Quotes About Isolation

Endless white ground below, and swirling flakes, and a lonely whistle of wind, and the shadow of houses.

would rather eat bees than share her tender inner being with anyone else—she didn't even want to share it with herself.

The spaces were wide and wild. And for the first time since this started, she felt a real sense of the danger here.

She had a fondness for headphones and screens and ducking away.

Left unattended, even for a few days, houses take on a strange feel. The cold accumulates in the corners. The dark settles down and pools on the furniture. Quiet leaks everywhere. The air sours.

She often found that when everything felt a little too much, she could not talk to anyone, even if she actually wanted to. She had a tendency to go where other people were not, to step into shadows when people walked toward her. She had a fondness for headphones and screens and ducking away, even as part of her wanted to be with friends. Which meant she was going to the library to find some people who were probably dead.

Rearden sat in his room at the Wayne-Falkland Hotel, fighting an enemy more dangerous than weariness or fear: revulsion against the thought of having to deal with human beings.

We cannot stop now, even though it frightens us that we are alone in our knowledge.

She noted that the sense of detachment one feels when looking at the earth from a plane was the same sense she felt when looking at people: only her distance from people seemed longer.

She saw the faces streaming past her, the faces made alike by fear—fear as a common denominator, fear of themselves, fear of all and of one another, fear making them ready to pounce upon whatever was held sacred by any single one they met... She had kept herself clean and free in a single passion—to touch nothing. She had liked facing them in the streets, she had liked the impotence of their hatred, because she offered them nothing to be hurt.

People turned to look at Howard Roark as he passed. Some remained staring after him with sudden resentment. They could give no reason for it: it was an instinct his presence awakened in most people. Howard Roark saw no one. For him, the streets were empty. He could have walked there naked without concern.

The air is pure under the ground. There is no odor of men.

How did you know what's been killing me? Slowly, for years, driving me to hate people when I don't want to hate.... Have you felt it, too? Have you seen how your best friends love everything about you—except the things that count? And your most important is nothing to them, nothing, not even a sound they can recognize. You mean, you want to hear? You want to know what I do and why I do it, you want to know what I think? It's not boring to you? It's important?

We wish to be damned with you, rather than blessed with all our brothers. Do

I think the only cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your prime concern within other men. I've always demanded a certain quality in the people I liked. I've always recognized it at once—and it's the only quality I respect in men. I chose my friends by that...A self-sufficient ego. Nothing else matters.

The human shapes moving past him in the streets of the city were physical objects without any meaning.

No, Jim,' she said quietly, 'I guess I've never felt anything at all.

His life was crowded , public and impersonal as a city square. The friend of humanity had no single private friend. People came to him; he came close to no one. He accepted all. His affection was golden, smooth and even, like a great expanse of sand; there was no wind of discrimination to raise dunes; the sands lay still and the sun stood high. ---Toohey.

The road was dark, edged with trees. Looking up, he could see a few leaves against the stars; the leaves were twisted and dry, ready to fall. There were distant lights in the windows of houses scattered through the countryside; but the lights made the road seem lonelier. He never felt loneliness except when he was happy.

Her work was all she had or wanted. But there were times, like tonight, when she felt that sudden, peculiar emptiness, which was not emptiness, but silence, not despair, but immobility, as if nothing within her were destroyed, but everything stood still.

We are doomed Whatever days are left to us, we shall spend them alone. And we have heard of the corruption of solitude. We have torn ourselves from the truth which is our brother men, and there is no road back for us. and no redemption. We know these things, but we do not care. We care for nothing on earth. We are tired.

In the crowded tension of the days that followed he never spoke to them, except of their work. They felt, entering the office in the morning, that they had no private lives, no significance and no reality save the overwhelming reality of the broad sheets of paper on their tables. The place seemed cold and soulless like a factory, until they looked at him; then they thought that it was not a factory, but a furnace fed on their bodies, his own first.

There were no traces of human existence around them. Old ruts, overgrown with grass, made human presence seem more distant, adding the distance of years to the distance of miles. A haze of twilight remained over the ground, but in the breaks between the tree trunks there were leaves that hung in patches of shining green and seemed to light the forest. The leaves hung still. They walked, alone to move through a motionless world. She noticed suddenly that they had not said a word for a long time.

He knew, while he spoke, that it was useless, because his words sounded as if they were hitting a vacuum. There was no such person as Mrs. Wayne Wilmot; there was only a shell containing the opinions of her friends, the picture postcards she had seen, the novels of country squires she had read; it was this that he had to address, this immateriality which could not hear him or answer, deaf and impersonal like a wad of cotton.