Quotes About Isolation

There was only me to save me, because no one else cared.

But he wasn't going for the sake of corruption or the kingdom. His tower was broken, he'd drunk Spindle-water, and he'd held my hand. So now he was going to run away as quick as he could, and find himself some new stone walls to hide behind. He'd keep himself locked away for ten years this time, until he withered his own roots, and didn't feel the lack of them anymore.

I do not care if they do not like me, he said. Maybe then they will let me alone, and I will not have to stay in China. The thought visibly struck him, and his head came up with sudden enthusiasm. If I were very offensive, do you suppose they would go away now? he asked. Laurence, what would be particularly insulting Hammond looked like Pandora, the box open and horrors loose upon the world. Laurence was inclined to laugh, but he stifled it out of sympathy.

I think everyone else felt as I did, secretly and irrationally, that if we could only succeed, if we could only destroy the whole place, we could save ourselves from ever having been in here.

They would have devoured my family and picked their teeth with the bones, and never been sorry at all. Better to be turned to ice by the Staryk, who didn't pretend to be a neighbor.

No one had made her talk to me, or be in my company. I couldn't understand why she would have gone to the trouble just to be unpleasant.

Fear and work weren't all bad, as companions went. They were both better than loneliness, and the deeper fears, the worse ones that I knew would come true: that I wouldn't see my mother and father for ten years, that I'd never live again in my own home, never run wild in the woods again, that whatever strange alchemy acted on the Dragon's girls would soon begin to take hold of me, and make me into someone I wouldn't recognize at the end of it.

My head ached worst of all, some part of me tethered back to the valley, stretched out of recognizable shape and trying to make sense of myself when I was so far from anything I knew.

and if they were both outcast for the same reason, they might at least have the pleasure of each other's society for compensation.

They looked at me and saw someone out of a story, who might ride by and be stared at, but didn't belong in their lives at all.

I don't know if anyone who hasn't tried it can properly appreciate just how horrible it is to be constantly surrounded by people who believe in absolutely everything

you sit inside the soundproofed cocoon, hoping you aren't missing the footsteps of something coming at your back, and read textbooks or work on exercise sheets while disembodied voices whisper to you in whatever language you're studying that day. Usually they tell me horrible gory stories or describe my death in loving detail.

she's been living alone with a man for ten years, so of course she's ruined, even though the girls all say he never puts a hand on them.

There was no eager ache of hunger in my belly from the long day of cooking and cleaning without a pause; there was no joyful noise of too many people crammed in around the table, laughing and reaching for the platters. Looking down at my tiny feast only made me feel more desperately lonely.

I remembered Sarkan in his tower, plucking girls out of the valley, and his coldness when I'd first come, as though he couldn't remember how to think and feel like an ordinary person.

Me vino muy bien verlos permanecer allí sentados y no acudir en mi ayuda, porque cuando terminé de gritar por segunda vez y el desollador consiguió entrar, comprendí que estaba totalmente sola y que tendría que apañármelas como pudiera, pues no le importaba a nadie más.

The heavy velvet hangings' deep dark closed us in all around, as if we lay inside his walled heart.

Maybe the hardest thing about moving over seas was being in a place where no one but your own family had any memory of you. It was like putting yourself back together in little pieces.

I wondered stony afternoons owning all their vastness.

rounded shoulders, the shoulders of women no one has touched for a long time. Men

everyone everywhere suddenly was to 'distance learn,' that awkward, heartless neologism

Since middle-class women have been sequestered from the world, isolated from one another, and their heritage submerged with each generation, they are more dependent than men are in the cultural models to offer, and more likely to be imprinted by them. [...] Given few role models in the world, women seek them on the screen and the glossy page.

And I wondered why there were no studies of communities that did not "lock down" — communities in which people chose their own levels of risk while providing support to those who wished to "isolate" or who wanted to protect their own, more vulnerable immune systems while others made different choices. I wondered why no one wanted to know what was becoming of them.

At the same time, I heard from a cousin that my elderly relative was in a nursing home, but, 'because of COVID,' her family was not allowed to see her ... A sociable woman with many grandchildren who loved her, this isolation seemed like it would be a form of torture for her.