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Exlpore more Isolation quotes

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The Forest that had been about her all her life, certain as a mountain, was made ashes. The high gable that had stood for two hundred years fallen in ruin. Throvenland was torn apart like smoke on the wind. Nowhere would be safe, ever again."

"This woman's size protected herfrom the hurts of the worldbut it also imprisoned her soul. As the merry-go-round revolved, she ate another French fry,as a silent scream frozen on her face."

"Everyone's moving on without me, into a world I don't understand."

"Dreams deny her the freedom she truly seeks. Darkness consumes. Leg muscles burn. She runs away, even while lost in the paradise of sleep. Gravity is a crushing force bearing down on her chest, shattering wings and refusing her flight. A whisper in her mind. You don't belong here."

"I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them, I have nothing in common with them."
Explore more quotes by Ally Condie

"What are the gifts given to we who live Below?'Long life, health, strength, and happiness.'What is the curse of those who live Above?'Short life, illness, weakness, and misery.'Is this fair?'It is fair. It is as the gods decreed at the time of the Divide. Some have to stay Above so that humanity might survive Below.'Then give thanks."

"So much of life is in the smallness of moments...but they are harder to mark. So we need the grander celebrations and occasions. People like to feel significant."

"At first, that's who I was. I wanted to know more about this boy who lives among us, but who never truly speaks... But now I feel like finding out about him is one of the ways I found out about myself. I did not expect to love his words. I did no expect to find myself in the."

"Sometimes you can't speak, not because others won't let you, but because you are afraid of what you'll say."

"It strikes me that perhaps this is part of what we are fighting to choose. Which pain to feel."

"No,' she says, as if the suggestion is ridiculous. 'I wouldn't go back to where I'm from. I'd go someplace I've never been."

"But then I realize that even if I did have a soul, it's not as though someone else would be there. It would only be more of me."

"Isn't it funny how the memories you cherish before a breakup can become your worst enemies afterwards? The thoughts you loved to think about, the memories you wanted to hold up to the light and view from every angle - it suddenly seems a lot safer to lock them in a box, far from the light of day and throw away the key. It's not an act of bitterness. It's an act if self-preservation. It's not always a bad idea to stay behind the window and look out at life instead, is it?"
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