We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship
can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone.
- Orson Welles

We're all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!
- Tennessee Williams

We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone,
alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.
- Maya Angelou

The one happiness is to shut one's door upon a little room, with a table before one,
and to create; to create life in that isolation from life.
- Eleonora Duse

Terrified of being alone, yet afraid of intimacy, we experience widespread feelings
of emptiness, of disconnection, of the unreality of self. And here the computer, a
companion without emotional demands, offers a compromise. You can be a loner,
but never alone. You can interact, but need never feel vulnerable to another person.
- Sherry Turkle

Sometimes people who are never alone are the loneliest, don't you think so?
- A.I. (Albert Isaac) Bezzerides, Nicholas Ray

Shut out from the world with its blare and glare, life in an institution moves softly.
The ears become attuned to gentle notes and a subdued tone.
- Mary B. Harris prison administrator

O make me a mask and a wall to shut from your spies
Of the sharp, enamelled eyes and the spectacled claws
Rape and rebellion in the nurseries of my face....
- Dylan Thomas

National isolation breeds national neurosis.
- Hubert H. Humphrey

Life's an awfully lonesome affair.... You come into the world alone and you go out of
the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going
and coming.
- Emily Carr

Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.
- Eugene O'Neill

It isn't the oceans which cut us off from the world—it's the American way of looking
at things.
- Henry Miller

If only I could manage, without annoyance to my family, to get imprisoned for 10
years, “without hard labour,” and with the use of books and writing materials, it
would be simply delightful!
- Lewis Carroll

He stands
isolate in a bulletproof
witness-stand of glass,
a cage where we may view
ourselves....
- Denise Levertov

But, my dear, you cannot live in isolation from the human race, you know.
- John Clifford, Herk Harvey

View at Oostereiland by Jan Rietschoof (1652-1719)