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Isolation Quotes

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Isolation Quotes

“By the time she was given the role (of Ilsa Lund) in April, Bergman would have accepted a script much worse than Casablanca. She had been stuck in Rochester, New York, where her husband was in medical school, since August, and she despaired of ever making another movie.”

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Book:Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca--Bogart, Bergman, and World War II
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“The fundamental predicament of homosexuals is one that no amount of legislation can improve. Even the argument that the repeal of the laws against private indecency will lessen opportunities for blackmail is founded on a misunderstanding. No one in his right senses will attempt to blackmail anyone to the police. The realization of the threat would merely lead to both parties being clapped into a dungeon. Blackmail operates by the threat to reveal facts of which a man is ashamed to those whose good opinion he prizes. This is hardly ever likely to be the C.I.D. It may easily be the victim's mother or wife or employer. To rob blackmail of its potency, it would be necessary to remove the homosexual's feeling of shame. This no power on earth can do. From this feeling of inadequacy and exile I was not immune. The only difference between me and other outsiders was that I cried aloud for pardon. Almost every living being seems to feel that if all were known he would be admired and even I was never able to rid myself of the idea that if all were known I would be forgiven.”

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Book:The Naked Civil Servant
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“At that moment I heard the steps of my younger protectors. I had not a moment to lose, but, seizing the hand of the old man, I cried, "Now is the time! Save and protect me! You and your family are the friends whom I seek. Do not desert me in the hour of trial!" '"Great God!" exclaimed the old man, "who are you?" 'At that instant the cottage door opened...”

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Book:Frankenstein
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“There is no time in what you are going through. Your suffering is a place, and you don't know whether you can ever leave this place. You don't even have enough hope to wish that it be over faster. Faster doesn't exist, any more than time itself. You are not alive enough to measure it. You live in a present of incessant pain.”

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Book:The Laws of the Skies
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“She did feel everything she’d said. The despair. Who wouldn’t, if they were paying attention? But you didn’t feel it all the time. You walled it up with purpose. With friendship. With vows and work. And you reminded yourself that it was not just you who felt this way, that there were others out there with their own pits and walls and vows and love and work, and you tried to let that make you kind.”

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Book:Last Exit
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“Les souvenirs mal enfouis vous torturent et s'enfuient par votre bouche just lorsqu'ils ne devraient pas. Et viennent l'agressivité, la rancune, la douleur, toutes les choses punies de solitude et d'isolement car les gens en ont peur. Ils se sentent menacés et vous restez éternellement dans votre cellule et votre rancœur avec la lumière d'éspérance. [Badly buried memories torture you and leak out of your mouth just when they shouldn't. Then comes the anger, the resentment, the pain, all the things punished by seclusion and isolation, because people are afraid of them. They feel threatened, and you remain forever in your prison cell and your bitterness, with a glimmer of hope]”

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Author:Valérie Valère
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“Jane wondered...When the girl was not cleaning her suite, which wouldn't take much time, and when she was not making her meals, and when she was not exercising, and when she was not being owned by some visitor, how often did she sit staring into space, alone and silent and still, as if she were a doll abandoned by a child who had moved on from childish things and no longer loved her?”

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Book:The Silent Corner
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“En mis días sobrios, mis acciones van en dirección contraria innumerables veces por donde quiero caminar, más que las veces en las que me he embriagado y mi caos con las palabras tiene aquel camuflaje que el alcohol otorga con balbuceos sin sentido ahogados en un fuerte sentimiento etílico. Pidiéndo implícitamente, a ti, que me auxilies en algún punto antes de retirarme del mismo suelo en el que nos encontramos. Tengo miedo a dónde iré después de nuestro encuentro pecador y sin suficiente recolección de eventos. Pero más miedo he tenido, en sobriedad, atemorizado de a dónde me guían mis torpes pasos y esta sofocación propia que mi cerebro le ordena a mis manos débiles atacar a su propio cascarón.”

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Author:Eliot Lira
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“A man, perhaps an inch shorter than Andrei, sensing the height comparison, slowly passed him. The stranger still wore an N-95 mask. The pandemic ended three years ago, but Andrei identified why masks were still worn by others. While millions had died from COVID-19, others silently and ashamedly rejoiced in the virus’ demands. The requirement of face masks made it mandatory for everyone to cover more than half of their face. And for those who disliked their face, they, for nearly two years, had the chance to go out in the world and not be ugly for once. Suddenly, while they were not beautiful, they were not hideous. Neutrality can do so much for someone. This period was like a gift for those with horrid teeth, large features, cystic acne, injuries, scarring, and discoloration. Never before were so many people looked straight in the eyes. Masks were some people’s only chance to show who they were. And now, when the pandemic had ended, they were back in the shadows. Large groups of people, however, as Andrei had seen, still wore them, beneath the excuse that the virus could still return. "I would love to kiss one of you on the cheek, he thought.”

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Book:A Happy Ghost
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“He thrust his pelvis against his mattress, humping his pillow and thinking of no particular woman or memory, but merely the idea of being touched by someone—anyone. It was a sort of sorrowful pornography, masturbating to the day he would never need to masturbate. He closed his eyes and released on his sheets two fluids of desperation: semen of a lonely man and tears of a lonelier one.”

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Book:The Goodbye Song
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“He clutched the handle of the knife with the same strength the gang members used to kick him. He was worthless, like a crumpled bit of trash thrown, but not worth picking up, that doesn’t even deserve a courteous foot nudge to hide. He was unseen, like the skin beneath the toga of a female statue made of stone. He was ugly, like the damaged face of the deformed stranger you try not to look at because you don’t want it in your memory. He was as soft as the pull-tab of a soda can, as easily broken as a straw wrapper, and as close to death as a baby slug crawling next to a group of kids at summer camp.”

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Book:The Goodbye Song
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“Isolation has carved me in its image and likeness. The presence of another person – of any person whatsoever – instantly slows down my thinking, and while for a normal man contact with others is a stimulus to spoken expression and wit, for me it is a counterstimulus, if this compound word be linguistically permissible. When all by myself, I can think of all kinds of clever remarks, quick comebacks to what no one said, and flashes of witty sociability with nobody. But all of this vanishes when I face someone in the flesh: I lose my intelligence, I can no longer speak, and after half an hour I just feel tired. Yes, talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial, and in them intelligence gleams like an image in a mirror.”

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Book:The Book of Disquiet
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“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!”

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Book:The Basement Trains: A 21st Century Poem
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“This is the problem with the gig economy, I think as I squirm around in the trunk. Everyone is so vulnerable and the rules for what constitutes civilized behavior--well, they're coming apart so quickly I've decided those rules were illusions all along. We have stopped seeing each other as people, as fellow travelers on this dying earth; we just see a gig or an economy.... The system is designed to keep us so depleted that we forget our sense of decency and become so mercenary about our own survival that we have nothing left to contribute to the common good.”

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Book:I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories
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“Sergio ha descubierto para su mal, que bíblicamente hablando, el tiempo del trabajo es el tiempo de la condena. Se repite y multiplica de una manera muy diversa. El oficinista que espera ansioso la hora de salida de su oficina, o el fin de semana, o sus vacaciones anuales y más tarde su jubilación, y el preso que comparte una condena fija, comparten una misma espantosa paradoja: en nombre de la vida, quieren que el tiempo pase, sin percatarse de que así el tiempo que anhelan perder es el único tiempo suyo, el tiempo de su vida, un tiempo que nadie les podrá devolver. Un día lo descubren, y entonces ya no pueden dormir en paz.”

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Book:Wolves' Dream
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“A screaming silence surrounds us. The waves claw the shore in hushed strokes. My words claw at my throat. “In silent words, you speak so much.” “And you, though you speak volumes, say precious little. Don’t you know that words are actors set in motion, and you are the playwright. They can create a mood of harmony or destroy peace in violent isolation. Words are civilians or soldiers; artists or autocrats; worshippers or pagans. They make you rich or sell you into poverty. Master them and you rule, or be mastered by them and serve.” She pauses as if in reflection. “Words can sway the masses; words can sway your own soul.”

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Book:An owl on the moon: A journal from the edge of darkness
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“And it is because we all of us know of this sombre power and its perilous manifestations, that we stand in so deep a dread of silence. We can bear, when need must be, the silence of ourselves, that of isolation: but the silence of many - silence multiplied - and above all the silence of a crowd - these are supernatural burdens, whose inexplicable weight brings dread to the mightiest soul.”

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Book:The Treasure of the Humble
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“People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles. This is the first thing I hear when I come back to the city. Blair picks me up from LAX and mutters this under her breath as she drives up the onramp. She says, "People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles." Though that sentence shouldn't bother me, it stays in my mind for an uncomfortably long time. Nothing else seems to matter. Not the fact that I'm eighteen and it's December and the ride on the plane had been rough and the couple from Santa Barbara, who were sitting across from me in first class, had gotten pretty drunk. Not the mud that had splattered on the legs of my jeans, which felt kind of cold and loose, earlier that day at an airport in New Hampshire. Not the stain on the arm of the wrinkled, damp shirt I wear, a shirt which looked fresh and clean this morning. Not the tear on the neck of my gray argyle vest, which seems vaguely more eastern than before, especially next to Blair's clean tight jeans and her pale-blue shirt. All of this seems irrelevant next to that one sentence. It seems easier to hear that people are afraid to merge than "I'm pretty sure Muriel is anorexic" or the singer on the radio crying out about magnetic waves. Nothing else seems to matter to me but those ten words. Not the warm winds, which seem to propel the car down the empty asphalt freeway, or the faded smell of marijuana which still faintly permeates Blaire's car. All it comes down to is the fact that I'm a boy coming home for a month and meeting someone whom I haven't seen for four months and people are afraid to merge.”

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Book:Less Than Zero
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“Through all this ordeal his root horror had been isolation, and there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one. That is why, in spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world will always return to monogamy.”

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Book:The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
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