What was it – this implacable remoteness, this inability to surrender herself to the warmth and comradely feelings of others? Could being an academic star, being applauded over and over again as a prodigy, take the place of all that? She shuddered with a feeling she couldn’t have put a name to. It was the...

I fall in love with Paraíso. It’s like a giant playground where I’m never scolded for running around recklessly, where I’m almost overwhelmed with the amount of attention and love I receive from Mami’s family. In New York, I’m invisible.

One of the disadvantages of traveling alone is that when you fall there is none to assist you.

The new contract between writers and readers is one I’m prepared to sign up to. I’ve met some fascinating people at events and online. Down with the isolation of writers I say! And long live Twitter.

Loneliness clarifies. Here silence standsLike heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken, Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken, Luminously-peopled air ascends; And past the poppies bluish neutral distance Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence: Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.

All men lead their lives behind a wall of misunderstanding they have themselves built and most men die in silence and unnoticed behind the walls. Now and then a man, cut off from his fellows by the peculiarities of his nature, becomes absorbed in doing something that is personal, useful and beautiful. Word of his...

The best way of ensuring that you don’t get infected with something like this, in the absence of an effective vaccine, would be isolation,

…it begins with isolation – demons always inhabit desolate places…

Being connected to everything has disconnected us from ourselves and the preciousness of this present moment.

No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other’s tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of...

A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.

Sometimes isolation can be shared.

God isn’t here. God doesn’t even know about this place

Noli me tangere,noli me legere,noli me videre,noli me

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

My aunt must have been perfectly well aware that she would not see Swann again, that she would never leave her own house any more, but this ultimate seclusion seemed to be accepted by her with all the more readiness for the very reason which, to our minds, ought to have made it more unbearable;...

Lovers are not snails; they don’t have to protrude from their shells and meet each other halfway. Meet me within your own self.

It is my opinion that the isolated mind loses its purchase on reality all too easily and becomes prone to fantasy.

Playing roles and acting are forms of lying. If a person acts like they really feel and it rocks the boat, they are ostracized. We promote pretense and lying as a cultural way of life. Living this way causes an inner split. It teaches us to hide and cover up our toxic shame. This sends...

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...

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were:...

‘In our inmost and secret heart, which you ask us to bare to you, we wish to banish them as we were banished, to a cold and lonely house, in the charge of a man who hated us. And we wish them trapped there as we were trapped.’ ‘You consider that unjust, Serenity?’ ‘We consider...

Halls are full of strangers, even when you recognize the faces.

I make love like Siberia, only with less heat and more of an isolated feeling.

Our society is so fragmented, our family lives so sundered by physical and emotional distance, our friendships so sporadic, our intimacies so ‘in-between’ things and often so utilitarian, that there are few places where we can feel truly safe.

How catastrophic is it when the church herself becomes secularized and expressive individualism sits in the driver’s seat in the church’s life and mission. When the church has lost connection with Christ her living head, she loses her soul.

The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.

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...

Sadness is the ambrosia of all art.

Camus had said in his ‘Carnets’ that the lives of others appear always, from the outside, to have a completion our own dismally lacks. Only when we understand this as a projection – that our lives, too, are unclosed and contingent – do we approach maturity. Alice felt immature. She felt that she was a...

Vashti was seized with the terrors of direct experience. She shrank back into the room, and the wall closed up again.

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.

Even as a child the glimpse of what a normal life would have been was always beyond my vision and my grasp. No matter what I glimpsed – whether hope or warning, happiness or sadness – it all led to the same present, to me being numb.I have been formed by the events of my...

A major determining factor by which a superior human can be isolated from his average counterparts is his very isolation—the degree to which he naturally removes himself from mass-media input and stimuli. You cannot be an elitist, a Magician, and be plugged into the system.

At this stage of the game, I don’t have the time for patience and tolerance. Ten years ago, even five years ago, I would have listened to people ask their questions, explained to them, mollified them. No more. That time is past. Now, as Norman Mailer said in Naked and the Dead, ‘I hate everything...

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.

There are all these people here I don’t know by sight or by name. And we pass alongside each other and don’t have any connection. And they don’t know me and I don’t know them. And now I’m leaving town and there are all these people I will never know.

My husband says this longing for isolation is not a good quality, that if I wanted to be a hermit I should have moved to the West Coast and adopted a lot of cats, not gotten married and had children that demand to be fed several times a day.

People don’t live like islands.

A study in scarlet, eh? Why shouldn’t we use a little art jargon? There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.

Maybe the real issue here is that we were not created to do life by ourselves. We were not given a sentence of solitary confinement and placed in a world of isolation, but from the moment we entered this human experience, it was clear there was a world waiting to be discovered, creatures which were...

But most days,I wander around feeling invisible.Like I’m a speck of dustfloating in the airthat can only be seenwhen a shaft of light hits it.

I am not an outsider. I am an insider who discovered that everyone else had gone out.

It was so quiet, a reservation kind of quiet, where you can hear somebody drinking whiskey on the rocks three miles away.

There comes a time when something changes you… No matter the impact… Where the world no longer beats in time with you. You no longer feel amongst the fray.. And the feeling of loneliness is a brandished armor you wear the rest of your life.

Not Waving but Drowning Nobody heard him, the dead man, But still he lay moaning: I was much further out than you thought And not waving but drowning. Poor chap, he always loved larking And now he’s dead It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way, They said. Oh, no no...

One by one they are being picked off around him: in his small circle of colleagues the ratio slowly grows top-heavy, more ghosts, more each winter, and fewer living… and with each one, he thinks he feels patterns on his cortex going dark, settling to sleep forever, parts of whoever he’s been losing all definition,...

One situation – maybe one alone – could drive me to murder: family life, togetherness.

Cath wasn’t trying to make new friends here. In some cases, she was actively trying not to make friends, though she usually stopped short of being rude.

One recalls the literary writer who, after grasping a story of a Mars voyage as a metaphor for isolation and the precariousness of relationships, realized that at a deeper, more subtle level it might even be a story about an actual trip to Mars!