Quotes About Isolation

This endless howl no one else even hears.

Pain darkened the world. Pain dislocated. Turned one's own flesh and bones into a stranger's house, from which no escape seemed possible.

Nor would he recognize hope if it came to him. Too much a stranger, too long a ghost.

There had been no time when he'd felt alone. Alone in the frightened sense, that is. Solitude was born of decision, and could be as easily yielded when its purpose was done.

The conquerors always assumed that what they conquered was identity. But the truth was, identity could only be killed from within, and even that gesture was but a chimera. Isolation had many children, and dissolution was but one of them – yet its path was unique, for that path began when identity was left behind.

Man and woman both, there was an age that, when reached, made the world beyond seem to fall away, drained of colour, devoid of significance. To live as a thing no longer desired but tolerated, at best humoured. To reach that age was to know the light in the eyes dimming – the first spark to wink out, and from that moment on, the shadows just crept ever closer.

The day he had been Shorn by his brother, it had seemed to him that his heart had died. Chained to stone, awaiting the cold water and the rot that it promised, the muscle that forged the tides of his blood seemed to beat on in some kind of waning inertia.

And now he was full of words, full of thoughts that had nowhere to go. He imagined that this was what it meant to be lonely. An entire inner world with no way out, no audience or witnesses. If there was beauty in there, none could see it. If there was torment, no one could hear the cries for help.

It's the last gift. I am done with this world, for I am alone in it. Alone.

You have barred the doors caged the windows every portal sealed to the outside world, and now you find what you feared most - there are killers and they are in the House.

Hadrian slapped him on the back. "I'm liking you more and more, Buck. A claustrophobic engineer who's entirely devoid of curiosity trapped aboard a spaceship in the midst of eternal darkness

It's bad when you lose 'em. Friends, I mean. Makes you wonder why you're still here, why the damned sack of blood and muscle and bones keeps on going. So you run. Then what? Nothing. You're not here, but wherever you are, you're still there.

You misunderstand me. You always have. I have grieved, and that's faded away. Gone. Now … well, now there's nothing. A vast, unlit cavern. Ashes.

There is no such place, Destriant. Even in isolation we were assailed – by our own doubts, by all the flavours of grief and despair. You and the Mortal Sword and the Shield Anvil, you have led us back into the living world – we have come from a place of death, but now we shall take our place among the peoples of this world. It is right that we do so.

Survivors do not mourn together. They each mourn alone, even when in the same place. Grief is the most solitary of all feelings. Grief isolates, and every ritual, every gesture, every embrace, is a hopeless effort to break through that isolation. None of it works. The forms crumble and dissolve. To face death is to stand alone.

Your family was much more of a closed system. Your parents maintained few ties, if any, with the larger community. You did not bring friends over, nor did your parents share their home with their friends or neighbors. A sense of isolation pervaded your home. You felt no belonging or connection to anything larger than your own family.

The only problem is that you're still operating on a survival level. It's been hard to relax your need to be in control, to trust that you can protect and take care of yourself, or to let other people close to you, to be vulnerable with others. To do so would seem threatening at a very deep level. So you remain isolated, doing your best to "handle" your life. You stay alive, but you don't thrive.

He thinks of Mrs. Ristovski. He doesn't know what made her the way she is, but something has killed her, he can see now that she is a ghost as well. She has been a ghost for a long time. And to be a ghost while you're still alive is the worst thing he can imagine.

I don't know Dr. Rosenberg. I have never met her, I have never spoken or corresponded with this woman. And to my knowledge, she is ignorant of my work and background except in the very broadest of terms.

I'm alone with the ghost of the swamp, somewhere near the weeping willows.

It's deeply disturbing to think about how many people in the world are dying inside, screaming for someone, anyone, to care, reaching out again and again, sometimes to the hand that slaps them, because, all too often, without that hand they have nothing at all.

Remember you are never really alone. Although it may feel like it for very long stretches of time.

I could tell you of occasionally, every eon, meeting a person, with whom I might stay for a billion years. But what of it? After a billion years there is nothing left to say, and you wander apart, uncaring in the end.

His ambition was to insert his dreams into the world, and if they were the wrong dreams, then he would dream them in solitude.