Quotes About Isolation

Perhaps the only reason they survived, Stencil reasoned, was that they were not alone. God knew how many more there were with a hothouse sense of time, no knowledge of life, and at the mercy of Fortune.

Pointsman is finding it much easier to of late to slip into a l'etat c'est moi frame of mind--who else is doing anything?

Now single up all lines!

Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment she'd wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry.

There was nobody who could help her. Nobody in the world. They were all on something, mad, possible enemies, dead.

One by one they are being picked off around him: in his small circle of colleagues the ratio slowly grows top-heavy, more ghosts, more each winter, and fewer living... and with each one, he thinks he feels patterns on his cortex going dark, settling to sleep forever, parts of whoever he's been losing all definition, reverting to dumb chemistry...

Can I say something out loud? Is anybody listening? Everybody. Nobody. Does it matter?

That night she sat for hours, too numb to even drink, teaching herself to breathe in a vaccum. For this, oh God, was the void.

writers, people you didn't even have to say hello to—and still be horribly murdered for your trouble. Once-overs you'd found ways to ignore now had you looking for the particular highlight off some creep's eyes that would send you behind double and triple locks to a room lit only by the TV screen, and whatever was in the fridge to last you till you felt together enough to step outside again.

You're so sick, Oedipa, she told herself, or the room, which knew.

Thomas Pynchon

Two of them there drinking red liquor like it was sadness medicine.

Children who drank the milk from the dairy cows who grazed nearby were found leaning against telegraph poles listening to the traffic speeding by through the wires above their heads, or going off to work in stockbrokers' offices where, unsymmetrically intimate with the daily flow of prices, they were able to amass fortunes before anyone noticed.

Why? Why use the room as introduction to an apologia? Because the room, though windowless and cold at night, is a hothouse. Because the room is the past, though it has no history of its own. Because, as the physical being-there of a bed or horizontal plane determines what we call love; as a high place must exist before God's word can come to a flock and any sort of religion begin; so must there be a room, sealed against the present, before we can make any attempt to deal with the past.

She is prey to interior winds he never felt.

He sees her standing at the end of a passage in her life, without any next step to take—all her bets are in, she has only the tedium now of being knocked from one room to the next, a sequence of numbered rooms whose numbers do not matter, till inertia brings her to the last. That's all.

a child roaming the night who missed the death before birth as certain outcasts do the dear lulling blankness of the community...

Too much of what is called 'education' is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.

In contemporary America, many colleges and universities have whole departments devoted to promoting a sense of racial and ethnic grievances against others, while celebrating the isolation of group identities, epitomized by ethnically separate residences on campus and sometimes even ethnically separate graduation ceremonies.

languages as Asians, who outnumber them nearly four to one.121 Linguistic diversity is not only a sign of cultural isolation and fragmentation, it contributes to the barriers

Too much of what is called education is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.

Hoje, apesar da liberdade de expressão e da mídia em massa, a visão social predominante está perigosamente próxima de se isolar de qualquer opinião discordante da realidade.

How beautiful she loked, but there was nobody to see, nobody.

We are solitary creatures au fond. It hapens so rarely that one feels another understands. But when one does feel it, it's not only a joy, it's a help and comfort in dark moments.