Quotes About Isolation

Imagine having so much energy to spare after finding food and shelter and clothing and some tiny goddamn scrap of company that you figured you'd make a beautiful silver cup, not because some kid did the best job, but just because she tried the hardest. I tried the hardest all the time , and everyone's just permanently fucking mad at me. Imagine having that much left over that you give one single ghostly shit about the eight-best daffodil.

Omaha is no place for anybody.

They snickered behind her back in tones that sent up prickly hedges all around their tight huddles of lace dresses and ribboned curls.

Do you know what a thirteen-year-old girl can do when she is alone and frightened and believes she is right?

Memory is like that. It alters itself so that girls are always trapped under the earth, waiting in the dark.

It's a dreadful world with only your own heart to drive you.

Once there was a girl who ate an apple not meant for her...Up until the apples, she had been living in a wonderful house in the wilderness, happy in her fate and her ways. She had seven aunts and seven uncles and a postdoctorate in anthropology.

There is no end and no beginning. There is only we two, alone in the dark, for always.

She started disappearing as soon as she was born. Just to get away from you.

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.

Mira, he supposed, had always lived in her own head and allowed others to visit once in a while. With advance notice. And extensive decontamination protocols.

He didn't even know how to talk about it. He had practiced not talking about the things he knew until no man could be called his equal.

Talking to Zelda felt like talking to a radio. It talked back, but you couldn't call it a conversation.

No one cared who they'd been before, or even who they were now. Sometimes it felt like they lived at the bottom of the world. People at the bottom of the world mind their business, mostly.

And feeling someone else's feelings...' Never replied softly. 'It's still lonely, but it's so much bigger than lonely. It's not hitting five people or one with the trolley but flying it off the tracks into the stars and sparing them all.

I think the greatest amount of pressure is the pressure I place on myself. So in a way I chose to be alone.

It's like being ghosted, I suppose, where, deprived of all social cues, I have no relational gauge for my own behavior. I ransack my mind for what I could have done, could have said. I stop trusting what I see, what I hear.

I liked to be off by myself, away from the eyes of adults who always had some task or errand to demand of an unoccupied child.

Even the women began to see us as something so foreign to their community that nothing we said could possibly be of any relevance to them. We

that man always had been off in his own boat on some branch of the river no one else ever rowed on.

To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life.

I have asked to be Where no storms come

Waarschijnlijk is het beter, dat ik van nu af aan in afzondering leef, dat is een draaglijker soort eenzaamheid dan die, ondergaan in het gezelschap van een ander.

Wat ik opschrijf is (...) het levensverhaal van een dolende pelgrim in de woestijn van glas en beton die maatschappij heet.