Quotes About Isolation

We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us less lonely. But we are at risk because it is actually the reverse: If we are unable to be alone, we will be more lonely. And if we don't teach our children to be alone, they will only know how to be lonely. Yet

Solitude reinforces a secure sense of self, and with that, the capacity for empathy. Then, conversation with others provides rich material for self-reflection. Just as alone we prepare to talk together, together we learn how to engage in a more productive solitude.

They are learning a way of feeling connected in which they have permission to think only of themselves.

when technology engineers intimacy, relationships can be reduced to mere connections.

The journal is written to everyone and thus to no one.

If you don't learn how to be alone, you'll always be lonely, loneliness is failed solitude.

We are so accustomed to being always connected that being alone seems like a problem technology should solve. And

Connectivity becomes a craving.

Paul Tillich has a beautiful formulation: "Language . . . has created the word 'loneliness' to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word 'solitude' to express the glory of being alone.

When habitual structures dissolve, so do boundaries between people.

You end up isolated if you don't cultivate the capacity for solitude; the ability to be separate; to gather yourself. Solitude is where you find yourself so you can reach out to other people and form real attachments.

We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us less lonely. But we are at risk because it is actually the reverse: If we are unable to be alone, we will be more lonely. And if we don't teach our children to be alone, they will only know how to be lonely

When one becomes accustomed to "companionship" without demands, life with people may seem overwhelming. Dependence on a person is risky but it also opens us to deeply knowing another.

It was a very particular loneliness: knowing that people around you were also sad but that you couldn't be sad together.

We now expect more from technology and less from each other.

We work so hard to build our online connections. We have so much faith in them. But we must take care that in the end we do not simply feel alone with our devices.

if you never teach your children how to be alone then they will only know how to be lonely for the rest of their lives.

What is a place if those who are physically present have their attention on the absent? At a café a block from my home, almost everyone is on a computer or smartphone as they drink their coffee. These people are not my friends, yet somehow I miss their presence.

Ray, twenty-eight, comments on what it's like to have a relationship when you compete with screens: "I think the way we're going, a lot of people are getting the feeling that even though the person they're with is there, you don't get the feeling of real connection. You just have information.

She had set it on the Internet, its own peculiar echo chamber.

My cell phone is my only individual zone, just for me.

The ties we form through the Internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind. But they are the ties that preoccupy.

We can't relate to others until we are comfortable with ourselves. That's a psychoanalytic first principle: If you don't teach your children to be alone, they'll only know how to be lonely.

Networked, we are together, but so lessened are our expectations of each other that we can feel utterly alone. And there is the risk that we come to see others as objects to be accessed— and only for the parts we find useful, comforting, or amusing.