373 Isolation Quotes

One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way.

It would be easier for the Devil to go to church and cross himself with holy water than for these people to comprehend the ideas which are accepted facts to us today.

The physicists say that I am a mathematician, and the mathematicians say that I am a physicist. I am a completely isolated man and though everybody knows me, there are very few people who really know me.

I have Social Disease. I have to go out every night. If I stay home one night I start spreading rumors to my dogs.

When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships.

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

Locations are all tough, all miserable. I never left the sound stage for 18 years at Warners. We never went outside the studio, not even for big scenes.

There are numerous bugbears in the profession of a politician. First, ordinary life suffers. Second, there are many temptations to ruin you and those around you. And I suppose third, and this is rarely discussed, people at the top generally have no friends.

We're a long, long way from home, Bobbie; Home's a long, long way from us. I feel a dirty wind blowing; Devils and dust.

Man was born to live with his fellow human beings. Separate him, isolate him, his character will go bad, a thousand ridiculous affects will invade his heart, extravagant thoughts will germinate in his brain, like thorns in an uncultivated land.

The curse of the intelligent man is that he will always find himself surrounded by the ignorant. The measure of the intelligent man is determined by his tolerance toward them.

I frequently lock myself in my studio. I do not often see the people I love, and in the end I shall suffer for it... painting is one's private life.

I'd sooner exchange ideas with the birds on earth than learn to carry on intergalactic communications with some obscure race of humanoids on a satellite planet from the world of Betelgeuse.

He whom God has touched will always be a being apart: he is, whatever he may do, a stranger among men; he is marked by a sign.

If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.

The truth is that Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in which it is convenient to segregate a certain number of the young of the nation while they are growing up.

The best an American can look forward to is the lonely pleasure of one who stands at long last on a chilly and inhospitable mountaintop where few have been before, where few can follow and where few will consent to believe he has been.

I spent my childhood alone, overweight and ugly, angry at everything, and knowing nothing of a life beyond this sadness.

If you wish to avoid foreign collision, you had better abandon the ocean.

Our social relationships are limited, most of the time, to gossip and criticizing people's behavior. This observation slowly pushed me to isolate from the so-called social life. My days pass by in solitude.

I dreamed night after night that everyone in the world was dead excepting myself, and that upon me rested the responsibility of making a wagon wheel.

Being a writer in a library is rather like being a eunuch in a harem.

It's not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It's a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life.

All of them, all except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves these Maginot Lines against this enemy they thought they saw across the frontier, this enemy who never attacked that way-if he ever attacked at all; if he was indeed the enemy.

The problem with the loneliness I suffer is that the company of others has never been a cure for it.

Love is always open arms. If you close your arms about love you will find that you are left holding only yourself.

Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet.

Maybe there is a single spot, just one, where living organisms are holed up. Maybe so, but if so this would be the strangest thing of all, absolutely incomprehensible. For we are not familiar with this kind of living. We do not have solitary, isolated creatures. It is beyond our imagination to conceive of a single form of life that exists alone and independent, unattached to other forms.

Lonely people, in talking to each other can make each other lonelier.

Economic man and the Calvinist Christian sing to each other like voices in a fugue. The Calvinist stands alone before an almost merciless God; no human agency can help him; his church is a means to political and social organization rather than a bridge to deity, for no priest can have greater knowledge of the divine way than he himself; no friend can console him - in fact, he should distrust all men; in the same fashion, Economic Man faces a merciless world alone and unaided, his hand against every other's.

It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people.

Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we've put it in an impossible situation.

It's important that someone celebrate our existence... People are the only mirror we have to see ourselves in. The domain of all meaning. All virtue, all evil, are contained only in people. There is none in the universe at large. Solitary confinement is a punishment in every human culture.

First the Nazis came: First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out- because I was not a communist; Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out- because I was not a socialist; Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out- because I was not a trade unionist; Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out- because I was not a Jew; Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Yes: in the sea of life enisl'd, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortal millions live alone.

I am leaving in order to have peace and quiet, to be rid of the influence of civilization. I want only to do simple, very simple art, and to be able to do that, I have to immerse myself in virgin nature, see no one but savages, live their life, with no other thought in mind but to render, the way a child would, the concepts formed in my brain and to do this with the aid of nothing but the primitive means of art, the only means that are good and true.

In many ways connection has been disastrous. We have confused information (of which there has been too much of)with ideas (of which there are too few. I found out much more about the world and myself by being unconnected.

Dar'st thou amid the varied To live alone, an isolated thing?

The schizoid man is the natural product of the technological man. It is one way to live and is increasingly utilized--and it may explode into violence.

Or I might be able to catch one, a little girl for example, and half strangle her, three quarters, until she promises to give me my stick, give me soup, empty my pots, kiss me, fondle me, smile to me, give me my hat, stay with me, follow the hearse weeping into her handkerchief, that would be nice. I am such a good man, at bottom, such a good man, how is it that nobody ever noticed it?

I'd like to be a fairy princess - a little golden doll with gossamer wings, in a voile dress, adorned with bright, shiny things. I see that as something totally pure and beautiful. Everything that's realistic has some sort of ugliness in it. Even a flower is ugly when it wilts, a bird when it seeks its prey, the ocean when it becomes violent. I'm very sensitive to ugly situations. I'm quick to read people, and I pick up if someone's reacting to me as just a sexy blonde. At times like that, I freeze. I can be very alone at a party, on the set, or in general, if I'm not in harmony with things around me.

But nobody did come, because nobody does; and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world.

'I always felt that nobody was going to understand me, going to understand what I felt about things. I guess that is why I started to write. At least on paper I could put down what I thought.'

What is fame? Everybody knows your name: never again are you alone.

I am out of humanity's reach. I must finish my journey alone, Never hear the sweet music of speech; I start at the sound of my own.

Jesus does not want us floating through space or sitting in fron of our televisions. Jesus wants us interacting, eating together, laughing together, praying together. Lonliness is something that came with the fall.

Home is where the people who live there need me to come home to them, and worry about me when I'm gone. There's no such place on this earth, no matter how far I drive

Then i put my face in tomorrow, i believe we're not alone I believe in Beatles, i believe my little soul has grown And im still so afraid, yes im still so afraid, yeah im still so afraid, on my own!

I built myself a house of glass: It took me years to make it: And I was proud. But now, alas! Would God someone would break it.

What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself.

Most people are on the world, not in it-have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them-undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.

As the people here grow colder I turn to my computer And spend my evenings with it Like a friend.

I am shielded in my armor Hiding in my room safe within my womb I touch no one and no one touches me. I am a rock. I am an island. And a rock feels no pain. And an island never cries.

If naebody care for me, I'll care for naebody.

To find themselves utterly alone at night where company is desirable and expected makes some people fearful; but a case more trying by far to the nerves is to discover some mysterious companionship when intuition, sensation, memory, analogy, testimony, probability, induction - every kind of evidence in the logician's list - have united to persuade consciousness that it is quite in isolation.

She had no fear of the shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind - or rather that cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.

We live in an old chaos of the sun, Or an old dependency of day and night, Or island solitude, unsponsored, free, Of that wide water, inescapable. Deer walk upon our mountains, and quail Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness; And, in the isolation of the sky, At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

'In great misfortunes,' he told himself, 'people want to be alone. They have a right to be. And the misfortunes that occur within one are the greatest. Surely the saddest thing in the world is falling out of love - if once one has ever fallen in.' Falling out, for him, seemed to mean falling out of all domestic and social relations, out of his place in the human family, indeed.

I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.

The years between thirty-five and sixty-five revolve before the passive mind as one unexplained, confusing merry-go-round. True, they are a merry-go-round of ill-gaited and wind-broken horses, painted first in pastel colors, then in dull grays and browns, but perplexing and intolerably dizzy the thing is, as never were the merry-go-rounds of childhood or adolescence; as never, surely, were the certain-coursed, dynamic roller-coasters of youth. For most men and women these thirty years are taken up with a gradual withdrawal from life, a retreat first from a front with many shelters, those myriad amusements and curiosities of youth, to a line with less, when we peel down our ambitions to one ambition, our recreations to one recreation, our friends to a few to whom we are anaesthetic; ending up at last in a solitary, desolate strong point that is not strong, where the shells now whistle abominably, now are but half-heard as, by turns frightened and tired, we sit waiting for death.

I am so 100 percent Swedish... Someone has said a Swede is like a bottle of ketchup - nothing and nothing and then all at once - splat. I think I'm a little like that. And I think I'm Swedish because I like to live here on this island. You can't imagine the loneliness and isolation in this country. In that way, I'm very Swedish - I don't dislike to be alone

Crooks: Books ain't no good. A guy needs somebody - to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody. Ch.4, p.72

So you chose not to be part of the bands of children who group together for the sole purpose of excluding others, and people look at you and say, poor girl, she's so isolated, but you know a secret, you know who you really are. You are the one human being who is capable of understanding the alien mind, because you are the alien mind; you know what it is to be unhuman because there's never been any human group that gave you credentials as a bona fide homo sapien:

I have too many secrets.

In the West, you have bigger homes, yet smaller families; you have endless conveniences - yet you never seem to have any time. You can travel anywhere in the world, yet you don't bother to cross the road to meet your neighbours.

Manhattan. Sometimes from beyond the skyscrapers, across of thousands of high walls, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia in the middle of the night, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.

In her sepulcher there by the sea - In her tomb by the sounding sea.

Yes, society must go on; it must breed, like rabbits. That is what we are here for. But then, I don't like society - much. I am that absurd figure, an American millionaire, who has bought one of the ancient haunts of English peace. I sit here, in Edward's gun-room, all day and all day in a house that is absolutely quiet. No one visits me, for I visit no one. No one is interested in me, for I have no interests. In twenty minutes or so I shall walk down to the village, beneath my own oaks, alongside my own clumps of gorse, to get the American mail. My tenants, the village boys and the tradesmen will touch their hats to me. So life peters out. I shall return to dine and Nancy will sit opposite me with the old nurse standing behind her. Enigmatic, silent, utterly well-behaved as far as her knife and fork go, Nancy will stare in front of her with the blue eyes that have over them strained, stretched brows. Once, or perhaps twice, during the meal her knife and fork will be suspended in mid-air as if she were trying to think of something that she had forgotten. Then she will say that she believes in an Omnipotent Deity or she will utter the one word 'shuttle-cocks', perhaps. It is very extraordinary to see the perfect flush of health on her cheeks, to see the lustre of her coiled black hair, the poise of the head upon the neck, the grace of the white hands - and to think that it all means nothing - that it is a picture without a meaning. Yes, it is queer.

Listen: The waitress brought me another drink. She wanted to light my hurricane lamp again. I wouldn't let her. 'Can you see anything in the dark, with your sunglasses on?' she asked me. 'The big show is inside my head,' I said

I bought a house, on a one-way dead-end road; I don't know how I got there, but I can't leave.

So let's get to the point, let's roll another joint. And let's head on down the road. There's somewhere I got to go. And you don't know how it feels, no, you don't know how it feels to be me.

Oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness, Some boundless contiguity of shade, Where rumor of oppression and deceit, Of unsuccessful or successful war, Might never reach me more.

I have drawn into myself so much that I literally do not see any other people anymore - excepting the peasants with whom I have direct contact, since I paint them.

Now I understand what you tried to say to me How you suffered for you sanity How you tried to set them free They would not listen they did not know how, perhaps they'll listen now.

Starry, starry night, portraits hung in empty halls Frameless heads on nameless walls with eyes that watch the world and can't forget. Like the stranger that you've met, the ragged man in ragged clothes The silver thorn of bloody rose, lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow.

Now I think I know what you tried to say to me How you suffered for you sanity How you tried to set them free They would not listen they're not listening still... Perhaps they never will...

With blackest moss the flower plots Were thickly crusted, one and all; The rusted nails fell from the knots That held the pear to the gable wall. The broken sheds looked sad and strange: Unlifted was the clinking latch; Weeded and worn the ancient thatch Upon the lonely moated grange. She only said, 'My life is dreary, He cometh not,' she said; She said, 'I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!'

'That men with knowledge merely play'd, I told thee - hardly nigher made, Tho' scaling slow from grade to grade; 'Much less this dreamer, deaf and blind, Named man, may hope some truth to find, That bears relation to the mind. 'For every worm beneath the moon Draws different threads, and late and soon Spins, toiling out his own cocoon.

Like a dog, he hunts in dreams, and thou art staring at the wall, Where the dying night-lamp flickers, and the shadows rise and fall.

Where the remote Bermudas ride, In th' ocean's bosom unespied.

Performance number 1,000, if I play it that long, will take place in a well-padded booby-hatch.

The basic thing is just fuck everybody. It's that feeling where no one understands: 'Who the fuck are my friends? Fuck you. Fuck everybody. Fuck everything.' It's just that thought - pure frustration.

Almost everyone who has been around me turned out to be a secret agent working for the Jews, working for the CIA... The Jews have planted so many of their Jew agents and CIA rats all around me. So many people... Girlfriends, lawyers, everybody almost, turned out to be working for the CIA and the Jews! Unbelievable but true.

I don't want him in my cell. I want a chick in my cell.

They came, by what means he did not know, from outside, the vast abstraction that none of them had ever seen. He had a mental picture of a starry void in which men and monsters swam or battled, and then swiftly erased it. Such ideas did not conform with the quiet behavior of his companions; if they never spoke about outside, did they think about it?

Lastly, isolation, by checking immigration and consequently competition, will give time for any new variety to be slowly improved; and this may sometimes be of importance in the production of new species. If, however, an isolated area be very small, either from being surrounded by barriers, or from having very peculiar physical conditions, the total number of the individuals supported on it will necessarily be very small; and fewness of individuals will greatly retard the production of new species through natural selection, by decreasing the chance of the appearance of favourable variations.

To be shelterless and alone in the open country, hearing the wind moan and watching for day through the whole long weary night; to listen to the falling rain, and crouch for warmth beneath the lee of some old barn or rick, or in the hollow of a tree; are dismal things-but not so dismal as the wandering up and down where shelter is, and beds and sleepers are by thousands; a houseless rejected creature.

A prison taint was on everything there. The imprisoned air, the imprisoned light, the imprisoned damps, the imprisoned men, were all deteriorated by confinement. As the captive men were faded and haggard, so the iron was rusty, the stone was slimy, the wood was rotten, the air was faint, the light was dim. Like a well, like a vault, like a tomb, the prison had no knowledge of the brightness outside; and would have kept its polluted atmosphere intact, in one of the spice islands of the Indian Ocean.

Well, we're our own prisons. We're each our own wardens and we do our own times. We get stuck in our own little trips and we kind a judge ourselves the way we do. You know, I can't judge uh, nobody else, best thing I can do is try to judge myself and live with that. See, what other people do is not really my affair, unless they approach me with it, and want me to do something about it, uh, then I'll uh take into consideration what has to be done. But other than that I just uh, try to do my number, and do my time.

I don't think like you people. You people put importance on your lives. Well, my life has never been important to anyone...

Susan was really busy with one of her bands, and there was about a month when I never left the house. I didn't go out in public; I didn't talk to anyone on the phone -- I went a little psycho. If I hadn't been alone so long, I would not have gone as far as I actually went. But one day I went from wondering what I would look like with a shaved head to 'That's pretty cool.' Then I put my hair in a big envelope and mailed it off to my wife. The funny thing was, I did this really silly, personal thing for no reason, and then all of a sudden it was on MTV News and in Newsweek, and I still hadn't left the house. I thought it was strange, because I don't know how anyone found out about my hair, and I don't know why they cared.

Were you gonna die alone (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly)