Isolation quotations

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◆ Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?

- Haruki Murakami99

◆ Vashti was seized with the terrors of direct experience. She shrank back into the room, and the wall closed up again.

- E.M. Forster98

◆ [The modern age] knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will cluck and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh through its changes, a plane will drone over, the nearest freeway will vibrate the air. Red and white lights will pass in the sky, lights will shine along highways and glance off windows. There is always a radio that can be turned to some all-night station, or a television set to turn artificial moonlight into the flickering images of the late show. We can put on a turntable whatever consolation we most respond to, Mozart or Copland or the Grateful Dead.

- Wallace Stegner98

◆ One situation – maybe one alone – could drive me to murder: family life, togetherness.

- Patricia Highsmith98

◆ We are like puzzle pieces who are perfectly suited to make a giant picture together, but we are assembling ourselves in the dark.

- Vironika Tugaleva98

◆ Stigma's power lies in silence. The silence that persists when discussion and action should be taking place. The silence one imposes on another for speaking up on a taboo subject, branding them with a label until they are rendered mute or preferably unheard.

- M.B. Dallocchio98

◆ Friendship is not a remedy for loneliness. Loneliness is part of our experience, and if we are looking for relief from loneliness in friendship, we are only going to frustrate the friendship. Friendship, camaraderie, intimacy, all those things, and loneliness lived together in the same experience.

- Rich Mullins98

◆ When I felt as though I had reached land, it was like I was on a deserted sandy beach, feeling isolated and afraid to share with anyone the memories that haunted me.

- Erin Merryn98

◆ What we needed were not words and promises but the steady accumulation of small realities.

- Haruki Murakami98

◆ No matter what you are dealing with in life, be it resentment or regret, bitterness or sadness, anger or apathy, hatred or hesitation, depression or disempowerment, disappointment or other destructive anxieties, painful envy or emotional turmoil, fear of isolation or thoughts of failure, keep in mind that if you are positive, positivity will find you and embrace you!

- Widad Akrawi98

◆ Shifts within friendships happen in imperceptible increments. There is distance, then assurance. Misconjecture, caution, gradual convergence. So much depends on the respect accorded to vulnerability.

- Gail Jones98

◆ World is so full of idiots that you can't even imagine to escape. The only solution is isolation. But it still spares one!

- Raheel Farooq98

◆ One by one they are being picked off around him: in his small circle of colleagues the ratio slowly grows top-heavy, more ghosts, more each winter, and fewer living... and with each one, he thinks he feels patterns on his cortex going dark, settling to sleep forever, parts of whoever he's been losing all definition, reverting to dumb chemistry...

- Thomas Pynchon98

◆ Freedom is the possibility of isolation. You are free if you can withdraw from people, not having to seek them out for the sake of money, company, love, glory or curiosity, none of which can thrive in silence and solitude. If you can't live alone, you were born a slave. You may have all the splendours of the mind and the soul, in which case you're a noble slave, or an intelligent servant, but you're not free. And you can't hold this up as your own tragedy, for your birth is a tragedy of Fate alone. Hapless you are, however, if life itself so oppresses you that you're forced to become a slave. Hapless you are if, having been born free, with the capacity to be isolated and self-sufficient, poverty should force you to live with others.

- Fernando Pessoa98

◆ Cath wasn't trying to make new friends here. In some cases, she was actively trying not to make friends, though she usually stopped short of being rude.

- Rainbow Rowell98