Quotes About Isolation

Maybe we become New Yorkers the day we realize that New York will go on without us.

To think of those Nickel nights where the only sounds were tears and insects, how you could sleep in a room crammed with sixty boys and still understand that you were the only person on earth. Everybody and nobody around at the same time. Here everybody was around and by some miracle you didn't want to wring their neck but give them a hug.

It was the softest bed she had ever lain in. But then, it was the only bed she had ever lain in.

It was the day after Sam's house collapsed, though she couldn't be sure. Best to measure time now with one of the Randall plantation's cotton scales, her hunger and fear piling on one side while her hopes were removed from the other in increments. The only way to know how long you are lost in the darkness is to be saved from it.

Somewhere, years ago, she had stepped off the path of life and could no longer find her way back to the family of people.

She watches the people through the sooted panes. They walk slower than they do when she reports to work and when she leaves work, and differently still from weekend strolling. They are the tin men and rag dolls who wake after hours in the toy store.

I feel about my phone the way horror-movie ventriloquists feel about their dummies: It's smarter than me, better than me, and I will kill anyone who comes between us.

She is alone with an unattended desk light whose electricity is an expenditure waiting to be itemized and eliminated in the next budget of Lift magazine, Covering the Elevator Industry for Thirty Years.

The world is mean from the start and gets meaner every day. It uses you up until you only dream of death. Mabel

What a world it is, Cora thought, that makes a living prison into your only haven. Was she out of bondage or in its web: how to describe the status of a runaway?

When the work was done, and the day's punishments, the night waited as an arena for their true loneliness and despair.

The loneliness is the worst, because this knowledge is something that cannot be shared, only suffered. Just as well. Why should anyone else have it easy. Spoken like a true New Yorker.

He had nerve damage: input could not penetrate. The world stalled out at his edges. Sometimes he had trouble speaking to other people, rummaging for language, and it seemed to him that an invisible layer divided him from the rest of the world, a membrane of emotional surface tension.

scattered parkgoers. Cora hunkered and

Manhattan was empty except for soldiers and legions of the damned, and already gentrification had resumed.

By making a circle of themselves that separated the human spirits within from the degradation without. Noble

When the work was done, and the day's punishments, the night waited as an arena for their true loneliness and despair.

No one remembered the unfortunate who had lent his name to the cabin. He lived long enough to embody qualities before being undone by them. Off to Hob with those who had been crippled by the overseers' punishments, off to Hob with those who had been broken by the labor in ways you could see and in ways you could not see, off to Hob with those who had lost their wits. Off to Hob with strays.

The type of guys Pepper sought were single-room-occupancy men, hot-plate men, shitty tippers who never passed a pay phone without checking for errant dimes, and they dreamed of fire.

He thought this city was a good place for him because nobody knew him — And he liked the contradiction that the one place that did know him was the one place he didn't want to be.

Harriet thought they should wake the boy. "Let him sleep," Evelyn said, and that was the last she heard from them. If her daughter had ever been suited for motherhood, she never demonstrated it. The look on her face when little Elwood suckled on her breast—her joyless, empty eyes seeing through the walls of the house and into pure nothing—chilled Harriet to the bone whenever she remembered it.

By making a circle of themselves that separated the human spirits within from the degradation without.

Hard weeks, the kind where you realize you've engineered it so that nobody has anything on you, and that means nobody has anything for you: help, a kind word.

She didn't see anyone she recognized; their faces had been transformed by fear.