Do you have Quotes about commitment issues/trust issues/ isolation?
Clarice Lispector, An Apprenticeship, or The Book of Delights
“As members of human society, perhaps the most difficult task we face daily is that of touching one another—whether the touch is physical, moral, emotional or imaginary. Contact is crisis. As the anthropologists say, ‘Every touch is a modified blow.’”
—Anne Carson, Dirt and Desire: Essay on the Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity
“But why is it that the more we come in contact with people the more remote we feel? Even the kindness shown to us makes us feel different, and alone and sad.”
—Kahlil Gibran, Beloved Prophet: Love Letters
“It does me no good; violence has changed me. / My body has grown cold like the stripped fields; / now there is only my mind, cautious and wary, / with the sense it is being tested.”
—Louise Glück, Averno; “October”
“The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”
—Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
“Only here’s what I really, really want someone to explain to me. What if one happens to be possessed of heart that can’t be trusted—?”
—Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
“I could not explain the breaking away, the withdrawal that took place in me.”
—Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin: Vol. I
“For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there?”
—Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
“It was like not feeling real any more. Disconnected despite all the talking. Watching the self I’d built up over four or five years just crack and fall off me like paint.”
—Eimear McBride, The Lesser Bohemians
“Hosts / of regrets come and find me empty. / I don’t feel this will change. / I don’t want any thing / or person, familiar or strange. / I don’t think I will sing / anymore just now; / or ever.”
—John Berryman, Delusion, etc.
“…I was not wild, not volcanic, I was rigid and self-protective; the form my self-protectiveness took was exclusion: that which I feared, I ignored…”
—Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry
“You cease indeed to talk, which is a custom prevalent among things parted and torn…”
—Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters
“Language crumbled into dust under the weight of her speechlessness.”
—Angela Carter, Burning Your Boats
“Brittle, not from solitude, but from mistrust, the aftermath of violence.”
—Louise Glück, Vita Nova; “The Garment”
“she knew how to detach herself, / another unforgivable sin, / and when the stones were hurled, / she simply wasn’t there,”
“I had been withdrawing into a retreat of numbness: it is so much safer not to feel, not to let the world touch one. But my honest self revolted at this, hated me for doing this.”
—Sylvia Plath, Unabridged Journals
“When I go to say what I think, I don’t want to / anymore. I don’t feel like I am where you are; / I’m not in the world except by appearance.”
—Alice Notley, Certain Magical Acts
“To feel anything deranges you. To be seen feeling anything strips you naked. […] You think what will they do what new power will they acquire if they see me naked like this.”
“I am always astonished, amazed that people should be kind. It makes me want to weep. You know. It’s dreadfully upsetting. What! Can it be that they have a heart! They are not playing a trick on me, not ‘having me on’, not ready to burst their sides at my innocence?”
—Katherine Mansfield, from a letter to J.M. Murry
“I am very concerned when I imagine how strangled and cut off you currently live, afraid of touching anything that is filled with memories (and what is not filled with memories?). You will freeze in place if you remain this way. You must not, dear. You have to move.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval
“But my faith seems naive, at least today. Maybe tomorrow I can believe again.”
—Anaïs Nin, Nearer the Moon
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