Numbness Quotes - Page 3

• I grow numb; I grow stiff. How shall I break up this numbness which discredits my sympathetic heart?

  Virginia Woolf

  Heart, Break, Sympathetic

  Virginia Woolf (2005). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.712, Wordsworth Editions

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• 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

  Shopping, Choices, Drug

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• He was numb except for dreading the loss of numbness.

  Thomas Harris

  Loss, Numb

  Thomas Harris (2009). “Red Dragon”, p.83, Penguin

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• I don't want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something wrong, something so huge I can't even see it, something that's drowning me. I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead.

  Margaret Atwood

  Depression, Lying, Stupid

  Margaret Atwood (1988). “Cat's eye”, Doubleday, 1989

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• The numbness of his loss had passed, and the pain would hit me out of nowhere, doubling me over, racking my body with sobs. Where are you? I would cry out in my mind. Where have you gone? Of course, there was never any answer.

  Suzanne Collins

  Pain, Loss, Bereavement

  Suzanne Collins (2009). “The Hunger Games”, p.26, Scholastic Inc.

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• No matter what feeling comes up - numbness, irritability, shame - if I let it arise and play itself through, I naturally open into wakefulness and care.

  Tara Brach

  Play, Feelings, Care

  Source: www.tarabrach.com

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• 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

  Blue, Years, Names

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• Even when I try to stir myself up, I just get irritated because I can't make anything come out. And in the middle of the night I lie here thinking about all this. If I don't get back on track somehow, I'm dead, that's the sense I get. There isn't a single strong emotion inside me.

  Banana Yoshimoto

  Depression, Strong, Lying

  Banana Yoshimoto, Michael Emmerich (2002). “Goodbye Tsugumi”, p.163, Grove Press

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• Outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness. I look down into the warm, earthy world. Into a nest of lovers' beds, baby cribs, meal tables, all the solid commerce of life in this earth, and feel apart, enclosed in a wall of glass.

  Sylvia Plath

  Baby, Stars, Wall

  Sylvia Plath (2000). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962”, Anchor

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• 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

  Broken, Way, Emptiness

  Janet Fitch (2013). “White Oleander”, p.174, Hachette UK

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• There is a curious comfort in letting go. After the agony, letting go brings numbness, and after the numbness, clarity. As if I can see the world for the first time, and my place in it, independent of you, a whole vista of what may be. Even if it is not grand or inspiring, it is real and solid, unlike the fantasy I've built around you. I will do this.
  I will triumph over you.

  Julie Berry

  Letting Go, Real, Independent

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• 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

  Heart, Past, Way

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• Dear to me is sleep: still more, being made of stone, While pain and guilt still linger here below, Blindness and numbness--these please me alone; Then do not wake me, keep your voices low.

  Michelangelo

  Pain, Inspiration, Sleep

  Michelangelo (2017). “Sonnets of Michelangelo”, p.78, Routledge

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• I was not allowed to think of him. That was something I tried to be very strict about. Of course I slipped; I was only human. But I was getting better, and so the pain was something I could avoid for days at a time now. The trade-off was the never-ending numbness. Between pain and nothing, I'd chosen nothing.

  Stephenie Meyer

  Pain, Thinking, Get Better

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• Anaesthesia, that's one technique: if it hurts, invent a different pain.

  Margaret Atwood

  Hurt, Pain, Technique

  Margaret Atwood (1987). “The edible woman ; Surfacing ; Lady oracle”, Treasure Press

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• She began to feel like the plastic doll she had been named after, without even a hole where her mouth was supposed to be.

  Francesca Lia Block

  Mouths, Dolls, Emptiness

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• 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

  Hurt, Heart, Symphony

  Carson McCullers (2010). “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter”, p.119, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I'm up all night against my will My medicine won't let me feel anything at all The doctor gave me sleeping pills and I took one Then I feel all alone, sleeping like a stone.

  Joseph Arthur

  Sleep, Night, Medicine

  Song: Your Are The Dark, Album: Redemption's Son, 2002

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• I believe that you've created a metaphorical universe in which you can express your darkest fears. In one aspect, yes, I believe in ghosts, but we create them. We haunt ourselves, and sometimes we do such a good job, we lose track of reality.

  Laurie Halse Anderson

  Jobs, Believe, Reality

  Laurie Halse Anderson (2009). “Wintergirls”, p.185, Penguin

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• Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.

  Adrienne Rich

  Self, Despair, Encounters

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• All the same, my depression and self-hatred, my desire to mutilate myself with broken bottles, my numbness and crying fits, my inability to get out of bed for days and days, the feeling of the world moving in to crush me, went on and on. But I knew I wouldn't go mad, even if that release, that letting-go, was a freedom I desired. I was waiting for myself to heal.

  Hanif Kureishi

  Depression, Crush, Letting Go

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• Look at that ugly dead mask here and do not forget it. It is a chalk mask with dead dry poison behind it, like the death angel. It is what I was this fall, and what I never want to be again. The pouting disconsolate mouth, the flat, bored, numb, expressionless eyes: symptoms of the foul decay within.

  Sylvia Plath

  Depression, Fall, Eye

  Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.155, Anchor

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• Very depressed today. Unable to write a thing. Menacing gods. I feel outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness.

  Sylvia Plath

  Depression, Stars, Writing

  Sylvia Plath (2000). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962”, Anchor

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• I am gay on the outside, especially among my own folk (I count Poles my own); but inside something gnaws at me; some presentiment, anxiety, dreams - or sleeplessness - melancholy, indifference - desire for life, and the next instant, desire for death; some kind of sweet peace, some kind of numbness, absent-mindedness.

  Frederic Chopin

  Life, Dream, Sweet

  Frederic Chopin (2013). “Chopin's Letters”, p.166, Courier Corporation

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• It was too much. The comfortable people made comfortable jokes about weather and things but I sat mostly silent saying a word or so when necessary a word or so trying to hide from them the fact that I was a fool and feeling terrible And I was numb, numb again, numb again again and again, numbness and pain swelling in me.

  Charles Bukowski

  Pain, Weather, People

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