Quotes About Isolation

I ignored her and continued down the hall. I had only four more hours to perfect the Sausalito. I was worried only about myself. By that stage, I was no longer certain of how the pack felt about anything.

I needed a darkness that would have killed the others. And they needed me to keep it a secret from them.

We've been working out of our tin can for half a decade. Nobody suggests moving into a brick-and-mortar office; nobody wants to peer through glass windows, in a building with a foundation, and admit that the insomnia emergency is now a permanent condition.

In the beginning, fifty hours sounded like a bleak ocean of time, more hours than Sawtooth wanted to spend with himself, let alone with another person. Now he needs the girl to sit and measure time with him, the way the neighbor woman needs her prescription mirror so that she doesn't forget her own face.

Only one or two lemons tumble from the branches each hour, but I've been sitting here so long their falls seem contiguous, close as raindrops.

She came for him like an astronaut, bouncing on the gray carpet. The only English word she knew was his name. Almost weightlessly, she reached for him. For wasn't she equally terrified? There was no buoy other than this boy, who had gripped her with his thin, freckled arms, bellying her out of the peat bog and into time.

Far away, I can hear Mouflon, our last sheep, bleating in the dark. I wonder if Annie is still out to protect her, still scouring the woods in barefoot pursuit of those dogs. I feel sorry for Annie, alone with a rabid pack of her own delusions. I feel sorrier for Mouflon. She's alone with Annie.

As dizzy as the stars, as near and alone.

a definite hostility to being looked at, like a vampire or a vacationing Olsen

with a little penguin huddle of moles just above her hip, looking lost on that Arctic shelf.

It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.

There is a loneliness that must be particular to monsters, I think, the feeling that each is the only child of a species. And now that loneliness was over.

A single note, held in an amber suspension of time, like a charcoal drawing of Icarus falling. It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity. It went on and on, until my own lungs were burning. "What bird are you calling?" I asked finally, when I couldn't stand it any longer. The Bird Man stopped whistling. He grinned, so that I could see all his pebbly teeth. "You.

If Sawtooth could put words to the brambled knot forming in his throat, he would tell her: Girl, don't go. I am marooned in this place without you. What I feel for you is more than love. It's stronger, peninsular. You connect me to the Mainland. You are my leg of land over dark water.

Do you ever feel like you're not even friends with sme of your friends?

Looks like they can't talk. Why not? War does that. You can't talk.

we were sucked into the sea of gyrating bodies like socks into a washing machine's agitator. Seconds later, bruised and sweaty and alone, I was spit out at the other end.

Time is a funny thing. It can take some people a whole lifetime before they realize they've been playing tug-of-war all by themselves.

Surrounding yourself with a lot of desert is a bit like sitting in quicksand: Sooner or later the water will find you and suck you under.

Kirjailijan ammatissa parasta on se, ettei tapaa uusia ihmisiä.

What is meaningful cannot in fact be isolated…. We achieve understanding within a circular movement from particular facts to the whole that includes them and back again from the whole thus reached to the particular significant facts.

Solitude would be ideal if you could pick the people to avoid.

The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

People who do a job that claims to be creative have to be alone to recharge their batteries. You can't live 24 hours a day in the spotlight and remain creative. For people like me, solitude is a victory.