Self-Imposed Isolation Quotes

You built your walls too, she tells him. So I have my wall. She says it glittering in a beauty he cannot stand. She with her beautiful clothes with her pale face that laughs at everyone who smiles at her.

I lock my door upon myself, And bar them out; but who shall wall Self from myself, most loathed of all?

The quality of owning freezes you forever in "I," and cuts you off forever from the "we.

I am an extremely private person. I always feel that I come across as a caricature of myself whenever I do interviews.

I don't really talk to people.

Why do you work so hard to make yourself disliked? I should think you'd find it happens enough on its own without putting yourself to any extra trouble.

He was a very private person, and sometimes it seemed to me that he was no longer interested in the world or in other people... I got the feeling that Julián was living in the past, locked in his memories. Julián lived within himself, for his books and inside them - a comfortable prison of his own design." "You say this as if you envied him." "There are worse prisons than words.

When we hide from the world in this way, we feel secure. We may think we have quieted our fear, but we are actually making ourselves numb with fear. We surround ourselves with our own familiar thoughts, so that nothing sharp or painful can touch us.

I'm an only child; I'm a very private person.

It would be erroneous to say Sohrab was quiet. Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it. Sohrab's silence wasn't the self imposed silence of those with convictions, of protesters who seek to speak their cause by not speaking at all. It was the silence of one who has taken cover in a dark place, curled up all the edges and tucked them under.

And I have the others in me. Even when I’m far away from them, I am forced to live with them. Even when I’m all alone, crowds surround me. I have no place to flee to, unless I were to flee from myself.

I've been pretending to be normal for so much of my life.

You think I alienate myself from society? Of course I alienate myself from society. It’s the only way I know of not being constantly reminded of all the ways I’m alienated from society.

If you shut yourself up disdainfully in your ivory tower and insist that you have your own conscience and are satisfied with its approval, it is because you know that everybody is criticizing you, condemning you, or laughing at you.

He was thirty-one now, not too old, but old enough to be lonely. He hadn't dated since he'd been back here, hadn't met anyone who remotely interested him. It was his own fault, he knew. There was something that kept a distance between him and any woman who started to get close, something he wasn't sure he could change even if he tried. And sometimes in the moments right before sleep came, he wondered if he was destined to be alone forever.

God, I feel like hell tonight. Tears of rage I cannot fight. I'd be the last to help you understand... Nothing's true and nothing's right so let me be alone tonight 'cause you can't change the way I am... I have a face I cannot show, I make the rules up as I go. It's try and love me if you can. Are you strong enough to be my man? When I've shown you that I just don't care, when I'm throwing punches in the air, when I'm broken down and I can't stand will you be man enough to be my man?

Solitude, the sly enemy that doth separate a man from well-doing.

I made a vow that I would never need another person ever. Turned my heart into a cage, a victim of a kind of rage.

A hermit is simply a person to whom civilization has failed to adjust itself.

How in the world was I alone? Because I wanted to be. That's all I can say. It's all that makes sense to me.

I think we are isolating ourselves, and in so isolating ourselves, I think we're minimizing ourselves, I don't think we are taken as seriously today as we were a few years ago.

A fine line separates the weary recluse from the fearful hermit. Finer still is the line between hermit and bitter misanthrope.

The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up.

Each man is his own prisoner, in solitary confinement for life.

Only man has become an outsider - and because of his own efforts. On his own, he has separated himself from existence.