#isolation

Isolationism is over. ↗

— Ralph Steadman

#over

[The modern age] knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will cluck and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh through its changes, a plane will drone over, the nearest freeway will vibrate the air. Red and white lights will pass in the sky, lights will shine along highways and glance off windows. There is always a radio that can be turned to some all-night station, or a television set to turn artificial moonlight into the flickering images of the late show. We can put on a turntable whatever consolation we most respond to, Mozart or Copland or the Grateful Dead. ↗

— Wallace Stegner

#isolation #loneliness #modern-society #noise #peace

You're going through the horror of it, you're going through the isolation of it but you're being empowered by reminding yourself that you're connected to everybody else. ↗

— Adam Arkin

#connected #else #empowered #everybody #everybody else

Sadness is the ambrosia of all art. ↗

— Frances Fong

#disgust #inertia #isolation #poetry #sadness

There is a terrible beauty to isolation. You don’t have to accept responsibility for others, or live up to their expectations. You could dip your toe into humanity’s maelstrom from time to time, or sit on the river bank and observe. ↗

— Celia Stander

#isolation #philosophy #beauty

Our story is never written in isolation. We do not act in a one-man play. We can do nothing that does not affect other people, no matter how loudly we say, "It's my own business. ↗

— Madeleine L'Engle

#madeleine-l-engle #our-story #walking-on-water #art

Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity. ↗

— Jonathan Franzen

#integrity #isolation #reading #self-knowledge #social-change

It's funny, because my last record was a lot about isolation and people living in separate worlds that other people can't even understand, which drug addiction is the perfect negative example of. ↗

— Aimee Mann

#addiction #because #even #example #funny

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. ↗

— Amelia Gray

#alienation #dating #digital-age #isolation #age

Maybe that's what growing up means, in the end - you go far enough in the direction of - somewhere - and you realise that you've neutered the capacity of the term home to mean anything. [...] We don't get an endless number of orbits away from the place where meaning first arises, that treasure-house of first experiences. What we learn, instead, is that our adventures secure us in our isolation. Experience revokes our licence to return to simpler times. Sooner or later, there's no place remotely like home. ↗

— Gregory Maguire

#home #isolation #experience