quotes about Numbness
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You can live without me." "I don't want to." I feared a love like this - that made us incomplete without each other. It was beautiful but treacherous, like snow that looked white and pure and lovely from the safety of your window, but when you stepped out to touch the softness, the cold first stole your breath, and then your will to move, until you could just lay down in it and let the numbness take you. yet I didn't want to be without him either, so I didn't chide him for the statement.
-- Ann Aguirre -
During the terrible years of the Yekhov terror I spent seventeen months in the prison queues in Leningrad. One day someone ‘identified’ me. Then a woman with lips blue with cold who was standing behind me, and of course had never heard of my name, came out of the numbness which affected us all and whispered in my ear—(we all spoke in whispers there): ‘Could you describe this?’ I said, ‘I can!’ Then something resembling a smile slipped over what had once been her face.
-- Anna Akhmatova -
This morning I suddenly catch myself: I'm not there, I'm so lost in thought, I don't know what's going on around me. Can you think yourself to death?
-- Anna Kamienska -
Grief, as I read somewhere once, is a lazy Susan. One day it is heavy and underwater, and the next day it spins and stops at loud and rageful, and the next day at wounded keening, and the next day numbness, silence.
-- Anne Lamott -
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Torture presupposes, it requires, it craves the abrogation of our capacity to imagine others suffering, dehumanizing them so much that their pain is not our pain. It demands this of the torturer, placing the victim outside and beyond any form of compassion or empathy, but also demands of everyone else the same distancing, the same numbness.
-- Ariel Dorfman -
I felt deeply tricked. Stunned. And furious. I also felt my default emotion: numbness.
-- Augusten Burroughs -
Violence is its own anesthetist. The numbness it induces feels very much like calm.
-- Barbara Grizzuti Harrison -
And though the coldness I have always felt leaves me, the numbness doesn't and probably never will. this relationship will probably lead to nothing... this didn't change anything. I imagine her smelling clean, like tea...
-- Bret Easton Ellis -
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I want someone to pinch me so I can feel something, anything. I'm sick of this numbness, of feeling so alone and outside of everything, but I know it's too dangerous to wake up." —Ruth Mendenberg
-- Carol Matas -
The music left only this bad hurt in her, and a blankness. She could not remember any of the symphony, not even the last few notes. She tried to remember, but no sound at all came to her. Now that it was over there was only her heart like a rabbit and this terrible hurt.
-- Carson McCullers -
It was, just as Kinski had predicted, suicide. He should never have done it. It is widely held by those who knew him, and Kinski himself, that he never recovered from Woyzeck. But what was the ultimate result? If you are the viewer of this film, Kinski's portrayal shocks your feelings out of the vault of intellectualizing or passive observing. He forces you to feel with him, to align yourself with your buried emotions. He outs your sensitivity. Is this not something Christ-like? It is, for my money. Kinski is the pure cure for the 21st-century disease - the numbness unto droning.
-- Cintra Wilson -
I turned away from him and went on my way, up the street and about my business. The past was dead. The future was resignation, fatality, and could only end one way now. The present was numbness, that could feel nothing. Like Novocaine needled into your heart. What was there in all the dimensions of time for me? ("Life Is Weird Sometimes" first chapter of unpublished novel THE LOSER)
-- Cornell Woolrich -
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But what would that be like feeling the tide rise out of the numbness inside
-- David Whyte -
He wondered if this was what clinical depression felt like, a total numbness, a weary lack of hope.
-- Dennis Lehane -
There's much to be said for feeling numb. Time passes more quickly. You eat less, and because numbness encourages laziness, you do fewer things, good or bad, and the world's probably a better place for it.
-- Douglas Coupland -
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We do not truly speak except at a distance. There is no word not severed.
-- Edmond JabesSource : Edmond Jabès (1993). “The Book of Margins”, p.174, University of Chicago Press
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I'm something that I used to be. I'm never where I feel I am, and if I seek myself, I don't know who's seeking me. My boredom with everything has numbed me. I feel banished from my soul.
-- Fernando Pessoa -
There is a feeling of disbelief that comes over you, that takes over, and you kind of go through the motions. You do what you're supposed to do, but in fact you're not there at all.
-- Frederick Barthelme -
In general, it’s not too hard to corrupt an American, mostly a matter of supply to their demand. Supply should be variegated to encourage the Illusion of Choice. Other than that they’re looking for numbness, so be ready to sedate. Drugs, booze, television, shopping, etc…
-- Geoffrey Wood -
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As long as I kept my body moving I could forget about the emptiness inside.
-- Haruki Murakami -
I have this strange feeling that I'm not myself anymore. It's hard to put into words, but I guess it's like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling.
-- Haruki Murakami -
I almost said, you're not broken, you're just going through something. But i couldn't. She knew. There was something terribly wrong with her, all the way inside. She was like a big diamond with a dead spot in the middle. I was supposed to breathe life into that dead spot, but it hadn't worked...
-- Janet Fitch -
She’s never where she is,' I said. 'She’s only inside her head.
-- Janet Fitch -
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The body shuts down when it has too much to bear; goes its own way quietly inside, waiting for a better time, leaving you numb and half alive.
-- Jeanette Winterson -
Wasn't it time she risked getting hurt again, instead of just accepting the numbness of never letting anyone in?
-- Jeaniene Frost -
Some people feel like they don't deserve love. They walk away quietly into empty spaces, trying to close the gaps of the past.
-- Jon KrakauerSource : "Into the Wild". www.imdb.com. 2007.
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I wish I could explain it so someone could understand it. I'm afraid it's something I can't put into words. There's just this heavy, overwhelming despair - dreading everything. Dreading life. Empty inside, to the point of numbness. It's like there's something already dead inside. My whole being has been pulling back into that void for months. (81)
-- Kay Redfield JamisonSource : FaceBook post by Kay Redfield Jamison from Oct 29, 2012
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She still felt shell-shocked by all of it, numb. Beneath the numbness, though, was a raw and terrible anger that was unlike anything she'd felt before. She had so little experience with genuine anger that it scared her. She actually worried that if she started screaming, she'd never stop.
-- Kristin Hannah -
How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.
-- Kurt Vonnegut -
Her heart began to ache, and she felt the numbness slip away. Misery welled up inside her. She clamped down on it, trying to hold onto the deadness that had blanketed her emotions for the past few days.
-- Lili Wilkinson -
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I had nothing and I was still changed. Like a costume, my numbness was taken away. Then hunger was added.
-- Louise Glück -
Winning intoxicates you, and numbs you to the sufferings of others.
-- Margaret Atwood -
Anaesthesia, that's one technique: if it hurts, invent a different pain.
-- Margaret Atwood -
In this world of numbness and information overload, the ability to feel, my boy, is a rare gift indeed.
-- Patrick Ness -
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I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between stars.
-- Raymond Chandler -
Pain is always preferable to numbness.
-- Scott AndersonSource : Scott Anderson (1999). “Triage: A Novel”, p.179, Simon and Schuster
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This behavior may...counteract feelings of'numbness'and depersonalization that aries duriing periods of extreme stress.-153 Girl,Interrupted
-- Susanna Kaysen -
It's important to cultivate detachment. One way to do this is to practice imagining yourself dead, or in the process of dying. If there's a window, you must imagine your body falling out of that window. If there's a knife, you must imagine the knife piercing your skin. If there's a train coming, you must imagine your torso flattened under its wheels. These excercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance.
-- Susanna KaysenSource : "Girl, Interrupted". Book by Susanna Kaysen, 1994.
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I lay and cried, and began to feel again, to admit I was human, vulnerable, sensitive. I began to remember how it had been before; how there was that germ of positive creativeness. Character is fate; and damn, I'd better work on my character. I had been withdrawing into a retreat of numbness: it is so much safer to NOT feel, NOT to let the world touch one.
-- Sylvia Plath -
You've faced horrors in these past weeks... I don't know which is worse. The terror you feel the first time you witness such things, or the numbness that comes after it starts to become ordinary.
-- Tasha AlexanderSource : Tasha Alexander (2013). “A Fatal Waltz”, p.163, Hachette UK
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He was numb except for dreading the loss of numbness.
-- Thomas Harris -
Who took away the part so essential to the whole Left you a hollow body Skin and bone.
-- Tracy ChapmanSource : Song: Remember The Tinman, Album: New Beginning, 1995
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Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.
-- Virginia Woolf -
Of course there is nothing the matter with the stars It is my emptiness among them While they drift farther away in the invisible morning
-- W. S. Merwin -
They give me a shot and a handful of pills to swallow. I stare at the thin red wall of my inner eyelid and listen to my skin and I can't be sure how the medication is affecting me. I can't remember how I'm supposed to feel. I can't remember my name. I have never seen my face.
-- Will Christopher Baer -
Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.
-- William Faulkner -
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I felt a kind of numbness, an enervation, but more particularly an odd fragility - as if my body had actually become frail, hypersensitive and somehow disjointed and clumsy, lacking normal coordination. And soon I was in the throes of a pervasive hypochondria.
-- William Styron -
Your superhuman power was to be able not to feel. Is it there inside everybody, this self that comes out while you are in captivity? You become the closest approximation of yourself that can tolerate living there.
-- Heather O'NeillSource : Heather O'Neill (2014). “Lullabies for Little Criminals”, p.139, Hachette UK
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... when he kissed her, she received the kiss without returning it, her eyes wide open, not afraid, not a virgin's eyes, just flat and uninvolved.
-- Tim O'Brien -
In general, it's not too hard to corrupt an American, mostly a matter of supply to their demand. Supply should be variegated to encourage the Illusion of Choice. Other than that they're looking for numbness, so be ready to sedate. Drugs, booze, television, shopping, etc.
-- Geoffrey Wood -
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Great potential for personal empowerment can be found in attending to our awareness of global problems and to our understanding of how they connect with each other and with our personal lives. The process of naming the danger, saying aloud that the threats to life on earth are real, moves us from the numbness of denial to the aliveness that makes action possible.
-- Sarah Connor