Quotes About Isolation

Bellamy thought, he is beginning to avoid me, my presence embarrasses him, my problems irritate him. I am becoming an unperson.

What I really wanted just then was to put Georgie in cold storage. It is unfortunate that other human beings cannot be conveniently immobilized.

Bellamy was sorry to hurt Clement's feelings, but he so intensely wanted to be alone where he could confront the awful cacophony of his own feelings.

Willy seemed like an inhabitant of some other dimension who could only tenuously communicate with the ordinary world. This would have troubled her less if she had not imagined his other dimension as a place of horror.

So it is that we can be terrors to each other, and people in lonely rooms suffer humiliation and even damage because of others in whose consciousness perhaps they scarcely figure at all.

She had dreamed of a separated man, a sad austere secluded man, a man with a great sorrow, an ascetic. She was a moth that wanted to be burnt by a cold cold flame.

What do you want for Christmas?' 'A loaded revolver.

Oh if only I could take my mother away and never know of these things again. But it was impossible, the machine would go on and on and nothing would stop it. And no one from now on for ever would know how much he suffered and what it was really like to be him. How can I bear it, he thought, how can I go on bearing it without becoming something savage and awful?

He . . . felt as if, wanting to be needed by everyone, he were merely becoming some sort of semi-invisible messenger.

By the time she wrote The Sovereignty of Good in 1970 her criticism had become stringent: 'we are not isolated free choosers, monarchs of all we survey, but benighted creatures sunk in a reality whose nature we are constantly and overwhelmingly tempted to deform by fantasy'.

She lived in private with her own horror.

I am sunk in the wreck of myself . . . I live in myself like a mouse inside a ruin.

I can't see why anyone would want to go on living when they've got like that. Whatever can he look forward to?' 'The next drink.' 'Well, you would! I think old age is awful. I hope I'll never be old.

No one, thank God, has attempted to befriend me.

I am going mad, she thought, I am in some sort of silent raging grief of which I shall die, everything has gone.

The presence of so many things which ought to have delighted her and been her friends brought home to Moy how little delight she could now feel and how alienated she now was from all the beings to which she had once felt so close.

She dreamt she saw the Polish Rider passing slowly by and he was weeping and she called out to him, but he turned his head away. She dreamt that she was drowning in the pool of tears.

I felt such a stranger there, like a poor lodger. One must be with one's own people.

The easiest thing to think was that he was going to die. This was not exactly an intent to commit suicide, though he did consider suicide, it was rather a sense of the impossibility of surviving much longer, whatever he did, whatever he chose. He felt rent apart by an unremitting mental, felt as physical, strain. When he was alone he groaned aloud.

I run, I run, I am gathered to your heart. But no, she thought, it's not like that. I am alone. I cannot reach anybody.

I told you I was going to retire from the world. That's still on. You remember that.

He thought, this is hell, not being able to live with oneself.

Little pictures out of hell.

Bereavement is my occupation and it absorbs me completely. You want me to touch you, to look at you with sympathy. I cannot.