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"During the days I felt myself slipping into a kind of madness. Solitary confinement has an astonishing effect on the mind. The trip was to stay calm and keep myself occupied. I spent hours working out how to break free. But trying to escape would have been instant suicide."
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"She walked in somber seclusion, unable to connect with women despite her heart's desire to do so while being shadowed by men who hungered for the indefinable; and while she yearned for friendship, they yearned for something more and what she had been in search of remained removed from her, and the more she erected barriers, the more they crossed them and each time they did, she turned from them and hid."
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Personal Development
"There is only one solitude, and it is great and is not easy to bear, and to almost everyone there come hours when they would gladly exchange it for some kind of communion, however banal and cheap, for the appearance of some slight harmony with the most easily available, with the most undeserving. But perhaps those are just the hours when solitude grows; for its growing is painful like the growing of boys and sad like the beginning of Spring."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I sometimes sit on my roof. Not to be closer to god. To be further from y'all."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Nico knew something about ghosts. Letting them get inside your head was dangerous. He wanted to help Reyna, but since his own strategy was to deal with his problems alone, spurning anyone who tried to get close, he couldn't exactly criticize Reyna for doing the same thing."
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Personal Development
"Their drift away from others produced a selfish privacy and they had lost the refuge and the consolation of a clan. Baptists, Presbyterians, tribe, army, family, some encircling outside thing was needed. Pride, she thought. Pride alone made them think that they needed only themselves, could shape life that way, like Adam and Eve, like gods from nowhere beholden to nothing except their own creations. She should have warned them, but her devotion cautioned against impertinence. As long as Sir was alive it was easy to veil the truth: that they were not a family-not even a like-minded group. They were orphans, each and all."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man."
Author Name
Personal Development
"All along - not only since she left, but for a decade before - I had been imagining her without listening, without knowing that she made as a poor a window as I did. And so I could not imagine her as a person who could feel fear, who could feel isolated in a roomful of people, who could be shy about her record collection because it was too personal to share. Someone who might have read travel books to escape having to live in the town that so many people escape to. Someone who - because no one thought she was a person - had no one to really talk to."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Up here on the Ice each of us is singular, isolate, I as cut off from those like me, from my society, and its rules, as he from his."
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Personal Development
"All I'd ever thought I wanted was to be left alone. Until I was."
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Personal Development
"The people who had turned their heads turned them again as the service proceeded; and at last observing her they whispered to each other. She knew what their whispers were about, grew sick at heart, and felt that she could come to church no more."
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Personal Development
Explore more quotes by Tahir Shah
"Real travel is not about the highlights with which you dazzle your friends once you're home. It's about the loneliness, the solitude, the evenings spent by yourself, pining to be somewhere else. Those are the moments of true value. You feel half proud of them and half ashamed and you hold them to your heart."
Travel
"The pursuit of illusion is not about studying for prizes, or for study's sake. There's no right or wrong, no pass or fail."
Exploration
"Previous journeys had taught me the danger of taking too much stuff."
Simplicity
"Searching for a lost city is a particularly European obsession."
Exploration
"Calcutta's the only city I know where you are actively encouraged to stop strangers at random for a quick chat."
Community
"There is nothing like a train journey for reflection."
Reflection
"Back at the Chateau Windsor there was a rat-like scratching at the door of my room. Vinod, the youngest servant, came in with a soda water. He placed it next to the bag of toffees. Then he watched me read. I was used to being observed reading. Sometimes the room would fill like a railway station at rush hour and I would be expected to cure widespread boredom."
Reading
"As the head of an expedition, you can't pussyfoot around being polite to everyone. You have to show your teeth once in a while; a little growling goes a long way."
Leadership
"My father looked on in disbelief, overwhelmed that his son had been taught to eat glass and relish it."
Survival
"The ability to tell a good route from a terrible one is a valuable skill when leading an expedition. Unfortunately for us all, it was a skill I did not possess."
Leadership
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