Quotes About Isolation

center, in bigger print: And if I die no soul will pity me. And why should they since I myself find in myself no pity to myself. I asked what it was

on the weekends. He'd mentioned a place called Sweet Briar where he met other scientists. She felt the trailer's absence

All this was making me hanker to go take more pills. Sick as that is. I wondered if Emmy knew how deep I was in. But she was wrapped up in her own shit. She said in Knoxville, June could refer these patients someplace for help, but here their insurance only covered the pills.

as isolated and alone as if I'd been abandoned on the Patagonian ice cap and left to fend for myself.

Well, the club is open until three in the morning and she works every day. So, by the time she gets home…" "I get the picture," I said. Though in fact, it was a little hard to imagine Harry with an attachment that didn't have an Ethernet cable and a mouse. He was an introverted, socially stunted guy, with no contacts I knew of outside of his day job, which he kept at arm's length in any event, and me. Conditions that had always made him useful.

There was a time when I didn't seem to need such things, when I would have been amused and perhaps even vaguely disgusted at the notion of living like some sort of psychic vampire, a lingering revenant pressed up against one-way glass, looking with forlorn and futile eyes at the ordinary life fate had denied him.

Asian face and local language skills to handle the cash. I had just returned to the States from Vietnam, having left the military under a cloud, the origins of which I was able to understand only years later. My mother, the American half of the marriage, had just died; I had no brothers or sisters;

He returned a moment later, alone, and, after taking a moment to catch his breath, resumed his rightful place on the bench without looking at anyone else in the room. Everyone returned to what they were doing: his affiliates, because they didn't care; the civilians, because they were unnerved. It was as though nothing had happened, though the pervading silence indicated that indeed something had.

His eyes were still on me, but they no longer perceived. I stepped back, out of their sightless ambit, and paused to observe the scene. It looked like what it almost was: a weightlifting addict, alone and late at night, tries to handle more than he can, gets caught under the bar, suffocates and dies there. A bizarre accident.

it came to feel more a fortress than a home. A fortress of solitude.

Seriously protecting yourself calls for the annihilation of ties with society, ties that most people need the way they need oxygen. You give up friends, family, romance. You walk through the world like a ghost, detached from the living around you. If you were to die in, say, a bus accident, you'd wind up buried in an obscure municipal graveyard, just another John Doe, no flowers, no mourners, hell, no mourning. It's natural, probably even desirable, to be afraid of all this.

The owner of a coffee shop sat diminished in the back of his deserted establishment, waiting for patronage that had long since vanished.

The third floor was quieter still. For a few moments, I leaned against the railing surrounding the open center of the floor, gazing down at the band, at the patrons at the tables before the stage, and at the waiters crossing between, and felt an odd sadness descend, both remote and heavy, as though I was watching this lively scene not so much from on high but rather from an impossibly detached and alienated distance

The room was large, and largely empty. The pace would pick up later in the evening. For now, the action comprised just a few lonely souls. They seemed lost in the expanse of the room, their play joyless, desultory, as though they'd been looking for a livelier party and found themselves stuck with this one instead.

What makes me a hard target is that I have no fixed points in my life—no workplace, no address, no known associates—that someone can hook into and use to get to me. If someone had established a connection from Harry to me, he'd have that fixed point. He could be expected to exploit it.

Hell is empty And all the devils are here. —William Shakespeare, The Tempest

Seriously protecting yourself calls for the annihilation of ties with society, ties that most people need the way they need oxygen.

it's always your first attempt every time you write, with your only companions being fear and coffee. That's the way it is a lot of times. You have fear and coffee, and that's it.

I took several long walks in the Wright and adjacent Taylor Valleys. I did not feel insignificant on these journeys, dwarfed or shrugged off by the land, but superfluous. It is a difficult landscape to enter, and to develop a rapport with. It is not inimical or hostile, but indifferent, utterly remote, even as you stand in it. The light itself is aloof.

And ceremony also functions as an antidote to loneliness.

the more our connections to others weakens. In his book Bowling Alone, political scientist Robert Putnam focused attention on the deterioration of social connection in contemporary life. And in this context it is relevant that the incidence of depression among the Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, is less than 20 percent of the national rate.

Ah, it's a real pit. Sort of place where they eat what they run over on the road. Gorillaville. You eat the beer, then you drink

So turn off the television—in fact, why don't you turn off all the lights except for the one over your favorite chair?—and we'll talk about vampires here in the dim. I think I can make you believe in them, because while I was working on this book, I believed in them myself.

The best-educated doctor in the world is standing on a low island in the middle of a sea of ignorance.