Distancing Self Quotes

A month ago, Gavin had given his employer four weeks' notice. "I'll get a job around here," he'd told her. "Something low-stress, part-time, maybe. We're not paying rent, and Dad's left us plenty. You should quit, too." A year earlier this news would have filled her with delicious, full fat, chocolate-coated joy. But now, after a grueling routine of shitty work, shitty- weird home life in a house where the shadow of a dead boy walked more solidly than the grownups, shitty headaches, shitty worry about a husband who couldn't keep his dick out of other women, the golden offer just weirded Laine out. She didn't trust it. ~ Stephen M. Irwin

Self-distancing is changing the perspective of life by observing inner feelings and experiences from distance with different angles, filters and lenses. ~ Amit Ray

Labels are distancing phenomena. They push us away from each other. ~ Leo Buscaglia

Saving a life just got much more important than savouring a lifestyle. ~ Amit Kalantri

All over the world, people are being quarantined and are being compelled to practice social distancing. We are trying desperately to remain sane in a world that seems bordering on the insane. So, the time is just right for us to ponder, reflect, meditate, and discover the world within our own minds. ~ Avijeet Das

The third kind of loneliness is avoiding unnecesssary activities. When we're lonely in a "hot" way, we look for something to save us; we look for a way out. We get this queasy feeling that we call loneliness, and our minds just go wild trying to come up with companions to save us from despair. That's called unnecessary activity. It's a way of keeping ourselves busy so we don't have to feel any pain. It could take the form of obsessively daydreaming of true romance, or turning a tidbit of gossip into the six o'clock news, or even going off by ourselves into the wilderness. The point is that in all these activities, we are seeking companionship in our usual, habitual way, using our same old repetitive ways of distancing ourselves from the demon loneliness. Could we just settle down and have some ~ Pema Chodron

We know there's social distancing. No need for the dramatic hand raise and exaggerated sidestep. That's just obnoxious. ~ Liz Faublas

Everything was simple, physical, painful, exalting. The world consisted of the four elements - land and water, firepower and distancing air. ~ Susan Sontag

Every day we have a choice. We can take the easier road, the more cynical road, which is a road sometimes based on a dream of a past that never was, fear of each other, distancing and blame, or we can take the much more difficult path, the road of transformation, transcendence, compassion, and love, but also accountability and justice. ~ Jacqueline Novogratz

He was not her therapist now but her lover, and if you couldn't make your lover angry, then what kind of lover was he? She saw the awful bind that one was put in when one's lover was also one's therapist-- how their objective eye and soothing voice could become the distancing device of a professional manner. A man doing his job--it was intolerable to be judged by such an eye, as if he were somehow above it all, and did not have any problems himself, any emotions that he could not control. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

I believe it is the inability of beginning writers to achieve at least a certain degree of detachment from their writing that defeats so many of them before they even get started. Without this distancing, any criticism of your writing will seem devastating, even incapacitating, whereas with the proper amount of detachment it will seem merely cruel and unusual punishment. ~ Patrick F. McManus

too much detail can have a distancing effect ~ Wesley Stace

Air quality is gradually improving in countries that remain under coronavirus quarantine. This is a positive change that is happening because of social distancing, home quarantine, and work from home that the people are embracing during this pandemic of COVID 19. But it is far too early to speak of long-term change. Countries and governments need to seriously rethink on adopting and practicing such positive changes in the long run. Thus, the improvement and sustenance of the environment of our world will ensue. ~ Avijeet Das

What? she asked, like she was surprised, even though she was fully aware that she was both distracting herself and distancing herself by becoming Therapist Sadie, rather than being Sadie the bag of flail who was marinating in her own lustypants. ~ Maisey Yates

In isolation you just lose the company but don't lose the purpose. ~ Amit Kalantri

The articulation of the other's body in words turns it into a map of possible pleasure, effectively distancing that body by transforming it into an erotic object. ~ Siri Hustvedt

You've got to learn to utilize the space (between you and
your opponent). Distancing is very important. ~ Masaaki Hatsumi

Digital technology is both arousing and distancing. We don't look at the users on the other side as people. They aren't - they're just usernames, Facebook photos and Twitter handles. ~ Douglas Rushkoff

The sea was cruel and selfish as human beings, and in its monstrous simplicity had no notion of complexities like pity, wounding, or remorse ... You could see yourself in it ... while the wind, the light, the swaying, the sound of the water on the hull worked the miracle of distancing, calming you until you didn't hurt anymore, erasing any pity, any wound, and any remorse. ~ Arturo Perez Reverte

An image is seen based on the light speed between the observer and the event. An image is light. Scientists theorize about sighting the edge of the universe and believe they are looking at the beginning of time. Things started moving away from each other when the Big Bang exploded 18 billion years ago. Sages theorize that this impassive distancing will end someday. Then things will reverse and start moving back towards each other. If reversal fails and contraction continues, the universe will collapse into itself, imploding into a Black Hole that can encapsulate an entire universe into a dark space the size of a fist. The size of a fist mirrors the size of a heart. ~ Eileen R. Tabios

Dex crouched down next to her, lips level with her ear. "You know, you were a lot more fun three years ago."
It was like he wanted her to kill him.
She turned, unfazed that their faces were separated by mere centimeters. So close she could see the pores in his caramel skin, the deep brown of his eyes, and the raised scar that rested near his temple.
She'd given him that scar.
What she also noticed was how her heart no longer fluttered like it used to when he looked at her. She used to love his eyes, their unspoken words. The feel of his skin against hers during their passionate nights, but now those thoughts made her cringe. She guarded herself against those details scrounged from distant memories. They were no longer part of a blissful reality but a hurtful past.
"A lot has changed in three years, Dextro," Andi said calmly. "Now if you don't move, I'll give you a new scar, and this time," she said, pointing to his right temple, "it will be across your neck."
He put his arms up in defense before rising, distancing himself from her. ~ Sasha Alsberg

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

The theological perspective of participation actually saves the appearances by exceeding them. It recognizes that materialism and spiritualism are false alternatives, since if there is only finite matter there is not even that, and that for phenomena really to be there they must be more than there. Hence, by appealing to an eternal source for bodies, their art, language, sexual and political union, one is not ethereally taking leave of their density. On the contrary, one is insisting that behind this density resides an even greater density – beyond all contrasts of density and lightness (as beyond all contrasts of definition and limitlessness). This is to say that all there is only is because it is more than it is. (...)

This perspective should in many ways be seen as undercutting some of the contrasts between theological liberals and conservatives. The former tend to validate what they see as the modern embrace of our finitude – as language, and as erotic and aesthetically delighting bodies, and so forth. Conservatives, however, seem still to embrace a sort of nominal ethereal distancing from these realities and a disdain for them. Radical orthodoxy, by contrast, sees the historic root of the celebration of these things in participatory philosophy and incarnational theology, even if it can acknowledge that premodern tradition never took this celebration far enough. The modern apparent embrace of the finite it regards as, on inspection, illusory, since in order to ~ John Milbank

If we turn away from our sexual passion, then we freeze and beings are harmed. If we grab it, then we are burned and beings are harmed. But if we just stay close to it, walk around it, always in touch with the fact that we are sexual beings, neither identifying with nor distancing ourselves from our sexuality, then we gradually become intimate with it. ~ Reb Anderson

I've always loved acoustic music because I've always loved to hear someone's words or just watch them and just get into them. The distancing thing about rock is it's so assaulting. ~ Jane Siberry

Ivy hugs me tighter. "Wonderful, Rylan. This is good to know. And thank you for calling me...your friend. I love being called that."
Love. My cheeks catch fire and my heart races as we continue holding each other. That word has become so foreign in my house, ever since my dad started distancing himself. But here's my best friend using it in a way that makes me feel like everything's okay and I'm whole again.
It's the same one word - the only word - that could describe what I'm feeling for Ivy. ~ Colleen Boyd

a lot of people have seen the futility of their lives, constantly ripped off by the banks, employed by the slaver corporations, lied to by politicians, manipulated by social media, spied on by everyone else... ~ Anonymous

he had never been meant to be a spy; he was a soldier. a soldier kept his sanity by distancing himself from his enemies, making them something far away and almost inhuman; merely an idea that bled when you stabbed it. ~ Grace Crandall

Question the images. Take them by the hand and don't let the sweet distancing they offer you vanquish you; do away with the distance's comfort or the soft indifference you derive from concentrating on the quality of the framing, the use of light and shadows, the successful composition. Force these images to bring you to the Mexican Southeast, to history, to the struggle, to this taking sides, to choose a faction. ~ Subcomandante Marcos

You don't have to be a member of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute to figure out that when you title a memoir of your parents 'Them,' you're performing an act of distancing. ~ Robert Gottlieb

COVID-19 enabled people to go to the bank looking like robbers, hazmat suits became fashionable, and social distancing was the norm. ~ Steven Magee

The attitude of letting go, of letting things be as they are, of non-attachment, does not imply a condition of reactive distancing or detachment, and is not to be confused with passivity, dissociative behaviors, or attempts to separate yourself even the tiniest bit from reality. It is not a pathological condition of withdrawal adopted to protect yourself. Nor is it nihilistic. It is exactly opposite: a supremely healthy condition of heart and mind. It means embracing the whole of reality in a new way. ~ Jon Kabat-Zinn

To desire money is much nobler than to desire success. Desiring money may mean desiring to return to your country, or marry the woman you love, or ransom your father from brigands. But desiring success must mean that you take an abstract pleasure in the unbrotherly act of distancing and disgracing other men. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

The people did not elect me. I speak with one voice that may echo other people, but I am part of a group of people. That's not distancing yourself from a community, that's also allowing the space for others to speak for themselves. ~ Edwidge Danticat

Socialism's results have ranged between the merely shabby and the truly catastrophic - poverty, strife, oppression and, on the killing fields of communism, the deaths this century of perhaps 100 million people. Against that doctrine was set a contrary, conservative belief in a law-governed liberty. It was this view which triumphed with the crumbling of the Berlin Wall. Since then, the Left has sought rehabilitation by distancing itself from its past. ~ Margaret Thatcher

It's enough for a small betrayal, a distancing, an affirmation of independence to provoke wrath, fear and also hatred from the adult. How many husbands and boyfriends kill the woman they say they love because she has decided to leave. It's in the news every day. ~ Dacia Maraini

Social distancing is staying away from people not from your purpose. ~ Amit Kalantri

I know that I am going to meet a personal variation on reality; a partial view of reality. But I know also that by that partiality, that distancing from the shared experience, it will be new: a revelation. It will be a vision, a more or less powerful or haunting dream. A space-voyage through somebody else's psychic abysses. It will fall short of tragedy, because tragedy is the truth, and truth is what the very great artists, the absolute novelists, tell. It will not be truth; but it will be imagination. Truth is best. For it encompasses tragedy and partakes of the eternal joy. But very few of us know it; the best we can do is recognize it. Imagination - to me - is the next best. For it partakes of Creation, which is one aspect of the eternal joy.
All the rest is either Politics or Pedantry, or Mainstream Fiction, may it rest in peace. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin