Numbness Quotes - Page 2

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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

I had nothing and I was still changed. Like a costume, my numbness was taken away. Then hunger was added.

Absent the edge, we drown in numbness.

One must go through periods of numbness that are harder to bear than grief.

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.

A lazy frost, a numbness of the mind.

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

Until the bitter end, the emptiness inside her was hers alone.

But what would that be like feeling the tide rise out of the numbness inside

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.

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.

He was numb except for dreading the loss of numbness.

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.

Pain is always preferable to numbness.

I am feeling fine. I remember these words and recite them. These are the things you say when asked how you are. After all, it would be odd to say: I'm not feeling. Or, more to the point: I'm not, I have ceased to be. Where am I?

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.

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.