Quotes About Isolation

talk to myself and look at the dark trees, blessedly neutral. So much easier than facing people, than having to look happy, invulnerable, clever.

He would lean back in his chair and match the tips of his fingers together in a little steeple and tell me why I couldn't sleep and why I couldn't read and why I couldn't eat and why everything people did seemed so silly because they only died in the end.

It was as if we had been forced together by some overwhelming circumstances, like war or plague, and shared a world of our own.

Sabía que debía estarle agradecida a la señora Guinea, sólo que no podía sentir nada. Si la señora Guinea me hubiera dado un pasaje a Europa, o un viaje alrededor del mundo, no hubiera habido la menor diferencia para mí, porque donde quiera que estuviera sentada -en la cubierta de un barco o en la terraza de un café en París o en Bangkok- estaría sentada bajo la misma campana de cristal, agitándome en mi propio aire viciado.

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream... I remembered everything... Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were a part of me. They were my landscape.

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 at a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok--I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks

I feigned sleep until my mother left for school, but even my eyelids didn't shut out the light. They hung the raw, red screen of their tiny vessels in front of me like a wound. I crawled between the mattress and the padded bedstead and let the mattress fall across me like a tombstone. It felt dark and safe under there, but the mattress was not heavy enough. It needed a ton more weight to make me sleep.

Quería estar donde nadie más que yo supiera que podría llegar.

under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air

Tunsin itseni veltoksi ja hylätyksi, olin kuin jonkin pelottavan eläimen luoma nahka. Oli helpotus päästää irti eläimestä, mutta se näytti vieneen mukanaan minun sieluni ja kaiken muun, mihin se saattoi iskeä kyntensä.

I didn't want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I'd cry for a week

And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness, is horrible and overpowering.

Approaching his cottage By crooked detour, He hears the gruff knocking Of the wolf at the door. His wife and his children Hang riddled with shot, There's a hex on the cradle And death in the pot.

Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in it's appalling self-consciousness, is horrible and overpowering.

Somehow these sluttish nights make me have a violent nunlike passion to write and sequester myself. I shall sequester. I don't want to see anybody because they are not Ted Hughes and I never have been made a fool of by a man.

different as the animal with the touch of human hands about him when he returns to the herd

a quiet large house with no interruptions, phone, or visitors;

O, only left to myself, what a poet I will flay myself into.

Why am I obsessed with the idea I can justify myself by getting manuscripts published? Is it an escape-an excuse for any social failure-so I can say No, I don't go out for many extracurricular activities, but I spend a lot of time writing. Or is it an excuse for wanting to be alone and meditate alone, not having to brave a group of women? (Women in numbers has always disturbed me.)

God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of parties with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear.

Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness, is horrible and overpowering.

Mentally I have led a vegetable existence this summer.

the razor slitting the stomach, and the life throbbing away, red flood by red flood - I lay crouched, kneeling on the khaki quilt on the living room floor where there was air