Quotes About Isolation

Jack was finally going mad, and it was a small comfort to know that he'd picked the right city for it.

for now, none of the lights are on and that's all there is, black steel and slate sky.

Neal Stephenson

This might sound like a foolish thing to have done, but a woman who has no family and few friends is forever skirting the edges of a profound despair, which derives from the fear that she could vanish from the world and leave no trace she had ever existed; that the things she has done shall be of no account and the perceptions she has formed [as of Dr. von Pfung for example] shall be swallowed up like a cry in a dark woods.

Men were drawn to civilization; only the most severe ascetic among them relished isolation. Penitent hermits craved seclusion. Being away from the squalor of humanity was an integral part of their spiritual monasticism. They could talk more readily to God in the silence of their mountaintop cave or their desert isolation. It was easier to believe that the voice you heard responding to your queries issued from a divine trumpet if there were no other souls nearby. But he was a soldier.

nothing was worse than getting stuck in a situation like that with nothing to read.

Paris to Jack and most others, then, was a network of deep trenches with vertical walls, and a few drafty battlements atop those walls—otherwise, the world's largest collection of closed and locked doors.

Margaret really messes up his head. When it gets really intolerable, he goes to the latrine (so that the staff will not break in on him at an inopportune moment) and executes a Manual Override. But one thing he learned in Hawaii was that a Manual Override is unfortunately not the same as the real thing. The effect wears off too soon.

Hiro is just a starving CIC stringer who lives in a U-Stor-It by the airport. But in the entire world there are only a couple of thousand people who can step over the line into The Black Sun.

NONE OF YOU WILL EVER STAND ON TERRA FIRMA, TOUCH YOUR loved ones, or breathe the atmosphere of your mother planet again," the president said. "That is a terrible fate. And yet it is a better fate than seven billion people trapped on the Earth's surface can hope for. The last ship home has sailed. From now on, launch vehicles will rise up into orbit, but they will not go back for ten thousand years." The

They have parallel-parked their bimbo boxes in identical computer-designed Burbclave street patterns and secreted themselves in symmetrical sheetrock shitholes with vinyl floors and ill-fitting woodwork and no sidewalks, vast house farms out in the loglo wilderness, a culture medium for a medium culture. The

Hackworth was alone and separate from all humanity, a feeling he had grown up with, like a childhood friend living next door.

Since the departure of King Coyote, Princess Nell had supposed herself entirely alone in the world. But now she saw cities of light beneath the waves and knew that she was alone only by her own choice.

He is no longer connected to the network by a fiber-optic cable, and so all his communication with the outside world has to take place via radio waves

His baseline attitude toward other humans was that they could all just go fuck themselves and that he was not going to expend any effort whatsoever getting them to change the way they thought.

Depression starts slow.

I feel dead, wasted, awful, broken and useless. It's not the kind of feeling you forget.

its hard to talk when you want to kill yourself

If you can't get out of bed for long enough, people come and take your bed away

I feel it in my pocket. I don't want to lose it. It's one of the only things that's making me me right now. Without my cell phone, who will I be? I won't have any friends because I don't have their numbers memorized. I'll barely have a family since I don't know their cell phone numbers, just their home line. I'll be like an animal.

What about: I got Jack and shit and Jack left town.

If you can't get out of bed for long enough, people come and take your bed away.

Hold on a second. I can talk,' I say. 'Guys.' I look at all three of them in turn. 'One thing that they do in here is give you a lot of time to think. I can't explain it; once you come in, time just slows down-' 'Well, you don't have any interruptions, that's probably it-' 'Also I think the clocks are a little off-' I wave my hand. 'Point is, you have time to think about how you got here...

I'll get up and bike to the Brooklyn Bridge and throw myself off it.