534 Quotes About Isolation

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.

On a whim, I told Mom once about seeing the world as a series of grays, and she told me I was depressed. This didn’t feel like that. This emptiness was different.

His parents never go out or entertain; they have no dinner parties, no bridge group, no hunting buddies or luncheon pals. Like Lydia, no real friends.

You have entered an abnormal, lonely, and unwelcome new world where you are nothing but an island of sadness.

Be proud of yourself for the effort, especially the parts that no one else saw.

I was trapped in dichotomy—certain of two things at once that couldn't possibly agree. Believing what happened wasn't bad enough to be so shaken over, but still coming undone. Blaming myself entirely, but still feeling powerless. Standing on the razor’s edge, knowing that I was doing myself wrong, but falling back in every single time.

I asked myself whether a life devoid of any affection, of any goal, a life one fills with a thousand trifles intended to relieve its monotony, populated with human beings one seeks out in order not to be alone and whom one flees to avoid being bored by them, whether such a life isn't ridiculous, whether anything whatsoever wouldn't be preferable.

In constant physical or emotional isolation nothing seems real, not even ourselves. It’s only in the reflective eyes of others that assures us we exist at all.

You used to give yourself over to endless sessions of doubt. You would claim to be an expert on the subject. But doubting would tire you so much that you would end up doubting doubt itself. I saw you one day at the end of an afternoon of solitary speculation. You were unmoving and petrified. Running several kilometers in a deep forest full of ravines and pitfalls would have exhausted you less.