Quotes About Isolation

Not saying hello is something I don't understand. The problem with ignoring others while traveling in remote wilderness areas, besides being characterized as brash and unmannerly, is that you never know who you might need to call upon for help.

As she wove in and out of all the people - rushing, talking, eating, laughing; some in clumps, some alone - she realized that no one, no one at all in the airport, or on the entire planet for that matter, knew her thoughts, knew what she was carrying inside her head and heart. And at that very minute, what was inside her head and heart made her feel as though there was no one else in the whole world she would rather be.

Feelings of alienation, marginalization, and isolation cause some of us to adopt a "me against the

before I knew you I kept a sparrow in a shoebox, I fed it ham and held it to my head to hear it sing, I called it a radio, it kept the blues away, I called it love and wrote down all the words, — Kevin Prufer, from "Ars Poetica," Kenyon Review (vol. 36, no. 1, Winter 2014)

Success is like death. The more successful you become, the higher the houses in the hills get and the higer the fences get.

For nearly twenty years, he'd produced these iconic photographs of the world's war zones and he suspected he was alone in seeing what he'd done.  Far from exposing the truth, he'd reduced human tragedy to the level of pornography, or worse, for pornographers were at least honest.

It already felt a lifetime ago, prison years being like dog years.

the way he'd slowly starved his relationship of oxygen.

I knew that if I asked, a hairbrush would appear, a toothbrush and four different kinds of toothpaste, but I tried to pretend I was self-sufficient. A lot of times when I think I'm being self-sufficient, I'm really just learning to live without the things that I need.

And even then, sixteen years old, I knew that I would hate every person in my life who loved me, who took care of me, who helped me find a way to whatever life I would have, because I could never tell them who I was, what I'd done.

After thirty minutes, he began to wonder if Annie had simply forgotten about him, returned to the house after the movie, and got drunk on vodka tonics. "Come get me," Buster whispered, hoping to create a psychic link to his sister.

But I was sixteen. I lived inside of myself way more than I lived inside of this town.

Death most resembles a prophet who is without honor in his own land or a poet who is a stranger among his people.

Once through this ruined city did I pass I espied a lonely bird on a bough and asked 'What knowest thou of this wilderness?' It replied : 'I can sum it up in two words: 'Alas! Alas

In solitude is bliss.

Passengers were crowded together, forced to live and sleep and eat in intolerably cramped conditions. There was almost no privacy, no water for washing, no break in the tedium as the ship rolled and pitched, hour after hour, day after day, even in fine weather.

I'm alone all day. In the afternoon, thunder... the sky stitches together the loose scraps of dark.

Away from the bright motion of the party, she carried her sadness like a dark stone clenched in her palm.

But I would make it through "Death Valley." Lee, Thurston, and I, and then just the two of us, stood there. My about-to-be-ex husband and I faced that mass of bobbing wet Brazilians, our voices together spell-checking the old words, and for me it was a staccato soundtrack of surreal raw energy and anger and pain: Hit it. Hit it. Hit it. I don't think I had ever felt so alone in my whole life.

I was cold, hungry, and in a hole in the ground. But at least I had my elven porn, damnit!

He left the room, and closeted himself in the dark, buzzing space where he raised his wasps and plotted the courses of heavenly bodies.

We all have secret lives. The life of excretion; the world of inappropriate sexual fantasies; our real hopes, our terror of death; our experience of shame; the world of pain; and our dreams. No one else knows these lives. Consciousness is solitary. Each person lives in that bubble universe that rests under the skull, alone.

Here they were, on the only planetary surface on which you could walk freely, naked to the wind and the sun, and when they had a choice, they sat in boxes and stared at littler boxes, just as if they had no choice-as if they were in a space station-

Summer thought about spending the day inside that house with the old woman watching. Silently watching.