Quotes About Isolation

A heart like mine, which never got any kind of affection growing up, is terrible above all things.

Everybody else going through the terror and joy of their first crushes, their first dates, their first kisses while Oscar sat in the back of the class, behind his DM's screen, and watched his adolescence stream by. Sucks to be left out of adolescence, sort of like getting locked in the closet on Venus when the sun appears for the first time in a hundred years.

He cried often for his love of some girl or another. Cried in the bathroom, where nobody could hear him.

She wanted to talk about unimportant matters, to speak to someone who wasn't her child or her spouse.

Freezing out," she said. She had her gloves in one hand like a crumpled bouquet.

Let's just say, by the end of her second quarter Beli could walk down the hall without fear that anyone would crack on her. The downside of this of course was that she was completely alone.

Waited for my brother and didn't talk to anybody and nobody talked to her, because she'd always been one of those quiet, semi-retarded girls who you couldn't talk to without being dragged into a whirlpool of dumb stories.

What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.

miles away from everthing and everyone I've ever known or loved. I feel as if I've entered a new era of my life. What strange places our lives carry us to...

That's the worst part, really, when you think about it. Try as you might, nobody will ever truly know who you are. You're just somebody alone in a house with your thoughts and nothing else.

Grief was a place, Sara understood, where a person went alone. It was like a room without doors, and what happened in that room, all the anger and the pain you felt, was meant to stay there, nobody's business but yours.

What is left when there is no love? A rope and rock.

The end of the world, he'd thought. That's where he was. The end of the world was Houston, Texas.

Grief was a place, Sara understood, where a person went alone.

When evening fell he dragged a chair out to the porch, where he sat through the night, a shotgun on his lap, staring into the dark.

Now it is dark. Stars soar above the vacant city, heaven's diadem. A century since the last person walked here, and still one cannot travel its streets, as I do, without seeing one's face reflected a thousand-fold.

Try as you might, nobody will ever truly know who you are. You're just somebody alone in a house with your thoughts and nothing else.

and stepped into the hall, sealing the door and the voices of the children behind her. A blast of quiet that felt like noise;

man sat in a concrete box long enough, thinking about his own death, and he boiled down to milky dust like water in a teapot forgotten on a stove;

First one and then another and then more and more, their frozen figures resolving out of the gloom. Most were seated around a series of tall tables, their postures grimly comical, as if they'd been overcome in the midst of some desperate, private act.

Inside the walls

Sara waited a respectful time, knowing there was nothing she could do to ease the woman's pain. Grief was a place, Sara understood, where a person went alone. It was like a room without doors, and what happened in that room, all the anger and the pain you felt, was meant to stay there, nobody's business but yours.

She remembered no one at all. She remembered one day thinking: I am alone. There is no I but I. She lived in the dark. She taught herself to walk in the light, though it was not easy.

If asked to name the worst moment of his life, Michael Fisher wouldn't have hesitated to give his answer: it was when the lights went out.