Quotes About Isolation

We found a city of women. Not one Eldren man had remained. Not one boy over twelve. Not one old man of any age. We had slain them all at sea.

and then quite suddenly I found that I had no rider, that I had no weight on my back, and that I was alone out in front of the squadron.

You know something, you never know what lonely is until you are really alone, alone all day, alone all night, with no one to talk to.

I was a bit of a loner, not because I wanted to be. I was just like that. Books became friends to me.

Do you understand the sadness of geography?

If she were a writer she would collect her pencils and notebooks and favourite cat and write in bed. Strangers and lovers would never get past the locked door.

Some people you just had to embrace, in some way or another, had to bite into the muscle, to remain sane in their company. You needed to grab their hand and clutch it like a downer so they would pull you into their midst. Otherwise they, walking casually down the street towards you, almost about to wave, would leap over a wall and be gone for months.

Everything that ever happened to me that was important happened in the desert.

Here. Where I am anonymous and alone in a white room with no history and no parading. So I can make something unknown in the shape of this room. Where I am King of Corners.

Sleep is a prison for a boy who has friends to meet.

He turns his back to the far shore and rows toward it. He can in this way travel away from, yet still see, his house....he feels he is riding a floating skeleton...Some birds in the almost-dark are flying as close to their reflections as possible.

Every river they came to was bridge-less, as if its name had been erased, as if the sky were starless, homes doorless.

You must talk to me, Caravaggio. Or am I just a book? Something to be read, some creature to be tempted out of a loch and shot full of morphine, full of corridors, lies, loose vegetation, pockets of stones.

A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.

A person will walk through a hundred doors to carry out the whims of the dead, not realizing he is burying himself away from the others.

If you grow up with uncertainty, you deal with people only on a daily basis, to be even safer on an hourly basis. You do not concern yourself with what you must or should remember about them. You are on your own.

There is God only in the desert, he wanted to acknowledge that now. Outside of this there was just trade and power, money and war.

She was secure in the miniature world she had built; the two other men seemed distant planets, each in his own sphere of memory and solitude.

The youth felt this was his first conversation in years.

Someone's war was slashing apart his delicate tapestry of companions. I was Odysseus, I understood the shifting and temporary vetoes of war. But he was a man who made friends with difficulty. He was a man who knew two or three people in his life, and they had turned out now to be the enemy.

He rides the boat of morphine. It races in him, imploding time and geography the way maps compress the world onto a two-dimensional sheet of paper.

Çölde yaln?zca su kutsald?r.

Some rooms could not be entered because of rubble. One bomb crater allowed moon and rain into the library downstairs—

Ich bin ein Mensch mit kaltem Herzen. Wenn ich mit einem großen Kummer zu tun habe, errichte ich Barrieren, damit das Gefühl des Verlusts nicht zu tief, nicht zu weit eindringen kann. Sofort gibt es eine Mauer, die uneinnehmbar ist. (S. 161)