Quotes About Isolation

No one who does not live with constant pain can imagine the toll it takes. The way it grinds you down. The sheer damnable tedium of it.

On December 7, 2059, Emilio Sandoz was released from the isolation ward of Salvator Mundi Hospital in the middle of the night and transported in a bread van to the Jesuit residence at Number 5 Borgo Santo Spirito, a few minutes' walk across St. Peter's Square from the Vatican.

Sometimes nothing is the scariest thing of all

She was, for several unpleasant moments, the isolated, lonely, insecure person she had been just three years earlier, a social blunderer, a locker-room towel for the maladjusted, unable to sell an article or figure out what to wear. Pull yourself together, she thought; it wasn't so bad.

Of course, not every single person was lonely, but he guessed that she was. She seemed in need of comfort and care, like a stray animal that gets fed by various kindly people but never held.

She couldn't tell if she was just pulling anything available into her sadness.

I get so lonely sometimes, I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger.

Who but a drunk, I wonder looking back, could sit on the porch alone and get in an argument?)

a dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it. In other words, the boat I can feel so lonely in actually holds us all.

A dowdy, depressed dwarf.

There can be distractions, but if you're isolated from the heart of the Games, the Olympics become just another competition.

I came back [to school] in the fall, as a full-time boarder, with a certain set to my jaw, determined to go it alone. A summer passed in thoughtful isolation, rowing on a mountain lake, diving from a pier, had made me perfectly reckless. I was going to get myself recognized at whatever price. It was in this cold, empty gambler's mood, common to politicians and adolescents, that I surveyed the convent setup. If I could not win fame by goodness, I was ready to do it by badness.

from Hum, Hum Oh the house of denial has thick walls and very small windows and whoever lives there, little by little, will turn to stone. In those years I did everything I could do and I did it in the dark— I mean, without understanding. I ran away. I ran away again (from poem: Hum, Hum)

It is no use thinking that writing of poems – the actual writing – can accommodate itself to a social setting, even the most sympathetic social setting of a workshop composed of friends. It cannot. The work improves there and often the will to work gets valuable nourishment and ideas. But, for good reasons, the poem requires of the writer not society or instruction, but a patch of profound and unbroken solitude.

There was only myself and the world, and it was I who was leaving.

Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart—to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.

When one is alone and lonely, the body gladly lingers in the wind or the rain, or splashes into the cold river, or pushes through the ice-crusted snow.

After the Titanic hit the iceberg at 11:40 P.M., the ship's radio operator sent out an SOS. An SOS is the international distress signal in Morse code. Unfortunately, the only ship near the Titanic had turned off its radio for the night. All the other ships who received the message were too far away to help. When the Titanic sank around 2:20 A.M., she was all alone.

Credit 47 Barbed-wire fences and guards prevented anyone from leaving the ghetto.

Jack and Annie were all alone.

After six months, you forget how heavy things are. Like, yourself." You also, after months of weightlessness, forget how to use your legs. "Your muscles don't remember what to do." And astronauts have no pit crew to rush

Funny thing happened on the way to the moon: not much," wrote Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan. "Should have brought some crossword puzzles.

Space exploration is in some ways an exploration of what it means to be human. How much normalcy can people forgo? For how long, and what does it do to them?

In retrospect, it was silly to think that the experience of traveling in space could be approximated by a repurposed walk-in freezer. To find out what would happen to a man alone in the cosmos, at some point you just had to lob one up there.