Quotes About Isolation

I had been alone more than I could have been had I gone by myself.

The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence. I knew perfectly well the cars were making noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making a noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn't hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for all the good it did me.

Good to know that if I ever need attention all I have to do is die.

it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

I am still raw. I say I may be back. You know what lies are for. Even in your Zen heaven we shan't meet. --from Lesbos, written 18 October 1962

The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.

I don't know how long I kept at it... I felt reasonably safe, streched out on the floor, and lay quite still. It didn't seem to be summer any more

I wish I knew what to do with my life, what to do with my heart…I do nothing all day, boredom settles in, I look at the sky so I get to feel even smaller than I already feel and my mind keeps poisoning itself uselessly.

No, I won't try to escape myself by losing myself in artificial chatter 'Did you have a nice vacation?' 'Oh, yes, and you?' I'll stay here and try to pin that loneliness down.

I knew I should be grateful to Mrs Guinea, only I couldn't feel a thing. If Mrs Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss? Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?

It was sometime in October; she had long ago lost track of all the days and it really didn't matter because one was like another and there were no nights to separate them because she never slept any more.

It's like watching paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction - every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that excitement at about a million miles an hour.

Sometimes I feel like I'm not solid. I'm hollow. There's nothing behind my eyes. I'm a negative of a person. All I want is blackness, blackness and silence.

I hate myself for not being able to go downstairs naturally and seek comfort in numbers. I hate myself for having to sit here and be torn between I know not what within me.

Worse even than your maddening song, your silence. -

I sank back in the gray, plush seat and closed my eyes. The air of the bell jar wadded round me and I couldn't stir.

But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.

The more hopeless you were, the farther away they hid you.

My life is a discipline, a prison: I live for my own work, without which I am nothing.

A black-sharded lady keeps me in a parrot cage.

To the person in The Bell Jar, black and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream

As I lay on my back in bed staring up at the blank, white ceiling the stillness seemed to grow bigger and bigger until I felt my eardrums would burst with it.