Quotes About Isolation

He read books. He liked none of them. He searched their pages for Amy. She was not there. He went to parties. They bored him. He walked the streets, gazing into strangers' faces. Amy was not there. The world, in all its infinite wonder, bored him. He searched every room of his life for Amy. But Amy was not anywhere to be found.

To be fair to them, they were only after something that walled them off from the past and from people in general, not something that offered any connection that might prove painful or human. Thet wanted stories, I came to realise, in which they were already imprisoned, not stories in which they appeared along with the storyteller, accomplices in escaping.

threatening apes. What was this room? How could he get out? The green blindfold was now wrapping around his throat, choking him. His heart was pounding. He

Loneliness, I've read, is like being in a long line, waiting to reach the front where it's promised something good will happen. Only the line never moves, and other people are always coming in ahead of you, and the front, the place where you want to be, is always farther and farther away until you no longer believe it has anything to offer you.

It was if we all sensed we'd be gone someday soon in a sudden instant--often it happened in the middle of the night--and didn't want to get involved. Or else it was that none of us wanted to know anybody later on who was the way we were now.

How amazingly far normalcy extends; how you can keep it in sight as if you were on a raft sliding out to sea, the stitch of land growing smaller and smaller. Or in a balloon swept up on a column of prairie air, the ground widening and flattening, growing less and less distinct below you. You notice it, or you don't notice it. But you're already too far away and all is lost.

since he seemed to be the one left out somehow, the one who would be lonely soon, the one who had done something he would someday wish he hadn't and would have no one to tell him that it was all right, that they forgave him, that these things happen in the world.

What a person becomes in such a situation is paralyzed—caught in one long, sustained, intolerable present. Who

It's great to be anywhere as a writer. It saves you from implication in the ugliness of the place and justifies your being there. You can spend all day jerking off as long as you describe it well.

Straight, as if sawn down from turf to beach, the cliff shuts off the human world, for the sea knows no time and no era; you cannot tell what century it is from the face of the sea. (The Breeze on Beachy Head)

Wardani had donned the emotional equivalent of a vacuum suit, the only response left in the human armory when the moral parameters of the outside environment have grown so outrageously variable that an exposed mind can no longer survive unshielded.

So where the fuck are you, Isaac? I can hear your breathing, I just need to see you so I can stop it.

The odds are pretty good in favour of no one ever finding you. Space, as textbooks are given to saying, is big.

These days, one of them told me one freezing slow-as-Sunday night, we're all just feeding off the stored fat of a dream gone bad.

He is as corrupt as the rest of them. As all the materialists.' 'Yeah, but give him his due. If his daughter ever gets raped, he's unlikely to beat her to death for dishonouring him.' She flinched. 'You are talking about an isolated incident, this is not—' 'Four.' I held out my fingers, rigid in front of her face. 'I'm talking about four isolated incidents. And that's just this year.

If not, they would drift forever, because the universe is mostly night and darkened ocean.

the pain that underlies all pain: the pain that we are all, as Rilke phrases it, "unutterably alone.

Doing it all the time, whether or not we are in the mood, gives us ownership of our writing ability. It takes it out of the realm of conjuring where we stand on the rock of isolation, begging the winds for inspiration, and it makes it something as do-able as picking up a hammer and pounding a nail. Writing may be an art, but it is certainly a craft. It is a simple and workable thing that can be as steady and reliable as a chore—does that ruin the romance?

Do you think too long a period of nightlessness," mused Sandra, "could drive you insane, the way they say sleeplessness can?

the monotony of quiet creativity, imagination fueled by routine and isolation

All that spring and summer, there were times when she felt as if she had no joints or muscles, no physical means with which to move about the world.

341 days seems like an eternity when you can't see people you love.

I have at times tried to imagine the despair which leads to suicide, attempted to conjure up the slew and slop of darkness in which only death appears as a pinprick of light: in other words, the exact opposite of the normal condition of life.

Me and my books, in the same apartment: like a gherkin in its vinegar.