Best 399 quotes in «isolation quotes» category

Every person who was a genius, a mental giant, or a great contributor to the human race watered the seeds of his greatness from the well of isolation, until the seed became a plant, and then finally, a formidable tree.

Few of us have a healthy sense of boundaries. We either have rigid boundaries (“No one is ever going to get close to me”) or weak boundaries (“I’ll be anything anyone wants me to be”). Rigid boundaries lead to distance and isolation; weak boundaries, to over-dependency and sometimes, further abuse. The ideal is to develop flexible boundaries, boundaries which can vary depending on the circumstances.

Find a part of yourself hidden in the twilight.

For a moment of nearly five seconds Nemed had wanted to correct, to interject with the boasting recitation of a child who has just learned something interesting about the subject at hand and wants to amaze the adults; he had wanted to tell Emer that the Inrisus were not magical or truly evil, and that their medicine was amazing. The tablet suggested that the Inrisus were entirely made of tumor cells; long ago, blue historians believed, the Inrisus had conquered cancer and found a way to separate its resilience to radiation and chemical attack from its malignancy, producing cells both immortal and functional. Their brains and hearts and other parts would keep showing up on medical scans, like blotches in a smoker’s lungs. Carcinogens simply made an Inrisus pregnant. But then Nemed realized that Emer was wearing beaver hide, that no part of his costume even had a zipper; he might not even know what cancer was. He wouldn’t know that it could be treated with radiation or chemicals; he wouldn’t appreciate the Inrisus and their ability to turn cancer into eternal life. He would probably call it necromancy, or a form of vampirism, stealing the life of an unborn infant because that was supposed to be the only way to live forever in the old stories of the Folk. I think less of him, Nemed realized. Him, and the others.

For some reason, I am certain that there is something I'm missing, something vital. Perhaps this is just more self-deception, yet another attempt to prove to myself that I'm not worthless.

From his earliest years Cincinnatus, by some strange and happy chance comprehending his danger, carefully managed to conceal a certain peculiarity. He was impervious to the rays of others, and therefore produced when off his guard a bizarre impression, as of a lone dark obstacle in the world of souls transparent to one other; he learned however to feign translucence, employing a complex system of optical illusions, as it were--but he had only to forget himself, to allow a momentary lapse in self control, in the manipulation of cunningly illuminated facets and angles at which he turned his soul, and immediately there was alarm. In the midst of the excitement of a game his coevals would suddenly forsake him, as if they had sensed that his lucid gaze and the azure of his temples were but a crafty deception and that actually Cincinnatus was opaque. Sometimes, in the midst of sudden silence, the teacher, in a chagrined perplexity, would gather up all the reserves of skin around his eyes, gaze at him for a long while and finally say: "What is wrong with you, Cincinnatus?" Then Cincinnatus would take hold of himself, and, clutching his own self to his breast, would remove that self to a safe place.

Everything pains me. The merest trifle rouses a sense of abandonment. I'm impatient with other people, their will to live, their universe. Attracted by a decision to withdraw from everyone [no longer bearing the world of Y].

God had said to listen to what five people tell you and don’t hold on to your own opinion. The person who holds on to his opinion is isolated. If you insist upon it, it will harm you as well as others. This true-false is a relative truth; it is a mundane [worldly] truth. One should not insist upon it.

Friendship is not a remedy for loneliness. Loneliness is part of our experience, and if we are looking for relief from loneliness in friendship, we are only going to frustrate the friendship. Friendship, camaraderie, intimacy, all those things, and loneliness lived together in the same experience.

He could have been invisible and it wouldn’t have made a difference to them. He didn’t care, so long as he felt at ease, which was his original intention. He wasn’t there to make friends, nor did he want to.

Generations can follow this destiny, can stay close to it or depart from it, having thus the capability of giving to their nation a maximum of life and honor or a maximum of dishonor and shame. Sometimes only isolated individuals, abandoned by their generation, can reach this destiny. In that moment, they are the people, they speak in its name. All the millions of dead and of the martyrs of the past are with them, as well as the nation's life of tomorrow.

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

Graff had isolated Ender to make him struggle. To make him prove, not that he was competent, but that he was far better than everyone else. That was the only way he could win respect and friendship. It made him a better soldier then he would ever have been otherwise. It also made him lonely, afraid, angry, untrusting. And maybe those traits, too, made him a better soldier.

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

Having arrived at this point, he had found no direction in which to go save that of further withdrawal into a subjectivity which refused existence to any reality or law but its own. During these postwar years he had lived in solitude and carefully planned ignorance of what was happening in the world. Nothing had importance save the exquisitely isolated cosmos of his own consciousness. Then little by little he had had the impression that the light of meaning, the meaning of everything was dying. Like a flame under a glass it had dwindled, flickered and gone out, and all existence, including his own hermetic structure from which he had observed existence, had become absurd and unreal.

Haymitch isn't thinking of arenas, but something else. "Johanna's back in the hospital." I assumed Johanna was fine, had passed her exam, but simply wasn't assigned to a sharp shooters' unit. She's wicked with a throwing axe but about average with a gun. "Is she hurt? What happened?" "It was while she was on the Block. They try to ferret out a soldier's potential weakness. So they flooded the street, " says Haymitch. This doesn't help. Johanna can swim. At least, I seem to remember her swimming around some in the Quarter Quell. Not like Finnick, of course, but none of us are like Finnick. "So?" "That's how they tortured her in the Capitol. Soaked her then used electric shocks," says Haymitch. "In the Block, she had some kind of flashback. Panicked, didn't know where she was. She's back under sedation." Finnick and I just stand there as if we've lost the ability to respond. I think of the way Johanna never showers. How she forced herself into the rain like it was acid that day. I had attributed her misery to morphling withdrawal. "You two should go see her. You're as close to friends as she's got," says Haymitch. That makes the whole thing worse. I don't really know what's between Johanna and Finnick, but I hardly know her. No family. No friends.Not so much as a token from District 7 to set beside her regulation clothes in her anonymous drawer. Nothing.

He can have friends. It's parents he can't have.

He had been for many years, a quiet silent man, associating but little with other men, and used to companionship with his own thoughts. He had never known before the strength of the want in his heart for the frequent recognition of a nod, a look, a word; or the immense amount of relief that had been poured into it by drops through such small means.

He laid there realizing how thoroughly he'd removed himself from the world or obligations, how stupidly independent he'd become: he needed no one, knew no one, was not a part of anyone's life. He'd so thoroughly removed himself from the world of dependencies and obligations, he wasn't sure he still existed.

He was a stranger here. The people who might remember him would certainly not welcome him. His old gang had cast him out, along with all of the former friends and parents. The suburban landscape of hypocrisy, so hated in his youth, beheld again and with it, old feelings that motivated him through life more than he would ever admit. Every turning point in life, already decided by all the events here

He welcomed isolation with all his heart. It never occurred to him that the reserve he met in Bedap and Tirin might be a response; that his gentle but already formidable hermetic character might form its own ambiance, which only great strength, or great devotion, could withstand. All he noticed, really, was that he had plenty of time to work at last.

He will not go behind his father's saying, And he likes having thought of it so well He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors.

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.

He had so much damn respect he wanted to scream.

Hello International Space Station, goodbye civilization.

He liked the electric darkness and the hot dirty air and the blasts of noise and traffic and the manic barking sirens and the crush of people. It helped a lonely man feel connected and isolated both at the same time.

He lived a quiet existence where the future was easy to predict and the past was a cancer in remission. It was meaningful, of course. But it was lonely.

He locked himself up in his sanctuary of art and carried the keys with him at all times. He maintained the social façade for financial security. The more tragedies were shackled to his name, the more demand there was for his public persona to clean up after the family name and showcase his art to overshadow his domestic disasters. His prominent reputation in the limelight of the town kept buzzing while the man behind the infamy withered in privacy.

He who has lived and thought can't help despising people in his soul; him who has felt disturbs the ghost of irrecoverable days; for him there are no more enchantments; him does the snake of memories, him does repentance bite.

How easily such a thing can become a mania, how the most normal and sensible of women once this passion to be thin is upon them, can lose completely their sense of balance and proportion and spend years dealing with this madness.

How young I seem; I am exceptional; I think of all I have. But really no one is exceptional, No one has anything, I’m anybody, I stand beside my grave Confused with my life, that is commonplace and solitary.

I am going to the USA to catch sight of a wild porcupine and to give some lectures.

How often did he feel it now, this gorgeous, furtive seclusion? In the bath sometimes, maybe. Though Jean failed to understand his need for periodic isolation and regularly dragged him back to earth mid-soak by hammering on the locked door in search of bleach or dental floss.

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

I am trying to participate

I am a stranger in this world, and there is a severe solitude and painful lonesomeness in my exile.

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.

I barricaded myself and stared out the window, without seeing anything but my own unhappiness.

I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.

I close my eyes and try and shut him out. My fingers don’t want to stay in time. They want to race ahead in fury, plunging into the dense fog of black notes, pulling the music out by its roots, hurling it up out of the piano and into the air.

I am isolated. I sit in a glass ball, I see people through a glass wall. I scream, but they do not hear me. - Ellen West

I don't want to hide. I don't want to be alone. I don't want to wander off into the desert in shame and die and become vulture food. Or end up keeling over just because I'm too self-conscious to leave the house. Cause of Death: Unnecessary Loneliness.

I feel the swelling energy, the inexplicable, restless hunger, rising in my own innocent life. I don't care at all about the music or the drinking or the gathering together of teenagers for fun and the thrill of belonging. But my father is gone. He has a new life, a new wife and daughter, and never calls or visits. I miss him badly. My mother is inaccessible. My older brother and sister have moved on to their own lives, leaving me alone at home and on the beach while my mother works and plays with Peter.

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.

If you liked being alone all the time, that would be one thing. But I don't actually think you do. I think you're just letting yourself be scared.

I genuinely don’t know how the dating scene works now. People can manipulate their image totally with filters on dating sites, so you don’t know what they really look like. If you try to chat someone up, it’s seen as harassment. Society is fragmenting more and more at an alarming rate.

Idleness & isolation both starts with “I.” What can I do, should I do nothing by waiting for better things to arrive hence surrendering to the moment of in-action or should I act & make this moment best of all moments? Who am I? Someone good with making the best use of given opportunities or someone who creates opportunities! Workstations are lonely, customer queries are declining, we enter the phase of isolation & idleness, deciding the next move becomes impossible. We begin the day looking for work, which is non-existent so we decide to let ourselves flow with the tide of idleness. We do nothing which seems difficult in the beginning but gradually it becomes a part of routine. We get surrounded by nothingness; nothing in-hand & nothing in sight. We stop thinking, we stop moving, like our physical fitness even our mental fitness start to deteriorate by lack of thinking. Nothing to think is a situation when we believe what others say, we become slaves of their thoughts, we stop being ourselves we choose to be like them, because it offers us a chance to avoid being singled out, we follow where others lead us, we knowingly become a sheep and blindly start following the herd. Idleness & isolation always gives us a choice to get-up and change the next moment, to come out of slumber, to try things not tried before, because we perform the best when we have nothing to lose, it’s that moment when we decide to give-up on being a follower & become the leader. Slowly results start coming, people start looking at us, what have we done & how have we done it. That is the moment when we transform the thought process of the teams, departments & organizations. That is when the “I” transforms itself into “WE” and impossible transform into the possible.

If I'm all alone, then the standard for sanity is up to me entirely.

If isolation is the furnace of transformation, I could be ashes by now.

If we don’t acknowledge the truth in our relationships, they simply become a state of isolation with somebody (some body) still around.