Quotes About Isolation

The most extreme agony is to feel that one has been utterly forsaken.

If only we could recall how we felt when we were small, or could imagine how utterly defeated a young child feels when his play companions or older siblings temporarily reject him or can obviously do things better than he can, or when adults—worst of all, his parents—seem to make fun of him or belittle him, then we would know why the child often feels like an outcast:

Even in the depths of sleep, in which he had to satisfy his need for protection and love by curling himself up into a trembling ball, he could not rid himself of the feeling of loneliness and homelessness.

They were villages forgotten in the depth of time, peopled by creatures chained forever to their tiny destinies.

Loneliness is a crowded room, Full of open hearts turned to stone, All together all alone

Loneliness is a crowded room.

Writing is one of the loneliest of the arts; unlike the actor we have no immediate audience and must wait many long months, even years on occasion, for the splatter of applause to reach our ears, if indeed we are not damned by total neglect.

Poverty is about relationships that don't work, that isolate, that abandon or devalue. Transformation must be about restoring relationships, just and right relationships with God, with self, with community, with the "other," and with the environment.

In the presence of God himself man stands always like a solitary tree in the wilderness.

The path of the king is a lonely one, and few are fit to walk it.

I love people. I love my family, my children ... but inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up.

You're physically incapable of having friends. All you can ever have are enemies and stooges.

senses could be dulled, and you might withdraw into yourself, feeling numb and empty.

Sir, do you know they've cut us off? We're entirely surrounded." "Those poor bastards," Puller said. "They've got us right where we want 'em. We can shoot in every direction now.

Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief.

Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it?

Ahab was inaccessible. Though nominally included in the census of Christendom, he was still an alien to it. He lived in the world, as the last of the Grisly Bears lived in settled Missouri. And as when Spring and Summer had departed, that wild Logan of the woods, burying himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out the winter there, sucking his own paws; so, in his inclement, howling old age, Ahab's soul, shut up in the caved trunk of his body, there fed upon the sullen paws of its gloom!

Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it.

Herman Melville

one, with fixed blinds inserted, in place of upper panels. The isolated subterraneousness of the cabin made a certain humming silence to reign there, though it was hooped round by all the roar of the elements. The loaded muskets in the rack were shiningly revealed

So, cutting the lashing of the waterproof match keg, after many failures Starbuck contrived to ignite the lamp in the lantern; then stretching it on a waif pole, handed it to Queequeg as the standard-bearer of this forlorn hope. There, then, he sat, holding up that imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness. There, then, he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair.

La felicidad busca la luz, por eso juzgamos que el mundo es alegre; pero el dolor se esconde en la soledad, por eso juzgamos que el dolor no existe.

Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe.

Herman Melville