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"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."
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Exlpore more Isolation quotes
"I am alone, I thought, and they are everybody."
"Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man."
"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."
"All I'd ever thought I wanted was to be left alone. Until I was."
"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 Toni Morrison
"The best hiding place was love. Thus the conversion from pristine sadism to fabricated hatred, to fraudulent love."
"Grownups don't pay it much attention because they can't imagine anything more majestic to a child than their own selves and so confused dependance for reverence."
"I can't tell you why I was in love with her. People didn't require that much as they do now. Folks were expected to be civilized to one another, honest, and - and clear. You relied on people being what they said they were, because there was no other way to survive."
"Outside, snow solidified itself into graceful forms. The peace of winter stars seemed permanent."
"Language, when it finally comes, has the vigor of a felon pardoned after twenty-one years on hold. Sudden, raw, stripped to its underwear."
"Apparently he thought he deserved only to be loved--from a distance, though--and given what he wanted. And in return he would be . . . what? Pleasant? Generous? Maybe all he was really saying was: I am not responsible for your pain; share your happiness with me but not your unhappiness."
"You know, the kind who know Jesus by His first name, but out of politeness never use it even to His face."
"In a way, her strangeness, her naivete, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings; had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like any artist with no art from, she became dangerous."
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