Quotes About Isolation

Man's loneliness is but his fear of life.

It wasn't the fog I minded, Cathleen. I really love fog. [...] It hides you from the world and the world from you. You feel that everything has changed, and nothing is what it seemed to be. No one can find or touch you any more.

Life is a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.

Man's loneliness is but his fear of life.

Dat ole davil, sea.

A Long Day's Journey into Night

Kierkegaard famously wrote "my sorrow is my castle." Unfortunately not all of us have as much space.

Leopardi: "True misanthropes are not found in isolation but among people, for it is practical experience in life, not philosophy, that makes us hate.

The last word of philosophy is loneliness.

Arguably, "solitude" is an urban word. The café is the urban equivalent of the desert cave.

Mass communication, radio, and especially television, have attempted, not without success, to annihilate every possibility of solitude and reflection.

Io sono abituato a cibarmi di nuvole e lontananza

Black is closing in around my eyes. I realize with a great, tired sadness that I am losing the world. The walls, the molding on the door frame, the yellow of the lamp, his back at the sink… are all achingly beautiful. I reach out and feel myself groping in the air, feel myself falling great distances, feel nothing at all. Suddenly, with a red rush I can breathe and I can see. I get up from the floor before he turns around and says, "You look flushed.

We are not close," he said, and let the effect linger before he said, "We live five hundred miles apart.

I'm not really involved with politics... I'm living in my cocoon with my classical music around.

Once the hag got upset she was apt to go downhill very fast and remember things like she was an orphan. People are often orphans when they are eighty-two, but it is true that when you have no mother or father you can feel very lonely at any age.

There had, of course, been no golden-haired boys; there hadn't been any boys at all. What there had been was a leper colony, run by the Brothers of Saint Patrick, a group of Irish missionaries to whom the crows had been sent.

and all I could see was a teary streaking of lights and little bubbles of color before I had to close up again, to shut myself in; so it couldn't be, it couldn't be the case, there's no way that all this was moving around me, Einstein was wrong-

We are separate - utterly separate. We do not even share the same space or time with others.

She spent a great deal of time staring into space, oppressed by the sense that she was waiting. But waiting for what? She did not know. Surely someone would call, someone must be needing her. Yet each day proceeded like the one before. Nothing intense, nothing desperate, ever happened. Time did not move. The home, the city, the nation, and life itself were eternal; still she had a foreboding that one day, without warning and without pity, all the dear, important things would be destroyed.

A leaf flattened itself against the window beside his head and leaped away into the darkness, and a feeling of profound despair came over him because everything he had done was useless. All that he believed in and had attempted to prove seemed meager, all of his life was wasted

At that moment I felt truly sorry for him. He might be a big, tough alien with a super fast spaceship, but he was living on snake sandwiches, and he'd never had cheese or chocolate which are like two of the holy trinity of foods as far as I'm concerned. (Wine is the third, in case you are interested.)

When I was released from prison, I didn't want to leave my house for the first three months.

All my habits through life have been singularly removed from any condition of reliance on others, and the feeling - right or wrong - that aloneness is my proper position has prevailed since my early childhood, no doubt nourished and strengthened by many and quick-following bereavements.