Isolation Quotes

John Joseph Powell

It is an absolute human certainty that no one can know his own beauty or perceive
It is an absolute human certainty that no one can know his own beauty or perceive a sense of his own worth until it has been reflected back to him in the mirror of another loving, caring human being.

Bernard Pomerance

Before I spoke with people, I did not think of all these things because there was no one to bother to think them for. Now things just come out of my mouth which are true.

Tennessee Williams

She lives in a world of her own – a world of – little glass ornaments…

Anaïs Nin

I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe.

Stephen Fry

It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing - they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

In the deepest darkness God tenderly grasps my hand and whispers that darkness is nothing more than a place that He is preparing for the arrival of light.

William Shakespeare

Thus weary of the world, away she hies,
And yokes her silver doves; by whose swift aid
Their mistress mounted through the empty skies
In her light chariot quickly is convey'd;
Holding their course to Paphos, where their queen
Means to immure herself and not be seen.

Judith Lewis Herman

Over time as most people fail the survivor's exacting test of trustworthiness, she tends to withdraw from relationships. The isolation of the survivor thus persists even after she is free.

Jack London

Too many thousands of opened books yawned between them and him. He had exiled himself.

Alastair Bruce

It has been raining here for ten years.I keep an accurate record of time and can state this with no fear of contradiction.

Michael Bassey Johnson

The consequences of seeking popularity is not only the chronic feeling of lonliness, but a desire to hide your face from the eyes of the universe.

Vironika Tugaleva

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

Roman Payne

Wherever you go in the next
catastrophé
Be it sickroom, or prison,
or cemet’ry
Do not fear that your stay will be
solit’ry
Countless souls share your fate,
you’ll have company!

Jasmine Ann Cooray

I know you don't think that any tongue I speak is mine; it must be rented. I am always denial, or pretense. A child born mid-flight has no nation. I can pull on either culture, but they always melt like a dream, trickle away, water on the oiled pelt of foreign.

Jonathan Franzen

Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.

Lucy Grealy

When I tried to imagine being beautiful, I could only imagine living without the perpetual fear of being alone, without the great burden of isolation, which is what feeling ugly felt like.

Frank Tallis

It is my opinion that the isolated mind loses its purchase on reality all too easily and becomes prone to fantasy.

Jodi Picoult

If you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.

Haruki Murakami

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

Kevin Powers

Nothing is more isolating than having a particular history.

Arthur Conan Doyle

A study in scarlet, eh? Why shouldn't we use a little art jargon? There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.

Louis L'Amour

Much of the study of history is a matter of comparison, of relating what was happening in one area to what was happening elsewhere, and what had happened in the past. To view a period in isolation is to miss whatever message it has to offer.

Mark Z. Danielewski

Noli me tangere,
noli me legere,
noli me videre,
noli me

Solange Nicole

There comes a time when something changes you... No matter the impact... Where the world no longer beats in time with you. You no longer feel amongst the fray.. And the feeling of loneliness is a brandished armor you wear the rest of your life.

Jon Krakauer

The monks' response was to climb into their curraghs and row off toward Greenland. They were drawn across the storm-racked ocean, drawn west past the edge of the known world, by nothing more than a hunger of the spirit, a yearning of such queer intensity that it beggars the modern imagination.

Patricia Highsmith

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

Anna White

My husband says this longing for isolation is not a good quality, that if I wanted to be a hermit I should have moved to the West Coast and adopted a lot of cats, not gotten married and had children that demand to be fed several times a day.

Raquel Cepeda

I fall in love with Paraíso. It’s like a giant playground where I’m never scolded for running around recklessly, where I’m almost overwhelmed with the amount of attention and love I receive from Mami’s family. In New York, I’m invisible.

Rudyard Kipling

We're all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.

Christopher Hitchens

The fragility of love is what is most at stake here - humanity's most crucial three-word avowal is often uttered only to find itself suddenly embarrassing or orphaned or isolated or ill-timed - but strangely enough it can work better as a literal or reassuring statement than a transcendent or numinous or ecstatic one.

Celia Stander

There is a terrible beauty to isolation. You don’t have to accept responsibility for others, or live up to their expectations. You could dip your toe into humanity’s maelstrom from time to time, or sit on the river bank and observe.

Daniel J. Rice

Every falling leaf reminds me that I too will soon be separated from these trees. Trying to capture freedom is like trying to catch a falling leaf. Occasionally you may grab one out of the air and hold it in your hands, but now what?

Virginia Woolf

alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know

Tabitha Suzuma

I close my eyes and try and shut him out. My fingers don’t want to stay in time. They want to race ahead in fury, plunging into the dense fog of black notes, pulling the music out by its roots, hurling it up out of the piano and into the air.

Charles De Lint

As the new work fills my notebooks, I've come to realize that the characters in my stories were so real because I really did want to get close to people, I really did want to know them. It was just easier to do it on paper, one step removed.

Alexandra Bracken

People don't live like islands.

Chris Galford

Some run the cliffs, and set upon an eagle’s wings. Others mire in the den, and once within, can never leave again.

Kim Stanley Robinson

And in this curious state I had the realization, at the moment of seeing that stranger there, that I was a person like everybody else. That I was known by my actions and words, that my internal universe was unavailable for inspection by others. They didn't know. They didn't know, because I never told them.

Rich Mullins

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.

Rainbow Rowell

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.

Gail Jones

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.

Wess Stafford

I have become convinced that the more wealth a country accumulates, the more isolated and lonely its people become. The loneliest are usually the children and the elderly. Children learn what they live, and isolation in the ‘village’ is one of the most destructive messages we daily write on the tablets of their hearts.

Jared Diamond

The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean - once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world], we won't be able to get help.

Lity Munshi

home is the isolation within the society from the society

Henri J.M. Nouwen

Our society is so fragmented, our family lives so sundered by physical and emotional distance, our friendships so sporadic, our intimacies so 'in-between' things and often so utilitarian, that there are few places where we can feel truly safe.

Erin Merryn

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.

Bell Hooks

Isolation and loneliness are central causes of depression and despair.

Sherman Alexie

It was so quiet, a reservation kind of quiet, where you can hear somebody drinking whiskey on the rocks three miles away.

John Geddes

...you are my Lady of Shalott lost in a dream of isolation - I care too much for you - I romanticize depression...

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