Best Isolation Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings Page 18

“I'm still prone to periods of isolation, still more fearful of the world out there and more averse to pleasure and risk than I'd like to be; I still direct more energy toward controlling and minimizing appetites than toward indulging them.”

World Stills Energy Pleasure Risk Periods Direct Isolation Appetite Fearful Minimizing

Author:Caroline Knapp

“They can romanticize us so, mirrors, and that is their secret: what a subtle torture it would be to destroy all the mirrors in the world: where then could we look for reassurerance of our identities? I tell you, my dear, Narcissus was so egotist...he was merely another of us who, in our unshatterable isolation, recognized, on seeing his reflection, the beautiful comrade, the only inseparatable love...poor Narcissus, possibly the only human who was ever honest on this point.”

World Humans Looks Would Be Beautiful Poor Secret Seeing Honest Identity Reflection Mirrors Dear Torture Isolation Subtle Comrade Narcissus

Author:Truman Capote

“I think that poetry is perfect for women raising children, with just bits of time and such need to connect to other women out of the isolation of motherhood.”

Thinking Needs Children Bits Perfect Motherhood Isolation Poetry Is Raising Children

Author:Francesca Lia Block

“Ignorance and prejudice are the handmaidens of propaganda. Our mission, therefore, is to confront ignorance with knowledge, bigotry with tolerance, and isolation with the outstretched hand of generosity. Racism can, will, and must be defeated.”

Hands Ignorance Racism Prejudice Missions Tolerance Generosity Propaganda Isolation Bigotry Intolerance Defeated Racism And Prejudice Ignorance And Prejudice

Author:Kofi Annan

“I began to wonder whether anything truly existed, whether reality wasn't an unformed and gelatinous substance only half-captured by my senses....If that were true, each of us was living in absolute isolation. The thought terrified me. I was consoled by the idea that I could take that gelatin and mold it to create anything I wanted...At times I felt that the universe fabricated from the power of the imagination had stronger and more lasting contours than the blurred realm of the flesh-and-blood creatures around me.”

“The challenge of modern freedom, or the combination of isolation and freedom which confronts you, is to make yourself up. The danger is that you may emerge from the process as a not-entirely-human creature. (Referenced in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young)”

People Humans May Young Process Loses Challenges Modern Danger Creatures Combination Isolation Toby

Author:Saul Bellow

“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.”

Writing Soul Reading Isolation Decrease Writing And Reading

Book:Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Source: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“Who shall blame him? Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son, who, very distant at first, gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head before her—who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world?”

Source: To the Lighthouse

“Fear and Bigotry are bred fom isolation and ignorance. -Shekinah”

Ignorance Isolation Bigotry

Author:P. C. Cast

“Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot.”

Thinking Ends Pride Idiot Isolation

Book:The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton

Source: The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton

“She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.”

Men Love Humans Soul Whole Dies Passion Salvation Every Man Height Beast Isolation Prose Sermons Fragments Monk Exalted Latent Human Love Howards End

Author:E. M. Forster

“What a person is for himself, what abides with him in his loneliness and isolation, and what no one can give or take away from him, this is obviously more essential for him than everything that he possesses or what he may be in the eyes of others.”

Giving May Persons Eye Loneliness Essentials Isolation

Book:101 Facts of life

Source: 101 Facts of life

“After the first establishment of identity there comes the imperative need to lose this new-found sense of separateness and to belong to something larger and more powerful than the weak, lonely self. The sense of moral isolation is intolerable to us.”

Needs Firsts Self Found Loses Powerful Moral Identity Lonely Weak Isolation Establishment Imperatives Separateness

Book:The mortgaged heart

Source: The mortgaged heart

“Poets knew that isolation in nature, far from people and things man-made, was good for the soul, and he'd always identified with poets.”

People Men Made Soul Poet Isolation

Author:Nicholas Sparks

“He stretched out his hands as he sang, sadly, because all beauty is sad…The poem had done no ‘good’ to anyone, but it was a passing reminder, a breath from the divine lips of beauty, a nightingale between two worlds of dust. Less explicit than the call to Krishna, it voiced our loneliness nevertheless, our isolation, our need for the Friend who never comes yet is not entirely disproved.”

World Needs Two Done Hands Loneliness Divine Breaths Lips Passing Passings Dust Isolation Nevertheless Reminders Krishna Explicit Two Worlds Nightingales

Author:E. M. Forster

“She had always been a reader… but now she was obsessed. Since her discovery of the book hoard downstairs from her job, she’d been caught up in one such collection of people and their doings after the next…The pleasure of this sort of life – bookish, she supposed it might be called, a reading life – had made her isolation into a rich and even subversive thing. She inhabited one consoling or horrifying persona after another…That she was childless and husbandless and poor meant less once she picked up a book. Her mistakes disappeared into it. She lived with an invented force.”

People Made Book Might Jobs Reading Next Force Pleasure Poor Mistake Rich Reader Discovery Caught Obsessed Isolation Collections Caught Up Persona Subversive Doings Consoling Reading Life

Author:Louise Erdrich

“She met the magus's stunned look with a smile. "The Thieves of Eddis have always been uncomfortable allies to the throne, Magus. There is the niggling fear that if you fall out with a Thief, he might see it as his right and responsibility to remove you. There are some checks, of course. There is only ever one Thief. They are prohibited from owning any property. Their training inevitably generates the isolation that makes them independent, but also keeps them from forming alliances that might become threats to the throne. It is not the folly you might think.”

Ifs Thinking Looks Might Fall Courses Responsibility Mets Training Independent Property Threat Checks Uncomfortable Folly Isolation Remove Allies Thieves Thrones Alliances Stunned

Author:Megan Whalen Turner

“What was Dionysus going to go? Send him back to his hellish isolation? He’d been there, done that, and had the Ozzy T-shirt to prove it.’ (Styxx)”

Done Prove Shirts Isolation T Shirt Prove It Dionysus Been There Done That

Book:Night Pleasures/Night Embrace

Source: Night Pleasures/Night Embrace

“Poems On Life: Life is given to us, we earn it by giving it. Let the dead have the immortality of fame, but the living the immortality of love. Life's errors cry for the merciful beauty that can modulate their isolation into a harmony with the whole. Life, like a child, laughs, shaking its rattle of death as it runs.”

Giving Children Whole Running Life Is Given Laughing Cry Fame Harmony Errors Whole Life Immortality Isolation Love Life Shaking Merciful

Author:Rabindranath Tagore

“Earth's dispossessed are vulnerable targets for extremists: those who teach that global justice is meaningless; that satisfaction can come only in violence, division, and intellectual isolation.”

Earth Justice Teach Violence Intellectual Satisfaction Vulnerable Isolation Target Division Meaningless Extremist

Author:Abdallah II

“And so I ask myself: 'Where are your dreams?' And I shake my head and mutter: 'How the years go by!' And I ask myself again: 'What have you done with those years? Where have you buried your best moments? Have you really lived? Look,' I say to myself, 'how cold it is becoming all over the world!' And more years will pass and behind them will creep grim isolation. Tottering senility will come hobbling, leaning on a crutch, and behind these will come unrelieved boredom and despair. The world of fancies will fade, dreams will wilt and die and fall like autumn leaves from the trees. . . .”

“I’ve told you the four thunderstorms – disappointment, frustration, unfairness and isolation. You cannot avoid them, as like the monsoon they will come into your life at regular intervals. You just need to keep the raincoat handy to not let the spark die”

Needs Dies Four Disappointment Isolation Frustration Sparks Intervals Handy Unfairness Thunderstorm Monsoons

Author:Chetan Bhagat

“Mirabelle replaces the absent friends with books and television mysteries of the PBS kind. The books are mostly nineteenth-century novels in which women are poisoned or are doing the poisoning. She does not read these books as a romantic lonely hearts turning pages in the isolation of her room, not at all. She is instead an educated spirit with a sense of irony. She loves the gloom of these period novels, especially as kitsch, but beneath it all she finds that a part of her indentifies with all that darkness.”

“I can't save you like that Ty. What you did to me wasn't this brilliant thing, like you think it was. You took me away from everything - my parents, my friends, my life. You took me to the sand and the heat, the dirt and isolation. And you expected me to love you. And that's the hardest bit. Because I did, or at least, I loved something out there. But I hated you too. I can't forget that.”

Thinking I Can Bits Parent Forget Love You Like You My Friends Expected Brilliant Hardest Hated Heat Isolation Sand Dirt

Author:Lucy Christopher

“If you are a writer, or want to be a writer, this is how you spend your days--listening, observing, storing things away, making your isolation pay off. You take home all you've taken in, all that you've overheard, and you turn it into gold. (Or at least you try.)”

Ifs Want Trying Home Turns Pay Taken Listening Gold Isolation Observing

Book:Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Source: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“SkyClan's destiny is that we will never live in isolation from other cats. We're not like forest Clans, we can't shut ourselves off entirely from kittypets or rogues. And visitors will be welcome.”

Destiny Cat Forests Welcome Isolation Visitors Rogues Clans

Author:Erin Hunter

“A person is a person through other persons; you can't be human in isolation; you are human only in relationships.”

Humans Persons Isolation

Author:Desmond Tutu

“The world says: "You have needs - satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don't hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more." This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.”

World Needs Believe Today Poor Results Rich Demand Murder Suicide Greed Envy Doctrine Isolation Materialism Worldly Brothers Karamazov Selfishness And Greed

Author:Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Many animals experience pain, anxiety and suffering, physically and psychologically, when they are held in captivity or subjected to starvation, social isolation, physical restraint, or painful situations from which they cannot escape. Even if it is not the same experience of pain, anxiety, or suffering undergone by humans- or even other animals, including members of the same species- an individual's pain, suffering, and anxiety matter.”

Source: Animals Matter: A Biologist Explains Why We Should Treat Animals with Compassion and Respect

“The arts don't exist in isolation.”

Art Isolation

Book:How Music Works

Source: How Music Works

“Love can isolate us from everything around us. But in its absence, we can be filled with the fear that something comparable exists.”

Filled Absence Isolation

Book:Happy Families

Source: Happy Families

“Do you know, Watson," said he, "that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.”

Source: The Sherlock Holmes Archives (incl. The Truth About Sherlock Holmes)

“The problem with religion, because it's been sheltered from criticism, is that it allows people to believe en masse what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation.”

People Believe Problem Religion Atheism Criticism Idiot Isolation

Author:Sam Harris

“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.”

“There were a thousand secrets in her eyes, a thousand wounds. A lifetime of distrust and betrayal. Isolation. How did one overcome such things?”

Eye Secret Thousand Overcoming Lifetime Betrayal Wounds Isolation Her Eyes Distrust

Book:Mind Game

Source: Mind Game

“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.”

People Failing Tests Isolation Survivor Persist Trustworthiness

Book:Trauma and recovery

Source: Trauma and recovery

“To dream in isolation can be properly splendid to be sure; but to dream in company seems to me infinitely preferable.”

Dream Seems Company Isolation Splendid

Author:Clive Barker

“There's only two ways to be completely alone in this world, lost in a crowd or in total isolation.”

World Way Two Lost This World Crowds Isolation Two Ways

Author:Jeff Lemire

“Survivors do not mourn together. They each mourn alone, even when in the same place. Grief is the most solitary of all feelings. Grief isolates, and every ritual, every gesture, every embrace, is a hopeless effort to break through that isolation. None of it works. The forms crumble and dissolve. To face death is to stand alone.”

Feelings Together Faces Form Effort Grief Break Embrace Isolation Hopeless Survivor Ritual Gestures Solitary Mourn Break Through Stand Alone

Author:Steven Erikson

“That's the day's business. Thinking. Thinking and isolation, because it doesn't matter if you pass the time of day with someone or not; in the end, you're alone. He seemed to have put in as many miles in his brain as he had with his feet. The thoughts kept coming and there was no way to deny them.”

Ifs Thinking Way Ends Matter Brain Feet Deny Miles Isolation Time Of Day

Book:The Long Walk

Source: The Long Walk

“Had it taken her this long to discover that she lacked some simple mental trick that everyone else had, a mechanism so ordinary that no one ever mentioned it, an immediate sensual connection to people and events, and to her own needs and desires? All these years she had lived in isolation within herself and, strangely, from herself, never wanting or daring to look back.”

People Needs Years Looks Long Desire Simple Taken Events Ordinary Connections Tricks Sensual Isolation Mechanism Daring

Author:Ian Mcewan

“Hideous psychic fallout they'd all endured both in active marijuana-dependency and then in marijuana-detox: the social isolation, anxious lassitude, and the hyperself-consciousness that then reinforced the withdrawal and anxiety - the increasing emotional abstraction, poverty of affect, and then total emotional catalepsy - the obsessive analyzing, finally the paralytic stasis that results from obsessive analysis of all possible implications of both getting up from the couch and not getting up from the couch.”

“Don't say anything, because I see that you understand me, and I am afraid of your understanding. 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. I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have to share my kingdom with you.”

World Desire Universe Understanding Share Broken Findings Lonely Terror Kingdoms Isolation Rulers Say Anything Penetrate Understand Me

Author:Anais Nin

“Instead of answering her as soon as he saw her hair grow electric, her face more vivid, her eyes like lightning, her body restless and jerky like a racehorse’s, he retired behind this wall of objective understanding, this gentle testing and acceptance of her, just as one watches an animal in the zoo and smiles at his antics, but is not drawn into this mood. It was this which left Lilith in a state of isolation - indeed, like a wild animal in an absolute desert.”

“With a nearly desperate sense of isolation and a growing suspicion that I lived in an alien land, I took to the road in search of places where change did not mean ruin and where time and men and deeds connected.”

Men Mean Growing Land Deeds Connected Ruins Aliens Desperate Isolation Suspicion

Book:Blue Highways: A Journey Into America

Source: Blue Highways: A Journey Into America

“She felt a stealing sense of fatigue as she walked; the sparkle had died out of her, and the taste of life was stale on her lips. She hardly knew what she had been seeking, or why the failure to find it had so blotted the light from her sky: she was only aware of a vague sense of failure, of an inner isolation deeper than the loneliness about her.”

Light Felt Sky Loneliness Taste Died Lips Seeking Deeper Stealing Isolation Vague Fatigue Stale Sparkle Taste Of Life

Book:Delphi Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)

Source: Delphi Works of Edith Wharton (Illustrated)

“The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.”

Form Ultimate Prison Metaphor Isolation Eagles Zoos Imprisonment Caged

Book:Get a Life

Source: Get a Life

“I have a sense of melancholy isolation, life rapidly vanishing, all the usual things. It's very strange how often strong feelings don't seem to carry any message of action”

Feelings Seems Action Strong Strange Messages Isolation Melancholy Usual Vanishing Strong Feeling

Book:Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

Source: Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

“Tenderness emerges from the fact that the two persons, longing, as all individuals do, to overcome the separateness and isolation to which we are all heir because we are individuals, can participate in a relationship that, for the moment, is not of two isolated selves but a union”

Love Life Persons Two Self Moments Facts Individual Love Is Overcoming Longing Unions True Love Isolation Isolated Tenderness Romantic Love Heirs Funny Relationship Separateness

Author:Rollo May

“The best thing about the bedroom was the bed. I liked to stay in bed for hours, even during the day with covers pulled up to my chin. It was good in there, nothing ever occurred in there, no people, nothing.”

People Hours Bed Best Things Isolation Isolated Bedroom Being Alone Chins Leave Me Alone Loneliness And Solitude

Book:Ham On Rye

Source: Ham On Rye

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Isolation Quotes