top of page
"That year, when the trees burned the fire of late summer into their leaves and the ground mist was a ghost of the river, long and wet and cold, the aunt looked from her windows to the walls around her and imagined another winter inside them. She began to see the world as a bird sees bars, and she scratched her arms beneath her sleeves."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Isolation quotes

"Nobody the dead man & Nobody the livingNobody is giving in & Nobody is givingNobody hears me but just Nobody caresNobody fears me but Nobody just staresNobody belongs to me & Nobody remainsNo Nobody knows nothingAll that remains are remains."

"Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man."

"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."

"I slump in my chair, thinking how a narcotic party of one is no party at all."

"The best part waspulling down theshadesstuffing the doorbellwith ragsputting the phonein therefrigeratorand going to bedfor 3 or 4days. and the next bestpartwasnobody evermissedme."

"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."

"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."
Explore more quotes by Shannon Hale

"I let my head fall back, and I gazed into the Eternal Blue Sky. It was morning. Some of the sky was yellow, some the softest blue. One small cloud scuttled along. Strange how everything below can be such death and chaos and pain while above the sky is peace, sweet blue gentleness. I heard a shaman say once, the Ancestors want our souls to be like the blue sky."

"It doesn't seem to matter what we think...The prince will come up here and look at us as if we're barrels in a trader's wagon. And if I'm salt pork and he doesn't care for salt pork, then there's nothing I can do."

"I'm a terrible prince. I should put my kingdom first and everything else second, but your first. I want you by my side every second, but I know I would crumble if I lost you."

"A cat can make you feel well rested when you're tired or turn a rage into a calm just by sitting on your lap. His very nearness is a healing song."

"Seriously, a thirty-something woman shouldn't be daydreaming about a fictional character in a two-hundred-year-old world to the point where it interfered with her very real and much more important life and relationships. Of course she shouldn't."

"The snow was too light to stay, the ground too warm to keep it. And the strange spring snow fell only in that golden moment of dawn, the turning of the page between night and day."

"Mama used to say, you have to know someone a thousand days before you can glimpse her soul."

"Do you know the feeling you get when you are awakened in the middle of a dream? The dream story is still real and full of color, but the waking world is rushing back into your mind. And for a moment both worlds are true, and you cannot quite tell them apart."
bottom of page