Quotes About Isolation

Maybe it was just because she was so pretty. Maybe I'm just as shallow as the next guy. Or maybe it was because the lonely can sometimes sense the lonely. Maybe what drew me to her was the fact that, like me, she seemed to want to keep to herself. I

Amazing what humans, even ones as wanton as Frank Ache, crave when left alone—other humans.

They never liked me." "No, I don't suppose they did." "And Esperanza? Does she still refer to me as Queen Bitch?" "She hasn't so much as mentioned your name in seven years." That made her smile. "Like I'm Voldemort. In the Harry Potter books." "Yep, you're She-who-must-not-be-named." Myron

FJ's eyes slithered toward Myron. Myron kept up the eye contact, but there was still nothing there, like looking into the windows of an abandoned building.

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

He hurt. He truly believed 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.

AM said it with the sliding cold horror of a razor blade slicing my eyeball. AM said it with the bubbling thickness of my lungs filling with phlegm, drowning me from within. AM said it with the shriek of babies being ground beneath blue-hot rollers. AM said it with the taste of maggoty pork. AM touched me in every way I had ever been touched, and devised new ways, at his leisure, there inside my mind.

Surrounded by madness, surrounded by hunger, surrounded by everything but death, I knew death was our only way out.

I have no mouth. And I must scream...

She thinks we were all killed when they made the Great Sweep, but I escaped in the mud.

None of us knew why AM had saved five people, or why our specific five, or why he spent all his time tormenting us, nor even why he had made us virtually immortal …

He would never let us go. We were his belly slaves. We were all he had to do with his forever time. We would be forever with him, with the cavern-filling bulk of the creature machine, with the all-mind soulless world he had become. He was Earth, and we were the fruit of that Earth; and though he had eaten us he would never digest us. We could not die. We had tried it. We had attempted suicide, oh one or two of us had. But AM had stopped us. I suppose we had wanted to be stopped.

Some hundreds of years may have passed. I don't know. AM has been having fun for some time, accelerating and retarding my time sense. I will say the word now. Now. It took me ten months to say now. I don't know. I think it has been some hundreds of years.

Inwardly: alone. Here. Living. under the land, under the sea, in the belly of AM, whom we created because our time was badly spent and we must have known unconsciously that he could do it better. At least the four of them are safe at last. AM will be all the madder for that. It makes me a little happier. And yet … AM has won, simply … he has taken his revenge … I have no mouth. And I must scream.

We read, I think, to repair our solitude, though pragmatically the better we read, the more solitary we become. 

Leggiamo per porre rimedio alla nostra solitudine, anche se poi, di fatto, la nostra solitudine cresce parallelamente all'aumentare e all'approfondirsi delle nostre letture. Non riuscirei proprio a considerare il leggere come un vizio, ma va concesso che non si tratta neppure di una virtù.

All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality.

only a few handfuls of students now enter Yale with an authentic passion for reading. You cannot teach someone to love great poetry if they come to you without such love. How can you teach solitude? Real reading is a lonely activity and does not teach anyone to become a better citizen.

Everyone has, or should have, a desert island list against that day when, fleeing one's enemies, one is cast ashore, or when one limps away, all warfare done, to pass the rest of one's time quietly reading. If

Everyone has, or should have, a desert island list against that day when, fleeing one's enemies, one is cast ashore, or when one limps away, all warfare done, to pass the rest of one's time quietly reading.

Uno de los dones más peculiares y originales de Kafka es que sus relatos parecen haber regresado de nuestro olvido, dejándonos siempre con la sensación de que perseveramos para olvidar lo que sentimos cuando experimentamos esas extrañezas.

the great artist of the intransitive verb also avoided objects of his sexual drive; what evidence we have indicates that he carnally embraced himself only, and walked the open road with only the thought of death and the knowledge of death as his close companions

This is, perhaps, the ultimate terror: to be lost and alone in a hostile land where the next man you meet wants only to kill you.

No one else in the entire world feels exactly what you feel.