top of page
.png){kind=small}
"They are so caught up in their happiness that they don't realize I'm not really a part of it. I am wandering along the periphery. I am like the people in the Winslow Homer paintings, sharing the same room with them but not really there. I am like the fish in the aquarium, thinking in a different language, adapting to a life that's not my natural habitat. I am the people in the other cars, each with his or her own story, but passing too quickly to be noticed or understood. . . . There are moments I just sit in my frame, float in my tank, ride in my car and say nothing, think nothing that connects me to anything at all."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Isolation quotes
"We may wonder what is going on in the back of the mind and what betides in the mood of some people who live on the edge of isolation and emotional poverty. They belong to life's outcasts: deserted by affection, deprived of physical or lingual contact and finally reduced to silence. ['Why didn't he ask ? ']"
"I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them, I have nothing in common with them."
"For everyone now strives most of all to seperate his person, wishing to experience the fullness of life within himself, and yet what comes of all his efforts is not the fullness of life, but full suicide, for instead of the fullness of self-definition, they fall into complete isolation."
"All I'd ever thought I wanted was to be left alone. Until I was."
"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."
"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."
"Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamn lonely anymore."
Explore more quotes by David Levithan
"If you want to live within the definition of your own truth, you have to choose to go through the painful process of finding it."
"It would be too easy to say that I feel invisible. Instead, I feel painfully visible, and entirely ignored."
"Luckily, I always travel with a book, just in case I have to wait on line for Santa, or some such inconvenience."
"The way you're singing in your sleepThe way you look before you leapThe strange illusions that you keepYou don't knowBut I'm noticingThe way your touch turns into arcsThe way you slide into the darkThe beating of my open heartYou don't knowBut I'm noticing."
"I try to convince myself that it's the alcohol talking. But alcohol can't talk. It just sits there. It can't even get itself out of the bottle."
"Now she's lit by the warm orange spreading from the horizon as not-quite-day, becomes not-quite-night."
"The word I think of is precarious. I am struck by how precarious it all is. How the things that hold us are only as strong as the faith we have in them."
"Max is a marvel to us. He will never have to come out because he will never have been kept in. Even though he has a mom and a dad, they made sure from the beginning to tell him that it didn't have to be a mom and a dad. It could be a mom and a mom, a dad and a dad, just a mom, or just a dad. When Max's early affections became clear, he didn't think twice about them. He doesn't see it as defining him. It is just a part of his definition."
"Do you wonder why we wander? Cal had asked.It was the night of the first snow; you could hear the branches bending and the iciclesfalling outside the window, beyond the wall.They were warmth together. They were hot breath and blankets and wrapping themselves."
bottom of page