Numbness Quotes - Page 4

• 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

  Suicide, Feelings, Dying

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• When I fell out of the light, I entered The stomach of indifference, the wordless cupboard.

  Sylvia Plath

  Light, Emptiness, Indifference

  Sylvia Plath (2010). “The Colossus”, p.72, Faber & Faber

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• Day just smiles at me, an expression so sad that it breaks through my numbness, and I begin to cry. Those bright blue eyes. Before me is the boy who has bandaged my wounds on the streets of Lake, who has guarded his family with every bone in his body, who has stayed by my side in spite of everything, the boy of light and laughter and life, of grief and fury and passion, the boy whose fate is intertwined with mine, forever and always. "I love you," he whispers. "Can you stay awhile?

  Marie Lu

  Laughter, Love You, Grief

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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

  Pain, Compassion, Empathy

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• When we look squarely at injustice and get involved, we actually feel less pain, not more, because we overcome the gnawing guilt and despair that festers under our numbness. We clean the wound - our own and others' - and it can finally heal.

  Desmond Tutu

  Pain, Guilt, Despair

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• So you couldn't protect yourself? The absolute erodes; the boundary, the wall around the self erodes. If I was waiting I had been invaded by time. But do you think you're free? I think I recognize the patterns of my nature. Bud do you think you're free? I had nothing and I was still changed. Like a costume, my numbness was taken away. Then hunger was added.

  Louise Glück

  Wall, Taken, Thinking

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• I have carpal tunnel so I can't write more than four hours total without tingling numbness. I take a lot of breaks and do stretches.

  Eden Robinson

  Writing, Tunnels, Four

  "The Saturday Rumpus Interview With Eden Robinson". Interview With Helga Schimkat, therumpus.net. September 24, 2016.

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• Personal voice- prophesy- disrupts the state of communal numbness in which most of us exist.

  Walter Brueggemann

  Voice, States

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• Apathy is a spiritual numbness that creeps in and corrupts the good that God intends for our life and the good that He wants us to accomplish for Him and His kingdom.

  Elizabeth George

  Spiritual, Apathy, Want

  Elizabeth George (2014). “A Woman's Walk with God: Growing in the Fruit of the Spirit”, p.143, Harvest House Publishers

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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

  Eye, Kissing, Emptiness

  Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.11, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The primary dues a writer or any artist pays is to remain sentient, and to forfeit the illusionary luxury of such anesthetics as avoidance, numbness, and denials.

  Vanna Bonta

  Artist, Luxury, Denial

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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

  Real, Moving, Understanding

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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

  Taken, Costumes, Hunger

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• Every parent who has ever said a few words over a goldfish in a toilet bowl
  or felt the numbness of an unexpected diagnosis in a pediatrician's office will appreciate the heartfelt wisdom in It's Okay to Cry. Norm Wright tenderly and skillfully equips parents to help children cultivate a healthy response to life's many pains and sorrows.

  Lori Borgman

  Children, Pain, Heart

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• People talk about the pain of grief, but I don't know what they mean. To me, grief is a devastating numbness, every sensation dulled.

  Veronica Roth

  Pain, Grief, Mean

  "Allegiant". Book by Veronica Roth, 2013.

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• 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 the 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 exercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance.

  Susanna Kaysen

  Distance, Fall, Knives

  "Girl, Interrupted". Book by Susanna Kaysen, 1994.

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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

  Body, Normal, Fragility

  William Styron (1990). “Darkness visible: a memoir of madness”, Random House Incorporated

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• I think there's a certain numbness in modern society, that accepts certain kinds of violence, but represses other kinds of violence.

  Nick Cave

  Thinking, Violence, Kind

  "Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock". Book by Simon Reynolds, 1988.

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• 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

  Morning, Stars, Matter

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• As long as I kept my body moving I could forget about the emptiness inside.

  Haruki Murakami

  Moving, Long, Body

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• And so I am feeling numb. It's a curious feeling, and I get it all the time. My attention to the world around me disappears, and something starts to hum inside my head. Far off, voices try to bump up against me, but I repel them. My ears fill up with water and I focus on the humming in my head.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Voice, Water, Focus

  Marya Hornbacher (2009). “Madness: A Bipolar Life”, p.15, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• 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

  Wall, Names, Giving

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• The airy sky has taken its place leaning against the wall. It is like a prayer to what is empty And what is empty turns its face to us and whispers: 'I am not empty, I am open'.

  Tomas Transtromer

  Prayer, Wall, Taken

  Tomas Transtromer (2017). “The Half-Finished Heaven: Selected Poems”, p.126, Graywolf Press

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• 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

  Tea, Imagine, Clean

  Bret Easton Ellis (2010). “American Psycho”, p.379, Vintage

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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

  Shells, Littles, Scared

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