top of page
.png){kind=small}
"There's something to be said in favor of working in isolation in the real world."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Isolation quotes
"Since some people had told me that I was ugly, I always preferred shade to the sun, darkness to light."
"Everyone's moving on without me, into a world I don't understand."
"Adam says I isolate. He is addicted to telling me that I spend too much time in my head. It's an unhealthy behavior. Look, I don't see how not bothering other people with your screwed-up vision of the world constitutes unhealthy behavior."
"What I ask of you is reasonable and moderate; I demand a creature of another sex, but as hideous as myself; the gratification is small, but it is all that I can receive, and it shall content me. it is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another. Our lives will not be happy, but they will be harmless, and free from the misery I now feel. Oh! my creator, make me happy; let me feel gratitude towards you of one benefit!"
"One will hate you for taking his life, another will run to excesses that you scorn. A third will emerge mad and raving, another a monster you cannot control. One will be jealous of your superiority, another shut you out... And the veil will always come down between you Make a legion, you will be, always and forever alone!"
"I had a strong sudden instinct that I must be alone. I didn't want to see any people at all. I had seen so many people all my life -- I was an average mixer, but more than average in a tendency to identify myself, my ideas, my destiny, with those of all classes that came in contact with. I was always saving or being saved -- in a single morning I would go through the emotions ascribable to Wellington at Waterloo. I lived in a world of inscrutable hostiles and inalienable friends and supporters."
"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."
"The best part waspulling down theshadesstuffing the doorbellwith ragsputting the phonein therefrigeratorand going to bedfor 3 or 4days. and the next bestpartwasnobody evermissedme."
"The exhilaration was hard to explain. It was a lonely feeling - a somehow melancholy feeling. He was outside; he passed on the wings of the wind, and none of the people beyond the brightly lighted squares of their windows saw him. They were inside, inside where there was light and warmth. They didn't know he had passed them; only he knew. It was a secret thing."
Explore more quotes by A. R. Ammons
"Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition."
"Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed."
"A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction."
"That's a wonderful change that's taken place, and so most poetry today is published, if not directly by the person, certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself, working with his friends."
"If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words,' or 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.'"
"I must stress here the point that I appreciate clarity, order, meaning, structure, rationality: they are necessary to whatever provisional stability we have, and they can be the agents of gradual and successful change."
"Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take."
"I can't tell you where a poem comes from, what it is, or what it is for: nor can any other man. The reason I can't tell you is that the purpose of a poem is to go past telling, to be recognised by burning."
bottom of page