Quotes About Isolation

A nation ringed by walls will only imprison itself.

But by the end of two years, most have either changed careers or moved to suburban schools - a consequence of low pay, a lack of support from the educational bureaucracy, and a pervasive feeling of isolation.

There was something to what he said, for it was true that the people I met on the job were generally much older than me, with a set of concerns and demands that created barriers to friendship. When I wasn't working, the weekends would usually find me alone in an empty apartment, making do with the company of books. I

It was as if, because of the very strangeness of my heritage and the worlds I straddled, I was from everywhere and nowhere at once, a combination of ill-fitting parts, like a platypus or some imaginary beast, confined to a fragile habitat, unsure of where I belonged. And I sensed, without fully understanding why or how, that unless I could stitch my life together and situate myself along some firm axis, I might end up in some basic way living my life alone.

But she wasn't prepared for the loneliness. It was constant, like a shortness of breath

And so I sit on the dunes in my carefully mismatched clothes, hour after hour, day after day, frozen in my looking back. 'Do not look behind you...lest you be swept away.' That is what scripture say. Only there is nowhere for me to look but back. No future. No redemption. Like Lot's wife, I am turned to salt, my tired eyes trained on the blue-gray horizon, where sea meets sky, where my yesterday's met my tomorrows, a ragtag eccentric, watching and waiting for something that never comes.

Purge everyone who "brings you down," and you risk being very lonely or, what is worse, cut off from reality.

In today's world, other people have become an obstacle to our individual pursuits.

Without people around, furniture has nothing to do but bear witness to the structural inadequacies of the human body: How much padding, cushioning, embracing, enfolding, and supporting we had needed just to stumble about through our days!

But suburbanization, probably more than any other single factor, hid the poor from view.

Other people can be annoying, as Sartre famously suggested, but true hell is perpetual imprisonment in the self.

Sage's parents might just as well have been in a plane crash. They had fallen out of her life, and Sage had been horribly hurt. The kind of hurt that could turn you mean, when what you really were was scared. Scared and lonely. She guessed Owen had been trying to tell her that about Sage. But she hadn't wanted to listen-couldn't listen. Then. (pg. 117)

In the end, the guards walked her out to her solitary old blue Pinto sitting in the parking lot, and she drove down the dark canyons to the freeway and the brighter lights of the Valley. She wasn't sure just why the thought of going home alone would frighten her. When she reached it, the place was quiet and normal as ever; but when she finally slept, toward six, it was not restful sleep.

Last time I talked to her she didn't sound like herself. She's depressed. It's awful what happens when people run out of money. They start thinking they're no good.

It's terrible to lose somebody, but it's also true that some people never have anybody to lose, and I think that's got to be so much worse.

This is what it means to be alone: everyone is connected to everyone else, their bodies are a bright liquid life flowing around you, sharing a single heart that drives them to move all together. If the shark comes they will all escape, and leave you to be eaten.

Now, see, that's why you want Internet friends. You can find people just exactly like you. Screw your neighbors and your family, too messy...the trouble is, once you filter out everybody that doesn't agree with you, all that's left is maybe this one retired surfer guy living in Idaho.

She is inhumanly alone. And then, all at once, she isn't.

It occurs to her that there is one thing about people you can never understand well enough: how entirely inside themselves they are.

But being a stay-at-home mom was the loneliest kind of lonely, in which she was always and never by herself.

I put my face to the window so nobody would see, if I tore up. Was this me now, for life? Taking up space where people wished I wasn't? Once on a time I was something, and then I turned, like sour milk. The dead junkie's kid. A rotten little piece of American pie that everybody wishes could just be, you know. Removed.

They couldn't close out the whole world, maybe, but they could sure find something on their TV or radio to put scientists or foreigners or whatever they thought he was in a bad light. Truly, they were no better than the city people always looking down on southerners ... If people played their channels right, they could be spared from disagreement for the length of their natural lives. Finally she got it. The need for so many channels.

I wish I could go visit them and talk in my own language, the English I knew before I grew thorns on my tongue.

Living in a holler, the sun gets around to you late in the day, and leaves you early.