Quotes About Isolation

Loneliness is good practice for eternity.

La mejor manera de emplear tu tiempo es separarte de todo, y en la soledad de tu habitación, observar el caleidoscopio de este mundo desconocido.

I . . . watched the storm through an amnion of water.

My father was always depressed. When he was home and sober, he was mostly in his room.

Nocturne Midnight. The moon has set, and the Pleiades. The hours pass and pass, yet still I lie alone. Sappho

My dad worked two jobs and moved us to the suburbs, and just being a black person, I went through a lot of racism and being called names and being bullied every single day. And it was hard. I didn't have any friends.

He'd gone into their marriage determined that she would never be alone again. In the end, she'd made him as alone in the world as she.

You don't know how to converse. Sometimes I think the spaces between the stars are filled with your silence.

The doorbell rang. The glass slipped from his hand and broke at his feet. How long had she been gone? How did one keep track of time in Hell? He might have been in the study for days already, drinking himself into a state. But his servants hadn't returned to gaze aghast upon him yet, so it couldn't have been too long.

The feeling that 'no one is listening to me' makes us want to spend time with machines that seem to care about us.

If we're not able to be alone, we're going to be more lonely. And if we don't teach our children to be alone, they're only going to know how to be lonely.

We expect more from technology and less from each other.

People are lonely. The network is seductive. But if we are always on, we may deny ourselves the rewards of solitude.

This is a new nonnegotiable: to feel safe, you have to be connected.

this distinctive confusion: these days, whether you are online or not, it is easy for people to end up unsure if they are closer together or further apart.

We are at a moment of temptation, ready to turn to machines for companionship even as we seem pained or inconvenienced to engage with each other in settings as simple as a grocery store. We want technology to step up as we ask people to step back.

The computer offered the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.

As we distribute ourselves, we may abandon ourselves.

The new technologies allow us to "dial down" human contact, to titrate its nature and extent.

if we don't have experience with solitude—and this is often the case today—we start to equate loneliness and solitude.

In all of these cases, we use technology to "dial down" human contact, to titrate its nature and extent. People avoid face-to-face conversation but are comforted by being in touch with people—and sometimes with a lot of people—who are emotionally kept at bay. It's another instance of the Goldilocks effect. It's part of the move from conversation to mere connection.

As technology became our lifeline, we realized how much we missed the full embrace of the human.

We had talk enough, but no conversation. —SAMUEL JOHNSON, THE RAMBLER (1752)

My own study of the networked life has left me thinking about intimacy - about being with people in person, hearing their voices and seeing their faces, trying to know their hearts. And it has left me thinking about solitude-the kind that refreshes and restores. Loneliness is failed solitude. To experience solitude you must be able to summon yourself by yourself; otherwise you will only know how to be lonely