Isolated Quotes

“Blackness. Nothingness. It was in the shape of a giant, hazy shadow, enveloping me, swallowing me, and digesting me into the unknown. It was my biggest fear and my ultimate fate.”
― Misty Mount, The Shadow Girl

“Terra read the words aloud: “If I’m one day gone, you’ll know it’s here that I go. Into the black darkness that has become my foe. No one will look and no one will ever find. My memory will only exist in the broken mind.” She paused after reading the entry and then traced her fingers along the edges of the page. “There are more words written under the blackness. You can just barely see that they were words but I can’t make them out well enough to read.”
― Misty Mount, The Shadow Girl

“When I moved my hands down away from the window I caught sight of my reflection in the glass, bright against the black morning beyond. I couldn’t contain the audible gasp that sounded in my throat. I had expected to see the slightly translucent representation of my face mirrored on the pane, but instead I saw an ivory haze where my features should have been.”
― Misty Mount, The Shadow Girl

“When I realized what the drawing was depicting, I thought I would feel horror-stricken and petrified, but a strange calm had settled over me. I said, “This blackness was in my nightmare. It was coming for me to take me away . . . and I was running, trying to escape.”
― Misty Mount, The Shadow Girl

“I did my best to fight and claw my way back to the life I once knew, but panic had taken over and colors were swirling and fading all around me. It was all turning into a great cloud of blackness, just like the one I had seen in my dream. The looming cloud of nothingness I had feared for so long was finally grabbing me, wiping my world dark and blank. The darkness was thick and intense, an inky void that stretched to eternity in every direction. Eventually my panic burnt itself out and I simply stayed there in the dark, feeling as if someone had drained my adrenal glands. I was no longer responding to the dark with fear, but acceptance. In fact, curiosity was beginning to take over.
The longer I let myself stare into it, the less dark it appeared. After some time, I realized that it was all different shades of murky black and foggy gray overlapping and undulating, just out of focus. I blinked mentally and suddenly she was there, standing above me with concern etched in sooty-colored lines on her monochromatic face.”
― Misty Mount, The Shadow Girl

“The trick is not to be isolated―if you're isolated, like Winston Smith in 1984, then sooner or later you're going to break, as he finally broke. That was the point of Orwell's story. In fact, the whole tradition of popular control has been exactly that: to keep people isolated, because if you can keep them isolated enough, you can get them to believe anything. But when people get together, all sorts of things are possible.”
― Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

“When we feel lonely, we are not lacking in love. We are disconnected from love.”
― Yong Kang Chan, Reconnect to Love: A Journey From Loneliness to Deep Connection

“I wonder what it would be like, to never have to be alone.”
― Holly Black, The Stolen Heir

“I had a certain talent for friendship, but I never had any friends, either because they never appeared, or because the friendship I had imagined was a mistake made by my dreams. I always lived an isolated life, which became more and more isolated the more I came to know myself.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

“Being there, but not being there.”
― Anthony Liccione

“There is a sense of sovereignty that comes from life on a mountain, a perception of privacy and isolation, even of dominion.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“Ruefully, nobody perceives me as exceptionally gifted, intelligent, handsome, or physically strong. My sense of alienation stems from an inferiority complex, depressive nature, and manic tendencies that repulse other people. For many years, I passively accepted my clumsiness, uselessness, and lack of capacity for learning by avoiding serious literature and other opportunities for personal growth. I embraced personal ignorance by favoring tactile sensations and gross pleasure afforded in a materialistic culture that revels in a hedonistic lifestyle.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Will you tell me how you came to be living...' He stops, as if trying to find the words. 'As you were.'

I remember the care I'd given that he not know. How could I explain the way time seemed to slip from my fingers, the way I became incrementally more detached, more unable to reach out a hand to take something I wanted? I will not allow him to pity me any more than he does.

'You could have come to see me,' he says. 'If you need something.'

I laugh at that. 'You?'

He frowns down at me with his amber eyes. 'Why not?'

The enormity of the reasons catches in my mouth. He's a prince of Elfhame, and I am the disgraced child of traitors. He befriends everyone, from the troll guard at the entrance to all those Tiernan mentioned back in the High Court, while I have spent years alone in the woods. But most of all, because he could have asked his sister to allow me to stay on the Shifting Isles and didn't.

'Perhaps I wanted to save that favour you still owe me,' I say.

He laughs at that. Oak liking me is as silly as the sun liking a storm, but that doesn't stop my desire for it.

Me, with my sharp teeth and chilly skin. It's absurd. It's grotesque.

And yet, the way he looks at me, it almost seems possible.”
― Holly Black, The Stolen Heir

“I have stood apart from the world for so long. That has made it hard for me to navigate being in it, but it has also made me an excellent observer.”
― Holly Black, The Stolen Heir

“Our protection against loneliness is exactly what keeps the loneliness intact.”
― Yong Kang Chan, Reconnect to Love: A Journey From Loneliness to Deep Connection

“We are constantly looking to others for love, support, and happiness, not realizing that the best person to meet our emotional needs lies within us.”
― Yong Kang Chan, Reconnect to Love: A Journey From Loneliness to Deep Connection

“Overcoming loneliness is not about getting rid of it forever. It’s about accepting the purpose of loneliness.”
― Yong Kang Chan, Reconnect to Love: A Journey From Loneliness to Deep Connection

“Saturday: the bill is debated. That morning, the union fills the viewing
area. Some people get in. I don’t. I stand outside holding a placard someone else
wrote. Some people in suits, who work for the people who run this town, are
disdainful. We take their seats in the public viewing area. They think, “Why
don’t you go home?”
― Gary Floyd, Liberté: Days of Rage: 1990-2020

“Loneliness has a pathos all its own...”
― Joli Darling

“When did he first notice that in himself, that little fascination with damage and its consequences? He might alarm her. He might mean to alarm her. Doing damage to this fragile night because it was such an isolated thing, an accident, with a look of meaning about it and no meaning at all.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Jack

“Many people became isolated in Arcadia due to the historic river flooding from hurricane Ian.”
― Steven Magee

“Some people are like diamonds they give you beauty and peace when you are around them, when they isolated no one recognizes them and they don't know their price.”
― Kamaran Ihsan Salih

“In the countryside in the middle of nowhere, no one can hear your screams!”
― Steven Magee

“In the middle of nowhere, no one can hear your calls for help!”
― Steven Magee

“Let your spirit to be free in education do not isolated in a bounded cage.”
― Kamaran Ihsan Salih

“When your body’s failing you, you’re alone. No one can do it with you. No one can feel the pain with you, feel it right alongside you. I realized that early. We’re all a little alone. A little separate.”
― Kate Clayborn, Best of Luck

“An American “epidemic of loneliness,” it’s being called, in research papers, the press, even on an official U.S. government website. Two in five Americans are unhappy with the relationships they do have. One in five Americans feel lonely and socially isolated. Loneliness, these researchers warn, is as lethal as smoking 15 cigarettes a day; can lead to suicide, Alzheimer’s disease, and other dementias; messes with our immune and cardiovascular systems, and more. Loneliness, in other words, is killing us.
So every night, like a bedtime prayer, I open my apps and swipe.”
― Deborah Copaken, Ladyparts

“Some days I donʼt exist. My bed becomes a casket.”
― Juansen Dizon, I Am The Architect of My Own Destruction

“...feeling again that sensation of being completely invisible in a room full of people; a feeling he had come to loath.”
― Adam Rabinowitz, Garage Band

“If you were the gateway for refuge in times of trouble and you were isolated the gateway shut to your face in the time of happiness, if you didn't learn a lesson from it, just blame yourself.”
― Kamaran Ihsan Salih