And sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in.

I lived a very isolated life. When you start at 20, you have a lot of nonsense to work out of your system.

I can’t reveal the mystery to either saint or sinner; I can’t state at length what I’ve said curtly; I achieve an altered state that I can’t explain; I have a secret that I cannot share.

My life is marked by long silences.

Circumstances have been such, that I have lived almost entirely secluded for some time. Those who are much in earnest and with single minds devoted to any great object in life, must find this occasionally inevitable.... You will wonder at having heard nothing from me; but you have experience and candour enough to perceive and know that God has not given to us (in this state of existence) more than very limited powers of expression of one's ideas and feelings... I shall be very desirous of again seeing you. You know what that means from me, and that it is no form, but the simple expression and result of the respect and attraction I feel for a mind that ventures to read direct in God's own book, and not merely thro' man's translation of that same vast and mighty work.

I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself using words. When I speak, I only pack myself a little differently.

For the feeling will not correspond to the theory until you have also discovered the unity of inner experience. Despite all theories, you will feel that you are isolated from life so long as you are divided within.

I'm not close to people, I am close to myself. I spend a lot of time inside.

Isolation. I had nobody to tell, and no language for it anyhow. (p28)

I avoided my own friends and acquaintances, yet the loneliness of my existence was insupportable.

Individuals of the earlier species had suffered from an almost insurmountable spiritual isolation from one another. Not even lovers, and scarcely even the geniuses with special insight into personality, ever had anything like accurate vision of one another.

All my life, I have lived with the feeling that I have been kept from my true place. If the expression "metaphysical exile" had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.

Isolation has carved me in its image and likeness.

"Quant à moi, maintenant, j'ai fermé mon âme. Je ne dis plus à personne ce que je crois, ce que je pense et ce que j'aime. Me sachant condamné à l'horrible solitude, je regarde les choses, sans jamais émettre mon avis. Que m'importent les opinions, les querelles, les plaisirs, les croyances ! Ne pouvant rien partager avec personne, je me suis désintéressé de tout. Ma pensée, invisible, demeure inexplorée. J'ai des phrases banales pour répondre aux interrogations de chaque jour, et un sourire qui dit "oui", quand je ne veux même pas prendre la peine de parler."