Quotes About Isolation

I'm not a big fan of the post-Armageddon stories, where Denzel Washington is walking around in a torn coat.

I spent that many years thinking I was alone. Then you prance into my life, nearly giving me a paroxysm, and now you deign to tell me there are more.

The beauty of the place moved me; I loved how the clean air felt in my lungs, how far I was from everything I had ever known. People I'd hurt, people I'd failed, people who thought me a monster. Here there was no monster greater than the ragged mountains.

I was a stranger in this family. I always had been.

Alone was the loneliest place on earth

but leaving me out was like being kicked out of the family.

After the marriage, Edward changed along with everything else. The barriers came up all around her. Where once, on the outside, she had felt shut out of their exclusive family, now--on the inside--she was debarred from the rest of the world.

Never underestimate the passion of a lonely mind.

She'd spent the decades barricading herself from life, setting the conditions for love so high no one else could ever meet them. Few, in fact, had made any effort. It was a simple thing, in the end, to hide in plain sight. The world did not prevent you from becoming what you were determined to become.

Nothing existed outside ourselves and school. For us, the world of politics, social revolution, the war in Vietnam never happened.

Where people are gone the night falls upward, black and unmanned.

It was good to be a stranger in Los Angeles. It was bad to be a stranger in Los Angeles with the company of another stranger in a loud shirt.

Floyd and Lloyd, his uncles by marriage, never spoke to each other. They were men of zero words to anyone, ever. They were men who lay watching TV, making women and children feel skittish and in trouble for existing.

before she was lost to the Tenderloin, north of Fascination, up in the boisterous and dirty hotels that formed the pearls on the chain of her bare life, barer even than mine.

Deeply vulnerable and hurting within as you act tough outside. You do need people; you need them so much so that it scares you to death. You drive them away so they don't get too close; yet you regret it every time you do.

Former pleasures meant nothing to me anymore. Life was a series of tasks to be endured, and even the simplest ones were painfully arduous. It took everything I could muster to cook a meal, wash the dishes, or do the laundry. My income was virtually nonexistent. My occupation was therapy.

There is no gesture more devastating than the back turning away.

Girls may try to avoid being alone at all costs, including remaining in an abusive friendship.

I was lonely. I felt it deeply and permanently, that this state of being on my own might never disappear. But I welcomed the lonliness, which had everything to do with being anonymous. It's never lonliness that nibbles away at a person's insides, but not having room inside themselves to be comfortably alone.

You get use to someone—start to like them, even—and they leave. In the end, everyone leaves.

My best day ever. Got up. Had breakfast. Came to school. Bored, as usual. Wishing I wasn't there, like usual. Kids ignoring me, suits me fine. Sitting with the other retards—we're so special. Wasting my time. Yesterday was the same, and it's gone, anyway. Tomorrow may never come. There is only today. This is the best day and the worst day. Actually it's crap.

she had not yet learnt that the loneliest place in this world is the no-man's-land of sex.

Pat's been deserted -- have you heard that, darling? Do you think she'll take the veil or cocaine or something?

There seldom seemed to be a house left with a roof, or with anything much beyond its four walls, and quite often they must lie staring up at the stars, which would stare back again, aloof and untroubled.