishing so little. How sad.

Speaking from experience, there are people who have too much space between their ears, and given the time, do nothing but free fall forever inside their heads.

I am not a part of this home any longer. I am a tiny thing created by indifferent scientists. I am an experiment, a mechanical bee placed near the hive. The real bees were happy being bees until I came along and gave them all the false information that destroyed their little lives.

The primary movement in the text is not from unity to differentiation, but from the isolation of an individual to the deep blessing of shared kinship and community.

It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you t

I saw this at about three o'clock in the morning, alone in my apartment, on a black-and-white set with lots of interference. White noise and snow. He seemed to be speaking directly at me, right out of the television set. For a moment I was disoriented, seized by panic; could a ghost embody itself through wavelengths, electronic dots, a picture tube? What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?

liked the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a bookstore, waiting tables in a coffee shop, who knew what kind of odd, solitary life I might slip into? Meals alone, walking the dogs in the evenings; and nobody knowing who I was.

It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you think?

Nothing is lonelier or more disorienting than insomnia

basketball courts ringed with barbed-wire fence.

He was a planet without an atmosphere. x.

the minibar cart, even church clocks tolling the hour, de Westertoren, Krijtberg, a dark edge to the clangor, an inwrought fairy-tale sense of doom. By day I sat on the foot of the bed straining to puzzle out the Dutch-language

I've come to realize that the only truths that matter to me are the ones I don't, and can't, understand. What's mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable. What doesn't fit into a story, what doesn't have a story. Glint of brightness on a barely-there chain. Patch of sunlight on a yellow wall. The loneliness that separates every living creature from every other

because the thing he hadn't understood then (he was happier not knowing it) was that once you were in prison, you never got out. People treated you like a different person; you tended to backslide, the way people tended to backslide into malaria or bad alcoholism

but ever since the painting had vanished from under me I'd felt drowned and extinguished by vastness—not just the predictable vastness of time, and space, but the impassable distances between people even when they were within arm's reach of each other

Sometimes, during the course of the listless day (dazed hours on the sofa, paging dully through the Encyclopaedia Britannica) these thoughts struck Harriet with such fresh force that she crawled in the closet and closed the door and cried, cried with her face in the taffeta skirts of her mother's dusty old party dresses, sick with the certainty that what she felt was never going to get anything but worse.

unbearable claustrophobia of the soul

he'd probably just crawl in the corner and starve. Like a hamster you forgot to feed.

I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.

At the silence, my heart went cold. Dead flowers stood rotting in the massive Chinese vases and a shut-up heaviness overweighed the room: the air almost too stale to breathe...It was a stillness I knew; this was a house closed in on itself when someone had died.

It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you think? Remember the Erinyes?

It's a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us.

No person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us.

Chlorotic, with a sunken chest, he smoked incessantly, wore cheap shirts that had grayed in the wash, drank endless cups of sugary tea.