Quotes About Isolation

Leave me out of it I said, I came here to drink

That mania for doing things in private. Which meant, in practice, not doing anything at all. For what was there that one could do in private.

Later, when I travelled to other parts of the world and saw numerous cities and glittering lights and the vitality of those crowds of people, I was struck with disappointment and disgust at how they had all abandoned us and looked the other way.

There is only darkness, starless and complete. The waves glitter like a million dull knives.

The music machine played away - far away - and when I started to understand the lyrics of a Cocteau Twins song, I knew I was wrecked.

it is an ocean of burning oil I am cast adrift upon, no sea's repose; I pass from waking agonies… to the semiconscious trance of torment in which the smaller, earlier, deeper rings of the brain know only that the nerves scream, the body aches, and there is no one to turn crying to for comfort.

The next day was a dream of such perfection that I have never approached the like again. It was, of course, all illusion, but I like to think of it still in isolation from what came after,as a moment of bliss, one of those days when on is no longer oneself, but becomes bigger, and better, able to overcome the normal preoccupations of life and breathe more freely.

The French, I knew, were well ahead in this area, constructing gigantic palaces in the centre of cities which offer every luxury to travellers prepared to pay well to avoid any real contact with the place they were visiting.

The English can lose their friends.

People are islands,' she said. 'They don't really touch. However close they are, they're really quite separate. Even if they've been married for fifty years.

I am allergic to almost every form of international agency, conference or committee.

Painters, writers, musicians are lonely people. So are statesmen and admirals and generals. But then, I added to be fair, so are criminals and lunatics. Let's just say, not to be too flattering, that true individuals are lonely. -- Vivienne Michel

The safe, empty room sneered at him.

Had it taken her this long to discover that she lacked some simple mental trick that everyone else had, a mechanism so ordinary that no one ever mentioned it, an immediate sensual connection to people and events, and to her own needs and desires? All these years she had lived in isolation within herself and, strangely, from herself, never wanting or daring to look back.

The library door was thick and none of the ordinary sounds that might have reminded them, might have held them back, could reach them. They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and no future

Everyone knew the urge to run from the world; few dared do it.

Cecilia knew she could not go on wasting her days in the stews of her untidied room, lying on her bed in a haze of smoke, chin propped on her hand, pins and needles spreading up through her arm as she read her way through Richardson's Clarissa .

An old friend of mine, a journalist, once said that paradise on earth was to work all day alone in anticipation of an evening in interesting company.

She was not in love, or out of love -- she felt nothing. She just wanted to be here alone in the dusk against the bulk of her giant tree.

Don't leave me here with my mind, I thought.

Florence suspected that there was something profoundly wrong with her, that she had always been different, and that at last she was about to be exposed. Her problem, she thought, was greater, deeper, than straightforward physical disgust: her whole being was in revolt against the prospect of entanglement and flesh; her composure and essential happiness were about to be violated.

We're alone then, all of us, even me, each treading a deserted highway, toting in a bundle on a shouldered stick the schemes, the flow charts, for unconscious advancement.

Auch dies ein vertrautes Element - das Grauen, das er nicht sehen kann. Aus sicherer Entfernung beobachtete Katastrophen. Dem vielfachen Tod zuschauen, aber niemanden sterben sehen. Kein Blut, keine Schreie, überhaupt keine menschlichen Gestalten, nur die willfährige, in die Leere entlassene Phantasie.

She turned her face into the pillow and let her tears drain into it, and felt that yet more was lost, when there was no witness to her sorrow.