#isolation

I like the idea of isolation, I like the idea of solitude. You can be connected and have a phone and still be lonely. ↗

— Paul Theroux

#i #idea #isolation #like #lonely

In much of the rest of the world, rich people live in gated communities and drink bottled water. That's increasingly the case in Los Angeles where I come from. So that wealthy people in much of the world are insulated from the consequences of their actions. ↗

— Jared Diamond

#civilization #consequences #environment #foresight #insight

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 no, it was too cold always (Still the dead one lay moaning) I was much too far out all my life And not waving but drowning. ↗

— Stevie Smith

#isolation #life

If our Founding Fathers wanted us to care about the rest of the world, they wouldn't have declared their independence from it. ↗

— Stephen Colbert

#isolationism #political-philosophy #politics #humor

…he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men [...] In the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I’m outside or is it all America? ↗

— John Updike

#angstrom #inspirational #isolation #loneliness #outside

So he was always in the town at one place or another, drinking, knocking about with the men he knew. It really wearied him. He talked to barmaids, to almost any woman, but there was that dark, strained look in his eyes, as if he were hunting something. Everything seemed so different, so unreal. There seemed no reason why people should go along the street, and houses pile up in the daylight. There seemed no reason why these things should occupy the space, instead of leaving it empty. His friends talked to him: he heard the sounds, and he answered. But why there should be the noise of speech he could not understand. ↗

— D.H. Lawrence

#drinking #isolation #language #meaninglessness #suicide

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. ↗

— Raquel Cepeda

#coming-of-age #family #home #identity #invisibility

Isolation is a big part of songwriting. ↗

— Natalie Imbruglia

#isolation #part #songwriting

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

— E.M. Forster

#isolation #machine #science-fiction #experience

Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation. ↗

— Wislawa Szymborska

#am #especially #everyone #experiences #good