Quotes About Isolation

I have tried to write poetry for people for whom there is no poetry.

Until people see poetry as springing from all of life, they will isolate it in a creativity corner and treat it like a mascot.

Hon är själv fånge i sitt eget fängelse.

It struck her as odd and faintly sinister, this lonely city creeping north in silence.

The trouble with space is, there's so much of it. An ocean of blackness without any shore. A neverending nothing. And here, all alone in the million billion miles of midnight, is one solitary moving speck. A fragile parcel filled with sleeping people and their dreams.

A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple.

Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing.

I don't like people--much. This kind, I mean. And they don't like me at all, as a rule. Maybe the latter explains the former.

What troubles me is the Internet and the electronic technology revolution. Shyness is fueled in part by so many people spending huge amounts of time alone, isolated on e-mail, in chat rooms, which reduces their face-to-face contact with other people.

I think I love him for this loneliness, that it's what pushed me toward him. I love his aloofness, his disengagement with the outside world. Such singularity moves me.

Il me rend à la solitude. La plus profonde, celle qu'on ressent au cœur d'une foule.

We are alone in the world. I've never enjoyed the rain so much.

I say to myself: Basically, what's new? Don't we already spend most of our time avoiding each other? Missing each other? I smile at the double meaning—an unsightly, tragic smile, of course.

Living by her side was like living in a fairy tale because she had these moments of pure poetry—she invented whole worlds. He tells me that eventually she was placed in a specialized institution, that in the end his father resigned himself to it: the death of his soul. She is still there.

Je me souviens d'instants d'une grâce indépassable dans une solitude insondable.

A loucura é um país onde não entra quem quer. Tudo se conquista. Em todo o caso, ele, ele entrara como um senhor, soltando as amarras e as âncoras com o brio de um capitão que afunda o navio a pique, sozinho na proa.

El anciano se llama Linh. Es el único que lo sabe, porque el resto de las personas que lo sabían están muertas.

An old man is standing on the after-deck of a ship. In his arms he clasps a flimsy suitcase and a newborn baby, even lighter than the suitcase. The old man's name is Monsieur Linh. He is the only person who knows this is his name because all those who once knew it are dead.

The strange land exhausts him. Death exhausts him. It has fed on him in the way young eager goats suckle their mother, forcing her to lie on her side because she cannot continue. Death has taken everything from him. He has nothing left. He is thousands of kilometres from a village that no longer exists, thousands of kilometres from the empty tombs of the corpses who died only a few feet away from them. He is thousands of days away from a life that was once beautiful and delightful.

Cuando le pregunté si no le pesaba la soledad, se quedó pensando un buen rato y luego, con voz grave y serena dijo: «Estar solo es el sino del hombre, de un modo u otro». Me pareció una frase muy hermosa y muy falsa a la vez. Tú no estás a mi lado, pero es como si te sintiera junto a mí a cada segundo, y te hablo a menudo, en voz alta.

Pauvre petit Houellebecq, tout seul, avec sa valise trop lourde.)

The union of altitude and solitude fills me with an arrogant sense of ownership.

But reading the note made me lonely in that kind of way one is lonely in a city of eight million people, when an empty connection is worse than being alone.

Some people are just not meant to be in this world. It's just too much for them.