Quotes About Isolation

I do not know what I would do if you left me. For the first time I felt the suggestion of a threat in his voice—or I put it there. I have been alone so long—I do not think I would be able to live if I had to be alone again.

He had been bruised, so to speak, so badly that the eyes of strangers lacerated him like salt.

The writer trapped among a speechless people is in danger of becoming speechless himself. For then he has no mirror, no corroborations of his essential reality; and this means that he has no grasp of the reality of the people around him.

But she saw nothing in my eyes—she stared at me as though I had made a long journey on a white charger all the way to her prison house.

Terrifying, that the loss of intimacy with one person results in the freezing over of the world, and the loss of oneself.

I am nothing to you, nothing, and you bring me fever but no delight.

The great buildings, unlit, blunt like the phallus or sharp like the spear, guarded the city which never slept. Beneath them Rufus walked, one of the fallen—for the weight of this city was murderous—one of those who had been crushed on the day, which was every day, these towers fell. Entirely alone, and dying of it, he was part of an unprecedented multitude.

There were lots of people around us, but I still felt this terrible lack of friendliness

Men are men, and sometimes they must be left alone.

For a woman,' she said, 'I think a man is always a stranger. And there's something awful about being at the mercy of a stranger.

I am too various to be trusted. If this were not so I would not be alone in this house tonight.

Sometimes you were here all day long and you read or you opened the window or you cooked something - and I watched you - and you never said anything - and you looked at me with such eyes, as though you did not see me. All day, while I worked to make this room for you.

To begin with, the room was not large enough for two. It looked out on a small courtyard. 'Looked out' means only that the room had two windows, against which the courtyard malevolently pressed, encroaching day by day, as though it had confused itself with a jungle.

the sorrow of the disconnected.

The poor boy sounded as though he would have put his head in the gas oven. If he had had a gas oven.

I did not want him to know me. I did not want anyone to know me.

Whether he is with others or not he is certainly alone.

The eyes of his friends told him that he was falling. His own heart told him so. But the air through which he rushed was his prison.

His face looked as though it were plunging into water. I couldn't touch him. I wanted so to touch him. ... But he was far away from me now, all by himself. I waited for him to come back.

Then Leona surprised him. "You talking about that boy? He's just bored and lonely, don't know no better. You could probably make friends with him real easy if you tried." He laughed. "Well, that's what's the matter with most people," Leona insisted, plaintively, "ain't got nobody to be with. That's what makes them so evil. I'm telling you, boy, I know.

Then the door is before him. There is darkness all around him, there is silence in him. Then the door opens and he stands alone, the whole world falling away from him. And the brief corner of the sky seems to be shrieking, though he does not hear a sound. Then the earth tilts, he is thrown forward on his face in darkness, and his journey begins.

retired into that strong self-pity which was, perhaps, the only thing he had which really belonged to him

I remember the winter sun was shining and I felt cold and distant as the sun.

And the brief corner of the sky seems to be shrieking, though he does not hear a sound.