Quotes About Isolation

trivial incidents can loom large and threatening in a community that's closed off from the outside. If you live in the teapot, the tempest fills your entire world.

My last thought before I fell asleep was: He is dead. My only friend. My only enemy.

It is these black clothes, said Strange. I am like a leftover piece of funeral, condemned to walk about the Town, frightening people into thinking of their own mortality.

There are people in this world, whose lives are nothing but a burden to them. A black veil stands between them and the world. They are utterly alone. They are like shadows in the night, shut off from joy and all gentle human emotions, unable to even give comfort to each other. Their days are full of nothing but darkness, misery and solitude.

For there was nothing in his eyes but the black night and the cold stars.

He was a man who knew there were such things as jokes in the world or people would not write about them, but had never actually been introduced to one or shaken its hand.

He did not feel as if he were inside a Pillar of Darkness in the middle of Yorkshire; he felt more as if the rest of the world had fallen away and he and Strange were left alone upon a solitary island or promontory. The idea distressed him a great deal less than one might have supposed. He had never much cared for the world and he bore its loss philosophically.

You think that I am angry, but I am not. You think I do not know why you have done what you have done, but I do. You think you have put all your heart into that writing and that every one in England now understands you. What do they understand? Nothing. I understood you before you wrote a word. What you wrote, you wrote for me. For me alone.

For the rest of the night he sat by himself under the elm-tree. Until this moment it had never seemed to him that his magicianship set him apart from other men. But now he had glimpsed the wrong side of something. He had the eeriest feeling - as if the world were growing older around him, and the best part of existence - laughter, love and innocence - were slipping irrevocably into the past.

For this is England where a man's neighbours will never suffer him to live entirely bereft of society, let him be as dry and sour-faced as he may.

Houses, like people, are apt to become rather eccentric if left too much on their own

To sit and pass hour after hour in idle chatter with a roomful of strangers is to me the worst sort of torment

The nearest inhabited village is about seven of your English miles to the left.

This creature softened my heart of stone. She died and with her died my last warm feelings for humanity.

The snow itself is lonely or, if you prefer, self-sufficient. There is no other time when the whole world seems composed of one thing and one thing only.

Her own dolls were either babies or storybook characters like Cinderella and Snow White who though past childhood were somehow not yet into the world, girls who kept themselves apart from the world without really knowing what for. Now girls know what for. They menstruate when they are ten, and their dolls are sluts.

There was no room in his life for Marta, and none in her life for him; but it was a pity, all the same.

Solitude is a good place to visit but a poor place to stay.

I start to wonder what the people all around me do on days like today. I live in a box in the sky with boxes identical to mine on all sides, and forty stories of identical boxes below me. What do all those boxed people do on Saturdays?

Surrounded by glistening pine trees, enveloped by rain and fog, for the first time it occurred to Elliot that his extended period of solitude just might be turning into loneliness.

Being alone wasn't nearly as lonely as being with people who didn't love you

Woody Allen had it right: "Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering—and it's all over much too soon.

It's funny, but we were living on this small island off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina when I was 9.

Hana didn't know that I existed, much less that I was looking for her. She didn't know that anyone was looking. Hana wasn't like me. She was like Candace, Shar, Karice—every lost girl in the world who felt herself unvalued and unsought. She had no way to know that somewhere in the world, right now, her name was being called.