Quotes About Isolation

And then he wakes up. Sweating. Panting. Always the same. The worst part is not the sleeplessness. The worst part is the general darkness the dream leaves over him, a gray film that clouds over the day. Even his happy moments feel encased, like holes jabbed in a hard sheet of ice.

Sarah dragged her wreckage back to the house, up to her bedroom, and down into a deep dark hole.

Unlike any man before him, Dor was being allowed to exist without getting older, to not use a single breath of the numbered breaths of his life. But inside, Dor was broken. Not aging is not the same as living, and without human contact, his soul dried up.

In the astronomy of high school life, Sarah would never have entered his orbit.

How did you do it, Benji? How did you survive all that way alone? I was never alone, the man said

He kept the outside world at bay by keeping the inside world at hand.

I'd had books published in foreign languages. I'd had many addresses over the years. But you can touch everything and be connected to nothing.

He] [w]ent deep into the cave where wounded men go when they walk around not talking to anyone about what's happening to them on the inside. Also known as Terre Haute.

I felt suddenly very young - or perhaps I felt my age: an almost childlike twenty-two, rather than that permanent middle-age that attaches itself to the man who lives alone and supports himself by wearing a suit in a city not of his birth.

Saeed wanted to feel for Nadia what he had always felt for Nadia, and the potential loss of this feeling left him unmoored, adrift in a world where one could go anywhere but still find nothing.

So Erica felt better in a place like this, separated from the rest of us, where people could live in their minds without feeling bad about it.

My mind disappears behind desperate terror.

He knew how little it took to make a man into meat: the wrong blow, the wrong gunshot, the wrong flick of a blade, turn of a car, presence of a microorganism in a handshake, a cough. He was aware that alone a person is almost nothing.

You have only recently been introduced to the types of silences that exist in a home with one occupant, and emotionally you stagger about this new reality like a sailor returned to land after decades at sea.

He was aware that alone a person is almost nothing.

shame, for the displaced, was a common feeling

phones themselves have the innate power of distancing one from one's physical surroundings, which accounted for part of it

The air is so dry, so clear, and there's so few people, almost no lights. And you can lie on your back and look up and see the Milky Way. All the stars like a splash of milk in the sky. And you see them slowly move. Because the Earth is moving. And you feel like you're lying on a giant spinning ball in space.

it's possible to open our eyes, to see, to recognize our solitude—and at the same time to not be entirely alone.

she felt she was a small plant in a small patch of soil held between the rocks of a dry and windy place, and she was not wanted by the world, and here she was at least known, and she was tolerated, and that was a blessing.

but I would suggest that it is instead our solitude that most disturb us, the fact that we are all but alone despite being in the heart of a city.

I'm not strange. I've just been put into circumstances nobody my age should be in.

Work went on monotonously, and our constant hunger was wrenching. Rice powder and bran, which I sometimes roasted in an attempt to give it some flavor, had torn my insides to shreds. One morning I didn't have the strength to get up, and no one came to see what had happened to me. Everyone was so used to having people just disappear.

At the very bottom of things, thought Sandor, there is always this: the addict's belief that they are unlovable.