Quotes About Isolation

I feel as though I were living in a world of strange beings — do you? It's people that make things so — silly. As long as you can keep away from them you're safe and you're happy.

It was her peculiar curse to never really be unknown.

Miss Brill had often noticed there was something funny about nearly all of them. They were odd, silent, nearly all old,and from the way stared they looked as though they'd just come from dark little rooms of even, even cupboards!

Do you ever want to hide, to be completely hidden so that nobody knows where you are. Sometimes one has a dreadful feeling of exposure–it's intolerable. I mustn't say these things.

But Lottie staggered on the lowest verandah step like a bird fallen out of the nest. If she stood still for a moment she fell asleep, if she leaned against anything her eyes closed. She could not walk another step.

I am a recluse at present & do nothing but write & read & read & write

It's a terrible thing to be alone -- yes it is -- it is -- but don't lower your mask until you have another mask prepared beneath -- as terrible as you like -- but a mask.

Privacy - like eating and breathing - is one of life's basic requirements.

She had tricked him. She had made him leave his old self behind and come into her world, and then before he was really at home in it but too late to go back, she had left him stranded there--like an astronaut wandering about on the moon. Alone.

We must remember that loneliness is not the real enemy - alienation from ourselves is. We are never lonely because we have lost contact with others. We are lonely because we have lost contact with ourselves.

In the brain's world, better to have a negative bond than the existential death of no bond at all. And

Social rejection—or the feeling of not belonging, of being less than others, unwanted, and an outcast—activates the same brain regions as physical pain.

We are never lonely because we have lost contact with others. We are lonely because we have lost contact with ourselves.

THERE IS NOTHING lonelier than a cat who has been loved, at least for a while, and then abandoned on the side of the road.

It is a heartache, honestly, to be so shunned. I have never understood why a creator god would go to so much trouble to separate one thing from another—the light from the darkness, waters that were under the firmament from waters that were above, the seas from the dry land, and worst of all, humankind from the fishes of the sea and the birds of the air and every creeping thing.

she was never, I felt, truly emotionally warm towards anyone

Maybe the desert wisdom of the Dakotas can teach us to love anyway, to love what is dying, in the face of death, and not pretend that things are other than they are. The irony and wonder of all of this is that it is the desert's grimness, its stillness and isolation, that brings us back to love.

An old woman I know who has lived all her life on ranches here and rarely complains about deprivations (she raised a family with no electricity or running water, and can remember winnowing wheat by hand with blankets in the 1920s because her family could not afford to hire a threshing machine and crew) once said to me, "The one thing I could never stand was the wind.

By the time a town is 75 or 100 years old, it may be filled with those who have come to idealize their isolation. Often these are people who never left at all, or fled back to the safety of the town after a try at college a few hundred miles from home, or returned after college regarding the values of the broader, more pluralistic world they had encountered as something to protect themselves and their families from...

Because I see these mountains they are brought low, because I drink these waters they are bitter, because I tread these black rocks they are barren, because I have found these islands they are lost; Upon seal and seabird dreaming their innocent world my shadow has fallen.

It's amazing how lonely a place where you were once happy can become.

Loneliness isn't relieved in a crowd.

After all, no one ever sought out her company, or tried to catch her eye. She could stand directly in front of a grand lord or lady, or even a tray-bearing footman, and more likely than not, she wouldn't be noticed.

It is not like cancer, where there is hope at least of cutting out afflicted parts of the body in hopes of eradicating the disease. In mental illnesses, the symptoms plague the whole body and mind equally. I am not necessarily sad when I am depressed. I am not necessarily "down." Sometimes I just have a gnawing, overwhelming sense of grief, with no identifiable cause. I grieve as though my loved ones were dead. I imagine their funerals. I feel completely alone and isolated.