Quotes About Isolation

He and I had always felt as if we were fellow survivors from some vanishing age or land, in the gibbering swamp of mediocrity around us.

HOWARD ROARK LAUGHED. He stood naked at the edge of a cliff. The lake lay far below him.

We are one of the Damned.

Other people are human. They're sensitive. They can't devote their whole life to metals and engines. You're lucky- you've never had any feelings. You've never felt anything at all.

I take the only desire one can really permit oneself. Freedom, Alvah, freedom." "You call that freedom?" "To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing." "What if you found something you wanted?" "I won't find it. I won't choose to see it. It would be part of that lovely world of yours. I'd have to share it with all the rest of you—and I wouldn

The prisoners liked to talk about their past. Their memories were the only future they had.

She went on, protected from the world around her by a last armor: indifference.

in the temple of his spirit, each man is alone.

A wall of the most effective soundproofing: indifference.

To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. That and nothing else.

She sat at the window of the train, her head thrown back, one leg stretched across to the empty seat before her. The window frame trembled with the speed of the motion, the pane hung over empty darkness, and dots of light slashed across the glass as luminous streaks, once in a while.

pipes and wires, a web of rails that went off into black holes where green and red lights hung as distant drops of color. There was nothing else, nothing to dilute it, so that one could admire

A world with its motor cut off and a single heart, pumped by hand.

It was a small, dim room and the air in it seemed heavy, as if it had not been disturbed for years.

Mr. Roark, we're alone here. Why don't you tell me what you think of me? In any words you wish. No one will hear us." "But I don't think of you." Toohey

what I'm like—except tonight." "Do you live here alone, like this, miles away from everything?" Wyatt pointed at the window. "I'm a couple of steps away from—everything." "What about people?" "I have guest rooms for the kind of people who come to see me on business. I want as many miles as possible between myself and all the other kinds.

And then they stopped smiling. The corpse they saw in the weeds by the roadside was a rusty cylinder with bits of glass—the remnant of a gas-station pump.

He never felt loneliness except when he was happy.

they seemed wounded by anything he said, it was not a matter of his words or actions, it was almost . . . almost as if they were wounded by the mere fact of his being.

I eat my heart out alone.

i could have told him to learn from Gatsby. from the lonely, isolated Gatsby, who also tried to retrieve his past and give flash and blood to a fancy, a dream that was never meant to be more than a dream.

I say "then, as now" because the revolution that imposed the scarf on others did not relieve Mahshid of her loneliness. Before the revolution, she could in a sense take pride in her isolation. At that time, she had worn the scarf as a testament to her faith. Her decision was a voluntary act. When the revolution forced the scarf on others, her action became meaningless.

I turned on the flashlight; it cut a small circle of light from the darkness around me.

What Nabokov captured was the texture of life in a totalitarian society, where you are completely alone in an illusory world full of false promises, where you can no longer differentiate between your savior and your executioner.