Quotes About Isolation

Everyone's alone—or so it seems to me. They make noises, and think they are talking to each other; They make faces, and think they understand each other, And I'm sure they don't. Is that delusion? Can we only love Something created in our own imaginations?

and now you live dispersed on ribbon roads, And no man knows or cares who is his neighbor Unless his neighbor makes too much disturbance, But all dash to and fro in motor cars, Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere.

The remarkable thing about television is that it permits several million people to laugh at the same joke and still feel lonely.

Can we only love Something created in our own imaginations? Are we all in fact unloving and unlovable? Then one is alone, and if one is alone Then lover and beloved are equally unreal And the dreamer is no more real than his dreams.

Here is no water but only rock Rock and no water and the sandy road

I can show you fear in a handful of dust

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me. I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black. We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence. Oed' und leer das Meer.

One thing you cannot know: The sudden extinction of every alternative, The unexpected crash of the iron cataract. You do not know what hope is, until you have lost it. You only know what it is not to hope: You do not know what it is to have hope taken from you Or to fling it away, to join the legion of the hopeless Unrecognized by other men, though sometimes by each other.

I an old man, A dull head among windy spaces.

Let us go then you and I When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table.

Hell is oneself, Hell is alone, the other figures in it merely projections

Living among strangers, with no one to talk to.

You can't understand me. It's not being alone That is the horror, to be alone with the horror. What matters is the filthiness. I can clean my skin, Purify my life, void my mind, But always the filthiness, that lies a little deeper . . .

What's the use of asking for an evening paper? You know as well as I do, at this distance from London Nobody's likely to have this evening's paper.

You do not know what hope is, until you have lost it. You only know what it is not to hope: You do not know what it is to have hope taken from you, Or to fling it away, to join the legion of the hopeless Unrecognised by other men, though sometimes by each other.

At the beginning, eight years ago, I felt, at first, that sense of separation, Of isolation unredeemable, irrevocable— It's eternal, or gives a knowledge of eternity, Because it feels eternal while it lasts. That is one hell.

I not a person, in a world not of persons But only of contaminating presences.

Urbanity provides us with so many ways to avoid people. Isn't that what distinguishes it from traditional rural life, where the onus, perhaps because it was difficult & rare, was more on greeting people?

You read articles about how the Internet has created a lonelier world, with people isolating themselves behind their screens, connecting to a flat keyboard rather than to other people in a park or a party. Yes and no. Yes and no. It depends on who you are, and where. Some of us never had parks or parties to connect in. Some of us never will.

The heart of [J.G.] Ballard's vision [is] the object at odds with its function and abandoned by its time.

There were more problems with solitude than just being horny and bored. If you didn't have anyone to talk to for days on end, you didn't have anyone to let you know whether you were going nuts or not.

John Wulgaru, she thought when she got back. Her hands were shaking. Is that his name, then? Am I the only person who knows that? Or the only person still alive?

Now, ten or more years later, far away from her home or even any thought of having a home, she again touched the feeling from that long ago day, being alone but not lonely, of being solitary yet sufficient.