Quotes About Isolation

My threshold for human contact had worn painfully thin. I felt like a car that had been running its lights too long on battery alone. I felt fresh out of charge, and as though I needed to plug in for days before I could have one more conversation with one more human being.

I've practiced "alone" a lot, and I'm good at it.

Her brain was not speaking to her. Or maybe it was the other way around. But she could feel the disconnect—a no-man's-land of blankness, like a moat hastily dug to foil an advancing enemy. And

And that, I realized, is the worst price we pay for living in a dearth of true communication. We go through our whole lives thinking it's only us.

If I was going to get hurt, or have a hard time, I wanted to do it all alone, with nobody looking.

If I sit inside, then nobody will know I'm in trouble. And so then nobody will help me.

I guess I feel like I've been putting up this big front to the world like I don't need anybody or anything. Like I'm happier by myself. I don't like being alone any better than anybody else does. I just got confused because it was better than being with most of the people I've known.

Sometimes you have to close yourself up. Shut the portals into the places inside you that still know how to feel. Because there's just nothing you can do.

Right," Raymond said, realizing he was in prison. That his inability to express what he was feeling had formed such a tight and inescapable box around his being that he could barely breathe.

There's no reception up there," Remy's father said at long last. "Because there are no cell towers." Remy wondered sometimes if the long pauses before answers were his father's attempt to get Remy to figure things out on his own. But he was never right at the edge of understanding,

But when I was inside, I was always OK. So I just started staying inside. Like I told you before, it gets to be an addiction.

I felt quite uncentered enough on my own, with no outside assistance.

See now why I hate to go outside so much?" "Yeah. I guess I do. But you gotta do it anyway, right? I mean, it's life. You gotta do life. Right?" "Not really," Billy said. "You don't have to. Lots of people don't do life any more. They just stop at some point. And once you stop, it's really hard to get started again. But then, once you get started again, it's kind of hard to stop.

There was something peaceful about an untouched fall of snow. Like being in another world, where nothing can go wrong. Because nothing can find you.

It struck me that she had been a pretty woman, once upon a time. Before she'd decided she didn't want to be anymore. Before she'd decided she didn't want to be anything to anybody.

Left with no choice, Janice curled up on the bed where she drowned in her sadness. ~ Janice woke in the darkness to a woman's screams. Moonlight from

She is dead. Almost certainly dead. Nearly conclusively dead. She is, at the very least, not answering her telephone.

Be my friend and love me, for the world is terrible lonely and I am sad.

No matter how mad, bad, and dangerous to know a civilization gets, unto every generation are born the lonely and the uncool, destined to forever stare into the candy-store window of their culture, and loneliness is the mother of ascension. Only the uncool have the requisite alone time to advance their species.

Finally, she said: "I'm lonely" — it's weird but you tell the wolves things, sometimes. You can't help it, all these old wounds come open and suddenly you're confessing to a wolf who never says anything back. She said: "I'm lonely," and they ate her in the street.

When the world changes, it stashes us away where we can't make it run the other way again.

Yes, Marya thought, the smell of woodsmoke and old snow pushing back her long black hair. Magic does that. It wastes you away. Once it grips you by the ear, the real world gets quieter and quieter, until you can hardly hear it at all.

Are you the only human in the world then? And all of the rest of us monsters?

That is what happens when a person lives alone for so long - no one else can change their ways.