Quotes About Isolation

After all, what is ''a man'' nowadays? Somebody who stands alone, independent of all ties.

Our society seems to say that a real man needs and wants nobody.

For love, we've got to be alone, together. We've got to close out everyone else.

Howell hung up the phone and pressed his forehead against the cool glass of the booth. The world was suddenly a different place. He wasn't sure he liked it.

I made a stop, ducking into the supermarket to pick up milk, Diet Pepsi, bread, eggs, and toilet paper. I was into my siege mentality, looking forward to pulling up the drawbridge and waiting out the rain. With luck, I wouldn't have to go out for days.

wrote him off the day he left and so did Ellen and

Sociologist James House of the University of Michigan declares that emotional isolation is a more dangerous health risk than smoking or high blood pressure, and we now warn everyone about these two! Perhaps these findings reflect the time-honored saying "Suffering is a given; suffering alone is intolerable.

One reason is that we are increasingly living in social isolation.

For better or worse, in the twenty-first century, a love relationship has become the central emotional relationship in most people's lives. One reason is that we are increasingly living in social isolation.

When that person is emotionally unavailable or unresponsive, we face being out in the cold, alone and helpless. We are assailed by emotions — anger, sadness, hurt, and above all, fear. This is not so surprising when we remember that fear is our built-in alarm system; it turns on when our survival is threatened. Losing connection with our loved one jeopardizes our sense of security. The alarm goes off in the brain's amygdala, or Fear Central

The third dance is Freeze and Flee, or as we sometimes call it in EFT, Withdraw-Withdraw. This usually happens after the Protest Polka has been going on for a while in a relationship, when dancers feel so hopeless that they begin to give up and put their own emotions and needs in the deep freeze, leaving only numbness and distance.

When safe connection seems lost, partners go into fight-or-flight mode. They blame and get aggressive to get a response, any response, or they close down and try not to care. Both are terrified; they are just dealing with it differently. Trouble is, once they start this blame-distance loop, it confirms all their fears and adds to their sense of isolation.

As the Irish poet John O'Donohue puts it, "There is a huge and leaden loneliness settling like a frozen winter on so many humans.

Robert Putnam notes in his seminal book on the loss of social connection in Western societies, Bowling Alone, "Good socialization is a prerequisite for life online, not an effect of it: without a real world counterpart, Internet contact gets ranty, dishonest and weird." We

the way she felt about her past was that she had somehow come into being who she was without any connection to it. As if floating in naked and unencumbered on some shell

There was nothing I hated worse than clumps of whispering girls who got quiet when I passed. I started picking scabs off my body and, when I didn't have any, gnawing the flesh around my fingernails until I was a bleeding wreck. I worried so much about how I looked and whether I was doing things right, I felt half the time I was impersonating a girl instead of really being me.

Sarah was up in her room with her heart broke so bad, Binah said you could hear it jangle when she walked.

Anyone can retire into a quiet place, wrote Evelyn Underhill, but it's the shutting of the door that makes the difference. Solitude is a time for stripping away everything in order to focus on God. (Matt 6:6)

Solitude is a time for God and God alone. Who knows what can happpen when we focus only on God. In solitude, we sense our deep oneness with God and keep company with Him. Solitude is breaking through my isolation into sharing and being in touch with my Creator. In fact, we can begin to heal our loneliness by transforming it into solitude.

To be ignored, to be forgotten, this was the worst sadness of all.

The pear trees were bare, their limbs spread open like the viscera of a parasol. Stretching into the darkness beyond, the single houses, double houses, and villas were lined up in cramped, neat rows which ran toward the tip of the peninsula. p94

Quietness has a strange, spongy hum that can nearly break your eardrums. I didn't know if it was the emptiness, the

that strange turbulence that rises when you begin to wash up on the island of your own little self and you don't see how you could ever sustain yourself there.

They provided me with some real nice sympathy, with the feeling I was exceptional. I was the girl abandoned by her mother. I was the girl who kneeled on grits. What a special case I was.