Quotes About Isolation

All the birds had flown away, save only the great, grotesque penguins.

for one who sits by a sleeper is indeed alone; perhaps more alone than he can realize.

Without warning, I heard the heavy door behind me creak slowly open upon its rusted hinges.

From the tangle of chimney-pots scarcely a wisp of smoke came

I say alone, for one who sits by a sleeper is indeed alone; perhaps more alone than he can realise.

Of the name and abode of this man but little is written, for they were of the waking world only; yet it is said that both were obscure. It is enough to know that he dwelt in a city of high walls where sterile twilight reigned, and that he toiled all day among shadow and turmoil, coming home at evening to a room whose one window opened not on the fields and groves but on a dim court where other windows stared in dull despair. —Azathoth from Dagon and Other Macabre Tales

This man, a vagabond, hunter, and trapper, had always been strange in the eyes of his primitive associates.

Scrivo in uno stato di tensione insostenibile. Fra poco sarà l'alba e, allora, io non esisterò più. Privo d'ogni mezzo, privo della droga che — sola — mi ha consentito fino ad oggi di sopravvivere ai miei incubi, non mi rimane altro modo per sottrarmi al tormento: mi getterò dall'alta finestra di questa soffitta, nella squallida strada sottostante.

But of these things I must not now speak. I will tell only of the lone tomb in the darkest of the hillside thickets.

It is enough to say that he dwelt in a city of high walls where sterile twilight reigned, that he toiled all day among shadow and turmoil, coming home at evening to a room whose one window opened not to open fields and groves but on to a dim court where other windows stared in dull despair.

St. John is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and such is my knowledge that I am about to blow out my brains for fear I shall be mangled in the same way. Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldritch phantasy sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to self-annihilation.

My youngest boy went mad. He sits drooling on the porch, trying to play the cat like an accordion. He's been scratched some.

he never spoke save in the debased patois of his environment;

thirst had driven him into the desert again

Certainly, we were in one of the strangest, weirdest, and most terrible of all the corners of earth's globe.

In such surroundings the mind loses its perspective; time and space become trivial and unreal, and echoes of a forgotten prehistoric past beat insistently upon the enthralled consciousness.

It was morning when I saw it, but shadow lurked always there. The trees grew too thickly, and their trunks were too big for any healthy New England wood. There was too much silence in the dim alleys between them, and the floor was too soft with the dank moss and mattings of infinite years of decay.

Now, as the baying of that dead, fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder, and the stealthy whirring and flapping of those accursed web-wings circles closer and closer, I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my only refuge from the unnamed and unnamable.

Even the Terrible Old Man who talks to leaden pendulums in bottles, buys groceries with centuried Spanish gold, and keeps stone idols in the yard of his antediluvian cottage in Water Street can only say these things were the same when his grandfather was a boy, and that must have been inconceivable ages ago, when Belcher or Shirley or Pownall or Bernard was Governor of His Majesty's Province of the Massachusetts-Bay.

Quite alone both as a novel and as a piece of terror-literature stands the famous Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë

His money and lands were gone, and he did not care for the ways of people about him, but preferred to dream and write of his dreams. What he wrote was laughed at by those to whom he shewed it, so that after a time he kept his writings to himself

The village seemed very old, eaten away at the edge like the moon which had commenced to wane

his appearance was that of the typical denizen of the Catskill Mountain region; one of those strange, repellent scions of a primitive colonial peasant stock whose isolation for nearly three centuries in the hilly fastnesses of a little-travelled countryside has caused them to sink to a kind of barbaric degeneracy, rather than advance with their more fortunately placed brethren of the thickly settled districts.

The Picture in the House * * * * * Written: December 12th 1920 First Published in The National Amateur, Vol. 41, No. 6 (July 1919)