Isolation Quotes

Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another.

~ Iain Banks

It might behoove us to realize that isolation is the absence of all the senseless clutter, and all the incessant racket that would keep God from having ample room to show up and sufficient silence to be heard. Therefore, isolation may actually be the place where we are least isolated.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

I am going to the USA to catch sight of a wild porcupine and to give some lectures.

~ Sigmund Freud

You are the salt of the earth. But remember that salt is useful when in association, but useless in isolation.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

I can be by myself because I'm never lonely; I'm simply alone, living in my heavily populated solitude, a harum-scarum of infinity and eternity, and Infinity and Eternity seem to take a liking to the likes of me.

~ Bohumil Hrabal

Solitude is a chosen separation for refining your soul. Isolation is what you crave when you neglect the first.

~ Wayne Cordeiro

I understand I've made an unusual lifestyle choice. But the label 'crazy' bothers me. Annoys me. Because it prevents response. When someone asks if you're crazy, Knight lamented, you can either say yes, which makes you crazy, or you can say no, which makes you sound defensive, as if you fear that you really are crazy. There's no good answer.

~ Michael Finkel

People who smile while they are alone used to be called insane, until we invented smartphones and social media.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

You end up isolated if you don't cultivate the capacity for solitude, the ability to be separate, to gather yourself. Solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments. When we don't have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious or in order to feel alive. When this happens, we're not able to appreciate who they are. It's as though we're using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self. We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us feel less alone. But we're at risk, because actually it's the opposite that's true.

~ Sherry Turkle

Isolation is a way to know ourselves.

~ Franz Kafka

In good company your thoughts run, in solitude your thought is still; it goes deeper and makes for itself a deeper groove, delves. Delve meansa 'dig with a spade'; it means hard work. In talk your mind can be stretched, widened, exhilarated to heights but it cannot be deepened; you have to deepen it yourself. It needs sturdiness. You will be lonely, you will be depressed; you must expect it; if you were training your body it would ache and be tired. It is worth it. There is a Hindu proverb which says: 'You only grow when you are alone'.

~ Rumer Godden

Even the technology that promises to unite us, divides us. Each of us is now electronically connected to the globe, and yet we feel utterly alone.

~ Dan Brown

No wires tender even as nervescan transmit the impact ofour seasons, our catastropheswhile we are closed inside them

~ Margaret Atwood

She liked to imagine that when she passed, the world looked after her, but she also knew how anonymous she was. Except when she was at work, no one knew where she was at any time of day and no one waited for her. It was immaculate anonymity.

~ Alice Sebold

Nobody enjoys the company of others as intensely as someone who usually avoids the company of others.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The very places that we presume God not to be are the very places that are filled with His footprints and littered with His fingerprints.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

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

~ Virginia Woolf

Without hesitation, Dove chose the nowhere road. For that was the only place, in his heart of hearts, that he really wanted to go.

~ Nelson Algren

There's this rushing sound, like white noise.The sound of nothing.

~ Julia Green

Tess realized one of the great modern dating sadnesses: everyone is so used to the comforting glow of the computer screen that no one can go so far as to say good morning in public without being liquored up.

~ Amelia Gray

In hermetic isolation, all kinds of bizarre and toxic ideas can fester. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and exposing a bad idea to the critical glare of other minds provides at least a chance that it will wither and die.

~ Steven Pinker

Up here on the Ice each of us is singular, isolate, I as cut off from those like me, from my society, and its rules, as he from his.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

During several centuries Clochemerle, far from the cities and trade routes, had lived in stillness and isolation. But now, at last, the clamour of the great world was crossing the invisible barrier, bringing doubts, temptations, and discontents.

~ Gabriel Chevallier

It is a rare person who can cut himself off from mediate and immediate relations with others for long spaces of time without undergoing a deterioration in personality.

~ Harry Stack Sullivan

The programme into which Cheryl was inducted combined all the different ways the intelligence community had learned could cause intense psychological change in adults and children. It had been learned through the use of both knowledgeable and 'unwitting' volunteers. They were subjected to sensory overload, isolation, drugs and hypnosis, all used on bodies that had been weakened from mild hunger. The horror of the programme was that it would be like having an elementary school sex education class conducted by a paedophile rapist. It would have been banned had the American government signed the Helsinki Accords. But, of course, they hadn't. For the test that day and in those that followed, Cheryl Hersha was positioned so she faced a portable movie screen. A 16mm movie projector was on a platform, along with several reels of film. Each was a short pornographic film meant to make her aware of sexuality in a variety of forms...

~ Cheryl Hersha

She fails to see who I am, even, for her eyes do not, will not, take me in. Instead they transmit a powerful message. She is like a billboard flashing, starkly: 'Keep Out'.

~ Carol Lee

Our time was most delightfully spent, in mutual Protestations of Freindship, and in vows of unalterable Love, in which we were secure from being interrupted, by intruding and disagreeable Visistors, as Augustus and Sophia had on their first Entrance in the Neighbourhood, taken due care to inform the surrounding Families, that as their happiness centered wholly in themselves, they wished for no other society.

~ Jane Austen

Isolation can be a particular problem for mothers at home with small children. Mothers become isolated from each other because we fear judgement. Other mothers can be our harshest critics. And we anticipate that criticism and don't ask each other for help.

~ Kathleen A. Kendall-Tackett

Energetically speaking, antimatter is the mirror image of matter, so the two instantly cancel each other out if they come in contact.Keeping antimatter isolated from matter is a challenge, of course, because everything on earth is made of matter. The samples have to be stored without ever touching anything at all—even air.

~ Dan Brown

No man is an island, entire of itself.

~ John Donne

As a teenager and young adult, I found being mute intensely isolating and dehumanizing. I felt truly like I was just a pair of eyes and ears - an entity without a body, without a face, and without a mouth. I felt as though I was barely a physical being.

~ Carl Sutton

No decision-making system is going to guarantee corporate success. The strategic decisions that corporations have to make are of mind-numbing complexity. But we know that the more power you give a single individual in the face of complexity and uncertainty, the more likely it is that bad decisions will get made.

~ James Surowiecki

America was an iceberg shattered into a billion fragments, and on each stood a person, rotating like an ice floe in a storm.

~ Rene Denfeld

As I stand there, staring absently at the stirring pot on the wall, I remember Greg’s words all those years ago: No one could create peace for me. Yes, I did the tough work to heal on my own. But in the process I’d missed the finer point. An insular life is just another wall. The realization rushes over me: There can be no peace without community. Real community – people to count on, and who could count on me.

~ Sasha Martin

It’s hopeless, trying to recruit a stranger to help me find someone who’s a stranger to him. But then again, we are all strangers to ourselves, caught up in the monotony of daily life, stuck in our routines, never really stopping to think about what will happen to us if we fall off track.

~ Shannon Mullen

Isolation is not a healthy ‘coping’ method, it’s like quarantining yourself in a gas chamber!

~ Joshua Stannard

Sartre felt that Hell is other people, but precisely the opposite is true. Hell is being left alone forever with no other reality than your own consciousness of yourself. It is being locked in a casket of your own internal chaos with no hope of a window, or door leading in light from outside to give you a moment's respite from yourself. Hell is the refusal of the gift of the other.

~ John Eldredge

In much of the rest of the world, rich people live in gated communities and drink bottled water. That's increasingly the case in Los Angeles where I come from. So that wealthy people in much of the world are insulated from the consequences of their act

~ Jared Diamond

If isolation is the furnace of transformation, I could be ashes by now.

~ Stephen Christian

Anything that inspires addiction or obsession - substances, entertainment, beauty, secrecy - is dangerous in that it can lead to isolation, self-absorption, and disconnection, to paralyzed stasis: an immobility that gathers like a force.

~ Greg Carlisle