Quotes About Isolation

He doesn't belong here. He came one night during a bad storm. Been a plague ever since.

The adults, though. They don't say much about him. Or to him. And no other Gungans come to see him, either. Nobody even says his name.

One of those towns where the country had moved on but this place stayed behind, as if it had found grim comfort in the fact it would never grow up, would never get better, and it was what it was from here until it was gone.

Three other vectors for infection. That's what this was, wasn't it? It's not contained at all.

A book is a suicide postponed.

Healing, recovering, from a death is also a form of estrangement, a further loss.

Was this what it meant to grow up, this vast loneliness?

It occurred to me, not for the first time, that Lili's world was not so different from my dioramas, or even from Sirena's installations: you took a tiny portion of the earth and made it yours, but really what you wanted was for someone else -- ideally, a grown-up, because a grown-up matters, has authority, but is also not the same as you -- to come and see, to get it, and thereby, somehow, to get you; and all of this, surely so that you might ultimately feel less alone on the planet.

It's the strangest thing about being human: to know so much, to communicate so much, and yet always to fall so drastically short of clarity, to be, in the end, so isolate and inadequate. Even when people try to say things, they say them poorly, or obliquely, or they outright lie, sometimes because they're lying to you, but as often because they're lying to themselves.

The whole world seemed a maze of shifting mirrors in which I wandered alone, looking always and frenziedly for the exit back into my real life, where people had substance, did as they said they would, and were whole.

When you're the Woman Upstairs, nobody thinks of you first. Nobody calls you before anyone else, or sends you the first postcard. Once your mother dies, nobody loves you best of all.

It's the strangest thing about being human: to know so much, to communicate so much, and yet always to fall so drastically short of clarity, to be, in the end, so isolate and inadequate. Even when people try to say things, they say them poorly, or obliquely, or they outright lie, sometimes because they're lying to you, but as often because they're lying to themselves. Sirena

It's the strangest thing about being human: to know so much, to communicate so much, and yet always to fall so drastically short of clarity, to be, in the end, so isolate and inadequate. Even when people try to say things, they say them poorly, or obliquely, or they outright lie, sometimes because they're lying to you, but as often because they're lying to themselves.

Maybe all people who do bad things…are just really lonely.

Kindness and a pure heart. Two things that couldn't be more alien to me.

It's a prison. It's twenty-four-hour-a-day life in a jail cell. We never get out, not even for one second. All we can do, all day long, is look for ways to survive. Nobody needs to teach us tricks. We brainstorm our own tricks all day long. When real anorexics compare notes, we've already figured out all the same tricks—and each one of us did it on our own.

Through the white snow-gate of our ampitheatre, as through a frame we looked eastward upon the summit group; not a tree, not a vestige of vegetation in sight,-sky, snow and granite the only elements in this wild picture.

It would seem, from this, that the people of Omanorion had mastered the ultra-civilized art of minding their own business.

He stood and watched his friend hobble around the house, felt the cold claw of loneliness reach out and touch him with icy fingers. A terrible loneliness. The loneliness of age—of age and the outdated.

The walls cried out to him. And voices cried out as well from the shadow of the past. He stood and listened to them, and now a strange thing struck him. The voices were there, but he did not hear the words.

She was a creature of the woods and hills, of springtime flower and autumn flight of birds. She knew these things and lived with them and was, in some strange way, a specific part of them. She was one who dwelt apart in an old and lost apartment of the natural world. She occupied a place that Man long since had abandoned, if, in fact, he'd ever held it.

He tilted back his head and stared up at the sky and marveled once again, as he had marveled many other times on many other planets, at the sheer, devastating loneliness and alienness of unfamiliar stars.

Man was spread thin throughout the galaxy. A lone man here, a handful there. Slim blobs of bone and brain and muscle to hold a galaxy in check. Slight shoulders to hold up the cloak of human greatness spread across the light-years. For Man had flown too fast, had driven far beyond his physical capacity.

To dream in isolation can be properly splendid to be sure; but to dream in company seems to me infinitely preferable.