Quotes About Isolation

What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world, is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century

The happiness achieved in isolation from the world and enjoyed within the confines of one's own private existence can never be anything but the famous "absence of pain," a definition on which all variations of consistent sensualism must agree.

Loneliness is not solitude. Solitude requires being alone whereas loneliness shows itself most sharply in company with others.

The real horror of the concentration and extermination camps lies in the fact that the inmates, even if they happen to keep alive, are more effectively cut off from the world of the living than if they had died, because terror enforces oblivion.

The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, or equality before the law and freedom of opinion, formulas which were designed to solve problems within given communities, but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever.

Hell is other people," said the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, and he wasn't even a fat guy.

alone, said the mother, he is

He truly believed that no one could love him, and no matter who you are, that hurts. It made you insecure. It made you want to hide and build fences

The world doesn't give even the slightest damn about us or our petty problems. We never quite get that, do we? Our lives have been shattered—shouldn't the rest of us take notice? But no.

There is no place more hollow, more soulless, than a school at night. The building had been created for life, for constant motion, for students rushing back and forth, some confident, most scared, all trying to figure out their place in the world. Take that away and you might as well have a body drained of all its blood.

maybe it was because the lonely can sometimes sense the lonely.

The danger of video games was that they shut the world out. The beauty of video games was that they shut the world out. Sally

Each writer had a bedroom in the main house and a shack or "work cottage" in which to write. We all met up for dinner at night. That was it. There was no Internet, no TV, no phones, yes lights, but no motorcar, not a single luxury.

Worn tires and ripped mattresses lay like war wounded in the middle of the road. Big chunks of cement peeked out from the high grass. There were stripped cars and while there were no fires burning, maybe there should have been.

They now lived in quasi-mansions in wealthier suburbs like Brookline or Newton with shrubs and fences and fancy marble bathrooms and swimming pools and where the very idea of living with non-nuclear family was nightmarish and incomprehensible

I stayed locked inside a windowless environment, sickened by the lack of sunshine like some dour owl.

I don't know why, but I decided to walk over to her.… because the lonely can sometimes sense the lonely.

Every home is its own independent country.

I think that we're all totally isolated beings and always will be.

Not being able to touch is sometimes as interesting as being able to touch.

I allow no one to touch me.

Life had stopped for her a long time ago. She was so out of touch with her feelings that she had no joy in her life and no concept of the fact that she could be wrong. She delivered her care of her insane patients in a killing manner, but she was convinced she was right.

When I was paralysed by polio at 13, I went into an isolation hospital and couldn't sit up, so I only took liquid food from spouted cups which the masked nurses would bring in and feed to me. I saw my parents only through glass; we couldn't touch.

Technology has made it possible to order food, buy clothes, get a ride - anything you can think of, really - at the touch of a button. But what about having the right people near you when you need them?