Numbness Quotes

Collection of famous quotes and sayings about Numbness.

Quotes About Numbness

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Personal voice- prophesy- disrupts the state of communal numbness in which most of us exist. ~ Walter Brueggemann
Numbness quotes by Walter Brueggemann
My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water
Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.
Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage -
My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,
My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks. ~ Sylvia Plath
Numbness quotes by Sylvia Plath
Ah felt a paralysis ay emotion as time stretched out. A pervading numbness was setting in, like a dentist's anaesthetic, spreading through ma body. ~ Irvine Welsh
Numbness quotes by Irvine Welsh
I wasn't glad that I hadn't died. And I wasn't sad that I hadn't. I wasn't anything. ~ Kathleen Rooney
Numbness quotes by Kathleen Rooney
We are angered even by the full acceptance of our humiliating confessions - how much more by hearing in hard distinct syllables from the lips of a near observer, those confused murmurs which we try to call morbid, and strive against as if they were the oncoming of numbness! ~ George Eliot
Numbness quotes by George Eliot
I used self-injury as a coping mechanism to help me overcome the emotional stress that I was incapable of dealing with in any other way. Self-injury was a means of escape, a way to relieve the numbness, and an expression of the pain within me. Something that the police wouldn't care about. ~ Stephen Richards
Numbness quotes by Stephen Richards
But grief, he'd discovered, was not an experience you went through once and then 'moved on' (as the idiotic popular phrase would have it). The truth was that it came over you in successive waves - waves separated by periods of numbness, periods of forgetfulness, periods of ordinary living. ~ John Verdon
Numbness quotes by John Verdon
There was supposed to be grief when someone died, tears and heartfelt eulogies, the cutting pain of loss. Instead, he felt…nothing. Just numbness, an absolute void of emotion. ~ Piper Vaughn
Numbness quotes by Piper Vaughn
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
Numbness quotes by Joseph Arthur
Art is the antidote that can call us back from the edge of numbness, restoring the ability to feel for another. ~ Barbara Kingsolver
Numbness quotes by Barbara Kingsolver
Numbness is not happiness. ~ Marty Rubin
Numbness quotes by Marty Rubin
Eventually, however, the denial turned into emptiness and my childhood ended. ~ Floyd C. Forsberg
Numbness quotes by Floyd C. Forsberg
Anaesthesia, that's one technique: if it hurts, invent a different pain. ~ Margaret Atwood
Numbness quotes by Margaret Atwood
Life is a helluva journey. You face situations. You meet people. You try to understand situations. You try to understand people.
But you will never ever be able to understand people. You will never ever be able to understand why some things happen.

You feel you desperately need someone to support. But you won't find any support. You feel you need an anchor amidst the unpredictably nature of life. But there won't be an anchor. And you will feel your feet are losing their balance. You will feel you are falling down. You will feel the weight of life pulling you down. And you are drowning in the ocean. And you are shouting for help. But nobody can hear you because everybody is busy living their life to listen to you.

You thus you give up on people. You lose faith in people. You lose faith on life.

You just go on living life without feeling anything. You live life in a state of numbness and indifference.

And then one day you look at yourself in the mirror, and you have become a stranger to yourself! ~ Avijeet Das
Numbness quotes by Avijeet Das
You have to be nicer to me," I said. Again he laughed. "What? I'm the King of nice. What are you talking about?" "You have to be nicer to me or ... or ... " "Or what?" he said. Still Lars, still charming and jokey, but with a thread of fear. It snaked in and pierced my numbness and almost broke my resolve. Almost, but not quite. "Or I have ti break up with you." I whispered What was there more to say? Nothing. So I hung up. ~ Lauren Myracle
Numbness quotes by Lauren Myracle
There is safety in numbness
there is solace
in sleep. ~ Lang Leav
Numbness quotes by Lang Leav
She examined me, she looked at me critically and said, "Why are you trying to starve yourself?" To keep myself from feeling love, from feeling lust, from feeling anything at all. ~ Joyce Carol Oates
Numbness quotes by Joyce Carol Oates
The DFA and organizations like it have pushed and squeezed and elbowed out all the feeling in the world. They have clamped their fists around a geyser to keep it from exploding.
But the pressure eventually builds, and the explosion will always come. ~ Lauren Oliver
Numbness quotes by Lauren Oliver
Numb the dark and you numb the light. ~ Brene Brown
Numbness quotes by Brene Brown
I walked back to the window to look down at the people who shared this city with me. The people who made every day a series of mediocrities.

The unreformed murderers masquerading as businessmen in borrowed suits and debt-laden cars. The voluptuous bimbos floating around in an inexplicable mix of vacuity and despair.

The crumbling face of my building looked pretty enough from across the street, but from here I could see how worn it was. I peeled off a satisfying chunk of paint, cement and matter. And I let it fall to the street below. ~ Nasri Atallah
Numbness quotes by Nasri Atallah
The responses that environmentalists evoke - fear, anxiety, numbness, despair - are not helpful, even if they are understandable. It should be fascinating, even enthralling, to be in the milieu of environmental change. ~ Paul Hawken
Numbness quotes by Paul Hawken
Your instincts may tell you that you can't survive if you experience feelings. But they are leftover child instincts. They're the ones that first told you to freeze your feelings. They themselves are frozen and haven't grown with the rest of you. These instincts don't know that you're far more capable of learning to cope with overwhelming emotion now than when you were a [child]. ~ Maureen Brady
Numbness quotes by Maureen Brady
Can you remember, Acte ... how much easier our belief in Nero made life for us in the old days? And can you remember the paralysis, the numbness that seized the whole world when Nero died? Didn't you feel as if the world had grown bare and colorless all of a sudden? Those people on the Palatine have tried to steal our Nero from us, from you and me. Isn't splendid to think that we can show them they haven't succeeded? They have smashed his statues into splinters, erased his name from all the inscriptions, they even replaced his head on that huge statue in Rome with the peasant head of old Vespasian. Isn't it fine to teach them that all that hasn't been of the slightest use? Granted that they have been successful for a few years. For a few years they have actually managed to banish all imagination from the world, all enthusiasm, extravagance, everything that makes life worth living. But now, with our Nero, all these things are back again. ~ Lion Feuchtwanger
Numbness quotes by Lion Feuchtwanger
She [Jo] recalled them holding one another and feeling a terrible numbness where caring should have been. She'd blamed it on the circumstances, the weight of what each of them carried that night, the responsibilities. But it wasn't that. They were holding something dying, maybe already dead, but they were too scared to admit it.
She wondered why the tragedy at Burke's Landing hadn't brought them together. Adversity was supposed to do that, wasn't it? Instead, everything got worse. Cork wasn't just distant. Something in him seemed to have died along with the other deaths that drizzly morning. Nothing mattered. ~ William Kent Krueger
Numbness quotes by William Kent Krueger
We are born free as creatures of bliss, compassion, friendliness, innocence and curiosity. Among us, there is a tremendous love and natural belonging. Burning beneath our numbness, negativity and grief is a celebration of life and a passion for being here ~ Georgi Y. Johnson
Numbness quotes by Georgi Y. Johnson
The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread.
When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out "stop!"
When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer. ~ Bertolt Brecht
Numbness quotes by Bertolt Brecht
grief saw nothing but itself, grief saw every speck of pain in the world; grief spread its wings large like an eagle, grief huddled small like a porcupine; grief needed company, grief craved solitude; grief wanted to remember, wanted to forget; grief raged, grief whimpered; grief made time compress and contract; grief tasted like hunger, felt like numbness, sounded like silence ~ Kamila Shamsie
Numbness quotes by Kamila Shamsie
I think there's a certain numbness in modern society, that accepts certain kinds of violence, but represses other kinds of violence. ~ Nick Cave
Numbness quotes by Nick Cave
Fibromyalgia (henceforth, "Fibro"). If you are not familiar with this disease, you may not know that it plagues six million people in the United States today. You may not know that people who have Fibro have a myriad of different symptoms including, but not limited to: muscle pain and fatigue, trouble sleeping, morning stiffness, headaches, painful menstrual periods, tingling or numbness in hands and feet, and problems with thinking/memory (sometimes called "fibro fog").* ~ Michael Holien
Numbness quotes by Michael Holien
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. ~ Ann Aguirre
Numbness quotes by Ann Aguirre
But what would that be like
feeling the tide rise
out of the numbness inside ~ David Whyte
Numbness quotes by David Whyte
Why, though? I knew it didn't make sense. I did love her in my own way. Very much. She was beautiful and fun and caring, but I was bored, so bored. I had to think of other girls to get a hard-on. I didn't want to start the long arduous road to her orgasm, let alone mine. Afraid to touch her in case it was mistaken for an application for sex. So in order to feel something through the numbness, I decided to perpetrate on my soul and hers the equivalent of quenching cigarettes on my paralyzed limbs. My hope was that if I registered pain, it would be welcomed as a sign of life. ~ Anonymous
Numbness quotes by Anonymous
He felt as if his heart had dried up. I needed her he thought. I needed someone like her to fill the void inside me. But I wasn't able to fill the void inside her. Until the bitter end, the emptiness inside her was hers alone. ~ Haruki Murakami
Numbness quotes by Haruki Murakami
When we think "prophetic" we need not always think grandly about public tasks. The prophetic task needs to be done wherever there are men and women who will yield to the managed prose future offered them by the king. So, we may ask, if we are to do that alternative constructive task of imagination, if we are to reach more than the most surface group prepared to be "religious," where do we begin? What I propose is this: The royal consciousness leads people to numbness, especially to numbness about death. It is the task of prophetic ministry and imagination to bring people to engage their experiences of suffering to death. ~ Walter Brueggemann
Numbness quotes by Walter Brueggemann
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? ~ Marya Hornbacher
Numbness quotes by Marya Hornbacher
Because there's no way I can do that."

"Yes, there is." He reached out, startling me, and pressed his palm to my cheek.

Almost immediately, a sense of well-being flooded through me, a blissful numbness that started at the top of my head and spread all the way down to my toes. "Seriously, best powers ever," I mumbled drowsily.

"Go to bed, Sophie," he said, dropping his hand as if my skin had burned him. ~ Rachel Hawkins
Numbness quotes by Rachel Hawkins
I felt so many things at once that together, they combined to make nothing, a numbness, an absence of feeling caused by a surplus of feeling. ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Numbness quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
The only good thing, is that the cold wakes her up and she doesn't have to struggle to stay conscious. The bad thing, is that the numbness is fading away now, and her whole body is racked with pain. ~ Amy Lunderman
Numbness quotes by Amy Lunderman
I feel something else break through the numbness. Something raw. Something primal. Something visceral. ~ Sam A. Patel
Numbness quotes by Sam A. Patel
At some point, there was rape and nothing else. This becomes your normal day. You don't know who is going to open the door next to attack you, just that it will happen and that tomorrow might be worse. You stop thinking about escaping or seeing your family again. Your past life becomes a distant memory, like a dream. Your body doesn't belong to you, and there's no energy to talk or to fight or to think about the world outside. There is only rape and the numbness that comes with accepting that this is now your life. Fear was better. With fear, there is assumption that what is happening isn't normal. Sure, you feel like your heart will explode and you will throw up, you cling desperately to your family and friends and your grovel in front of the terrorists, you cry until you go blind, but at least you do something. Hopelessness is close to death. ~ Nadia Murad
Numbness quotes by Nadia Murad
I think my thought and imagination contain the picture and perceive its significance from every point of view. I have to force myself not to dwell upon it to avoid the sort of numbness that comes from deep apprehension and dwelling upon elements too vast to be yet comprehended or in any way controlled by counsel. ~ Erik Larson
Numbness quotes by Erik Larson
In the silence, Kestrel heard a falling leaf scratch the glass of the window, opened out toward the dimming sky. It was warm, but summer was almost over.
"Play your tiles," Arin said roughly.
Kestrel turned them over, taking no joy in the fact that she had surely won. She had four scorpions.
Arin flipped his. The sound of ivory clacking against the wooden table was unnaturally loud.
Four vipers.
"I win," he said, and swept the matches into his hand.
Kestrel stared at the tiles, feeling a numbness creep along her limbs. "Well," she said. She cleared her throat. "Well played."
He gave her a humorless smile. "I did warn you."
"Yes. You did."
He stood. "I think I'll take my leave while I have the advantage."
"Until next time." Kestrel realized she had offered him her hand. He looked at it, then took it in his own. She felt the numbness ebb, only to be replaced by a different kind of surprise.
He dropped her hand. "I have things to do."
"Like what?" She tried for a lighthearted tone.
He answered in kind. "Like contemplate what I am going to do with my sudden windfall of matches." He widened his eyes in pretend glee, and Kestrel smiled.
"I'll walk you out," she said.
"Do you think I will lose my way? Or steal something as I go?"
She felt her expression turn haughty. "I am leaving the villa anyway," she said, though she had had no such plans until the words left her mouth.
They walked in silence thr ~ Marie Rutkoski
Numbness quotes by Marie Rutkoski
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 not to feel, not to let the world touch one. But my honest self revolted at this, hated me for doing this. Sick with conflict, destructive negative emotions, frozen into disintegration I was, refusing to articulate, to spew forth these emotions - they festered in me, growing big, distorted, like pus-bloated sores. Small problems, mentions of someone else's felicity, evidence of someone else's talents, frightened me, making me react hollowly, fighting jealousy, envy, hate. Feeling myself fall apart, decay, rot, and the laurels wither and fall away, and my past sins and omissions strike me with full punishment and import. All this, all this foul, gangrenous, sludge ate away at my insides. Silent, insidious. ~ Sylvia Plath
Numbness quotes by Sylvia Plath
Violence is its own anesthetist. The numbness it induces feels very much like calm. ~ Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
Numbness quotes by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
Numbness and cynicism, I suspect, are more often the products of frustrated compassion than of evil intentions. ~ David Hilfiker
Numbness quotes by David Hilfiker
When a hand comes down across your bottom, the sting is quickly followed by a prickling numbness. The pain vanishes and the heat generated from those slaps sends lines of electric fire through all the tissues and nerve endings, ripples of warmth that gather in a wave of sensations, a million tiny kisses that lap over your clitoris and take you to a breath-taking orgasm. That's why girls like spanking and spanking girls is a unique pleasure. ~ Chloe Thurlow
Numbness quotes by Chloe Thurlow
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
Numbness quotes by Douglas Coupland
I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here. ~ Sylvia Plath
Numbness quotes by Sylvia Plath
My world has been torn apart and stitched back together too many times, and now I exist only as a tattered patchwork of myself - unable to think, unable to feel anything other than numbness. ~ Amie Kaufman
Numbness quotes by Amie Kaufman
How odd to smile during Richard's funeral. He was dead and I was smiling to myself. Grief does that. Laughter lies close in with despair, numbness near by acuity and memory with forgetfulness. I would have got used to it, but I didn't know this at the time. All I knew, was that memory had given pleasure first, then cracking pain. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison
Numbness quotes by Kay Redfield Jamison
I had, of course, witnessed hundreds of people in a casino before, mindlessly dropping coins into slot machines. They don't play for money in America. It's true. The big payout is incidental to most gamblers. It's the numbness they're after. Not so in China. No one had that look of glazed stupor often found in American casinos. ~ J. Maarten Troost
Numbness quotes by J. Maarten Troost
March 28, 2012
The dreams won't subside. I don't just have them at night anymore but during the day as well. Erotic flashes of her lips, her breasts, her thighs.
My imagination does not rest. I yearn to know what she feels like, what she tastes like. My dreams make me long for more.
This woman is a virus. Every cell in my body has been infected by her. I try to remain civil, normal when I'm in her presence but she'll lick her lips or play with the top of her collar and suddenly memories of my dreams will come flooding back.
This woman is a virus that has dominated every part of my being. She attacks my lungs, squeezing the breath out of me until I'm hopelessly gasping for air.
This isn't a want. This isn't a need. This is an ache. I ache with wanting. I ache with need. I ache until the pain finally leaves me feeling numb. I long for that numbness. It's the only time I feel like…I don't feel.
I try to run away, to keep my distance but this woman is a virus. She's in my blood. Her smile stops my feet from moving. The only time she allows me to breathe freely is when I inhale her perfume. I feel myself losing control.
These dreams, this ache is slowly driving me insane.
This woman is a virus and she's eating me alive. ~ Jacqueline Francis - The Journal
Numbness quotes by Jacqueline Francis - The Journal
Walking was a habit he'd been unwilling to give up. He couldn't see the point in shutting himself up in a vehivle any more often than he had to, doing damage to the earth and the air in order to avoid using his body.
People did just that all the time, though. Most claimed they needed to save time. It was true they had little enough of that-- their lives were so soon ended. But Nathan didn't see them treating time as precious otherwise. They'd sit in their cars at a fast-food place for fifteen minutes when it would be quicker to park and go inside.
No, he blamed the modern culture of urgency. Only the most urgent sensations, emotions, and situations were considered important. They called it living life to the fullest. Not surprisingly, many sought numbness in alcohol or the pervasive voyeurism of reality TV while others tried to live a perpetual peak experience through drugs, sex, or celebrity. Ordinary lives, ordinary living had little value.
Nathan thought people needed to wash dishes by hand sometimes. Prepare their own meals more often. And take walks. ~ Eileen Wilks
Numbness quotes by Eileen Wilks
I felt deeply tricked. Stunned. And furious. I also felt my default emotion: numbness. ~ Augusten Burroughs
Numbness quotes by Augusten Burroughs
Sometimes you feel things so much, so intensely, it becomes a new kind of numbness, the oblivion of overstimulation. ~ Leah Raeder
Numbness quotes by Leah Raeder
Paced Breathing

People who experience anxiety often breathe improperly. They take shallow breaths from their chests instead of deep breaths from their diaphragms. (The diaphragm is the muscle that separates your chest cavity from your abdominal cavity and that makes it possible for you to inhale and exhale.)
Breathing from the chest can cause you to hyperventilate, which has a negative effect on your body's chemistry. Hyperventilation does not only mean panting or gasping for air; it also includes yawning, holding your breath, and sighing. The symptoms of hyperventilation are similar to those associated with anxiety: shortness of breath, lightheadedness, faintness, tingling or numbness in your fingers and toes, and the feeling that you are walking around in a dream. If you deal with anxiety and begin to hyperventilate, it will make the situation even worse. ~ Heather Moehn
Numbness quotes by Heather Moehn
Footsteps came to her, nearly invisible in the worn carpet. There were no words, just the creaking of old joints as they approached the bed, the lifting of expensive and fragrant sheets, and an understanding between two living ghosts.

Jahns's breath caught in her chest. Her hand groped for a wrist as it clutched her sheets. She slid over on the small convertible bed to make room, and pulled him down beside her.

Marnes wrapped his arms around her back, wiggled beneath her until she was lying on his side, a leg draped over his, her hands on his neck. She felt his moustach brush against her cheek, heard his lips purse and peck the corner of hers.

Jahns held his cheeks and burrowed her face into his shoulder. She cried, like a schoolchild, like a new shadow who felt lost and afraid in the wilderness of a strange and terrifying job. She cried with fear, but that soon drained away. It drained like the soreness in her back as his hands rubbed her there. It drained until numbness found its place, and then, after what felt like a forever of shuddering sobs, sensation took over.

Jahns felt alive in her skin. She felt the tingle of flesh touching flesh, of just her forearm against his hard ribs, her hands on his shoulder, his hands on her hips. And then the tears were some joyous release, some mourning of the lost time, some welcomed sadness of a moment long delayed and finally there, arms wrapped around it and holding tight.

She ~ Hugh Howey
Numbness quotes by Hugh Howey
I thought about suicide all the time, but it seemed toomuch effort, swallowing all those pills or jumping off things. If I'd lived out in the country I would have found a quiet stretch of railway track, and lain on it, fallen asleep, so that I would never have known when my last moment came. In London, the minimum tube fare had gone up so much that even to get near the line cost a fortune. Suicide seemed an extravagance I couldn't afford. People never leave you alone, either; I knew that if I'd tried to lie down on the line, any number of commuters would have pulled me off again, so that I didn't delay their train.
There must have been murderers out there who wanted to kill, with no way of finding those who wanted to be dead. If there had been some way of contacting them, a date-with-death line, I would have called them to set up a meeting. The current ways of death seemed too haphazard; it was all left up to chance. Had Chance come up, tapped me on the shoulder, said "Oi, you - long black tunnel, white light, off you go," I wouldn't have complained.
It was like having frostbite all over - feeling numb and in pain at the same time. ~ Helena Dela
Numbness quotes by Helena Dela
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
Numbness quotes by Will Christopher Baer
crossed borders like the wind. Yet it had happened, and Khristo finally understood how it had happened. Moving across the countryside made one prey, over time, to a series of small mishaps, none of them serious in and of itself, but cumulative over time. A few hours of sleep when one could manage it, a meal now and then, the insidious chill of the early spring, the constant forcing of the mind into a state of vigilance when all one craved was numbness, when not to think about anything seemed the most exquisite luxury the world had to offer. ~ Alan Furst
Numbness quotes by Alan Furst
Lately, though, he'd just been tired in general. Tired of people. Tired of books and TV and the nightly news and songs on the radio he'd heard years before and hadn't liked much in the first place. He was tired of his clothes and tired of his hair and tired of other people's clothes and other people's hair. He was tired of wishing things made sense. He'd gotten to a point where he was pretty sure he'd heard everything anyone had to say on any given subject and so it seemed he spent his days listening to old recordings of things that hadn't seemed fresh the first time he'd heard them.
Maybe he was simply tired of life, of the absolute effort it took to get up every goddamned morning and walk out with into the same fucking day with only slight variations in the weather and food.
He wondered if this was what clinical depression felt like, a total numbness, a weary lack of hope. ~ Dennis Lehane
Numbness quotes by Dennis Lehane
Feeling must have rendered her numb. ~ Mary Lawson
Numbness quotes by Mary Lawson
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
Numbness quotes by Elizabeth George
Obama. Kathy was becoming obsessed with the numbness, the way the news cycle was making her incapable of action, a beached somnolent whale. No one could put anything together, that was the problem. She had recently read an article that listed all the reasons why monarch butterflies were dying, before equations were too difficult, you knew intellectually, but you never really saw the consequences, since they tended to impact other poorer people in other poorer places. There is no away to throw things to didn't quite work as an axiom if you were a species that depended so stubbornly on the evidence of its eyes. ~ Olivia Laing
Numbness quotes by Olivia Laing
It seems to me that we live in dangerous times all over the world: we have the technology to remember everything but a desire to forget the troubling and to seek the safety of numbness. Fiction can do something about that. ~ Romesh Gunesekera
Numbness quotes by Romesh Gunesekera
Even the regular sufferings of fear were better than the ashen grayness of unfeeling, the numbness that had clutched his heart for months. Who knew that no pain was the worst pain, that ordinary agony was the way to feel alive? ~ Matthew Specktor
Numbness quotes by Matthew Specktor
To other cities, other machines, other forests of buildings of concrete where other men and women missed the stars at night and tended small plants on windowsills and kept tiny dogs and took them for walks along corridors in the endless procession of boxes and intersections and lights; where they rented space in other peoples's property so they had somewhere to sleep so they could get up and perform profit-related tasks they neither understood nor cared about, simply so they would be given the tokens of exchange they needed in order to rent the space in which they slept and snarled and watched television until finally some of them slipped out of the window and ran howling down the dark streeets, throwing off a numbness handed down from a society that was itself trapped in fracture and betrayal and despair; the lonely insane in a culture turning into a Christmas bauble, gaudy beauty wrapped around an emptiness coalescing faster and faster into parking lots and malls and waiting areas and virtual chat rooms--non places where nobody knew anything about anybody anymore. ~ Michael Marshall Smith
Numbness quotes by Michael Marshall Smith
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
Numbness quotes by Marya Hornbacher
I had no particular problem about getting divorced. For all intents and purposes we already were divorced. And I had no emotional hang up about signing and sealing the official documents. If that's what she wanted, fine. It was a legal formality, nothing more.

But when it came to why, and how, things had turned out this way, the sequence of events was beyond me. I understood, of course, that over time, and as circumstances changed, a couple could grow closer, or move apart. Changes in a person's feelings aren't regulated by custom, logic, or the law. They're fluid, unstable, free to spread their wings and fly away. Like migratory birds have no concept of borders between countries.

But these were all just generalizations, and I couldn't easily grasp the individual case here-that this woman, Yuzu, refused to love this man, me, and chose instead to be loved by someone else. It felt terribly absurd, a horribly ugly way to be treated. There wasn't any anger involved (I think). I mean, what was I supposed to be angry with? What I was feeling was a fundamental numbness. The numbness your heart automatically activates to lessen the awful pain when you want some-body desperately and they reject you. A kind of emotional morphine. ~ Haruki Murakami
Numbness quotes by Haruki Murakami
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
Numbness quotes by Sylvia Plath
Why are you being nice to me?"
The suprise on his face suprises me even more.
"Because I care about you." he says simply.
"You care about me?" The numbness in my body is beginning to dissipate. My blood pressure is rising and anger making its way to the forefron of my consciousness. "I almost killed Jenkins because of you!"
"You didn't kill-"
"Your soldiers beat me! You keep me here like a prisoner! You threaten me! You threaten to kill me! You give me no freedom and you say you care about me?" I nearly throw the glass of water at his face. "You are a monster!"
Warner turns away so I'm staring at his profile. He clasps his hands. Changes his mind. Touches his lips. "I am only trying to help you."
"Liar."
He seems to consider that. Nods, just once. "Yes, most of the time, yes. ~ Tahereh Mafi
Numbness quotes by Tahereh Mafi
One must go through periods of numbness that are harder to bear than grief. ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Numbness quotes by Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Indifference is the worst kind of response when love is expressed. Hate is not the antithesis of love; it's the nonexistence of feeling, a pervasive apathy. When hate is present, so is love. It's passion gone sour and fueled by pain, but, nonetheless, it's passion and love is apparently still alive. Yet when indifference seeps into our spirits, an emotional numbness and permitted scotoma takes the place of any passion – whether it's love or hate – and resigns in a new state of being. ~ M.B. Dallocchio
Numbness quotes by M.B. Dallocchio
I think the more
she has failed at things like relationships
and parenting, the more she has cut
herself off from feeling bad about those
things. And if you don't let yourself feel
bad, sooner or later you stop feeling
good, too. You insulate yourself. Build
up layers, like stacking paper, everything
growing heavier. And when the weight
becomes too much, those layers compress.
Become hard. Sad, really, to think that
Kristina has turned herself into cardboard. ~ Ellen Hopkins
Numbness quotes by Ellen Hopkins
She had had many men before her father's death and after they'd found each other. As if the pain would go away when enough souls showed her love - made love to her or made her forget her name for a night. ~ Meara O'Hara
Numbness quotes by Meara O'Hara
A lazy frost, a numbness of the mind. ~ John Dryden
Numbness quotes by John Dryden
He was numb: heart-numb, mind-numb, soul-numb. And the numbness, he realized, went a long way down, and a long way back. ~ Neil Gaiman
Numbness quotes by Neil Gaiman
Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world. ~ Lorrie Moore
Numbness quotes by Lorrie Moore
Since our society equates happiness with youth, we often assume that sorrow, quiet desperation, and hopelessness go hand in hand with getting older. They don't. Emotional pain or numbness are symptoms of living the wrong life, not a long life. ~ Martha Beck
Numbness quotes by Martha Beck
At the time, I remained relatively calm before that spectacle of horrors, which is perhaps the most telling indication of just how desensitized I had become. The more I witnessed such atrocities and rubbed shoulders with death, the more I desired to stay alive, no matter the cost. ~ Kang Chol-Hwan
Numbness quotes by Kang Chol-Hwan
Cynicism creates a numbness toward life.

Cynicism begins with a wry assurance that everyone has an angle. Behind every silver lining is a cloud. The cynic is always observing, critiquing, but never engaging, loving, and hoping.

...

To be cynical is to be distant. While offering a false intimacy of being "in the know," cynicism actually destroys intimacy. It leads to bitterness that can deaden and even destroy the spirit.

...

Cynicism begins, oddly enough, with too much of the wrong kind of faith, with naive optimism or foolish confidence. At first glance, genuine faith and naive optimism appear identical since both foster confidence and hope.But the similarity is only surface deep.Genuine faith comes from knowing my heavenly Father loves, enjoys, and cares for me. Naive optimism is groundless. It is childlike trust without the loving Father.

...

Optimism in the goodness of people collapses when it confronts the dark side of life.

...

Shattered optimism sets us up for the fall into defeated weariness and, eventually, cynicism. You'd think it would just leave us less optimistic, but we humans don't do neutral well. We go from seeing the bright side of everything to seeing the dark side of everything. We feel betrayed by life.

...

The movement from naive optimism to cynicism is the new American journey. In naive optimism we don't need to pray because everythin ~ Paul E. Miller
Numbness quotes by Paul E. Miller
In this world of numbness and information overload, the ability to feel, my boy, is a rare gift indeed. ~ Patrick Ness
Numbness quotes by Patrick Ness
But now and then, beneath the outer numbness, something stirred, like a living pain waiting for the anesthetic to wear away. ~ Zilpha Keatley Snyder
Numbness quotes by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
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
Numbness quotes by Bret Easton Ellis
Throughout the movie, we moved to eat popcorn, shifted to get comfortable, only to end up uncomfortable; an awkward dance of keeping my hands and parts from familiar and unfamiliar areas of Echo's divine body. I was capable of being a gentleman for the length of one movie, at least. The credits roled and my left hand, which I'd placed behind my head to avoid her tempting tummy, tingled with numbness.
My patience finaly snapped. "This is ridiculous." I swept her up and swung her over my shoulder, her bare feet dangling in front of me.
Tinkling laughter filed the room. "What are you doing?" I tossed her onto the bed. Her fire-red hair sprawled over the pilow. My siren smiled up at me.
"Getting comfortable," I said. " -Noah's POV ~ Katie McGarry
Numbness quotes by Katie McGarry
A faint movement distracted me as Oria elbow-crawled up to my side. Her profile was outlined by the light from those faraway torches as she looked down on the castle below.
"I'm sorry, Oria," I breathed.
She did not turn her head. "For what?"
"All our plans when we were growing up. All the fine things we'd have had after we won. Making you a duchess--"
She grunted softly. "That was no more than dream-weaving. I don't want to be a duchess. Never did. Well, after my fourteenth year, I didn't. That was you, wanting it for me."
For the first time a flicker of emotion broke briefly through the aching numbness around my heart. "But when we talked…"
She rested her chin on her tightly folded fists, staring down at the castle. I could see tiny reflections of the ruddy torches in her eyes, so steady and unblinking was her gaze. "The only way for me to be a noble is to become a scribe or a herald and work my way up through the government service ranks, and I don't want to write others' things, or to take records, and I don't want to get mixed up with governments--with the kind of people who want to rule over others. Seems like the wrong people get killed, the nice ones. I want…" She sighed and stopped.
"Tell me," I said. "We can dream-weave once more."
"I want to run a house. You can control that--make life comfortable, and pleasant, and beautiful. My dream was always that, or partly that…"
Once again she stopped, and this time the gleam of t ~ Sherwood Smith
Numbness quotes by Sherwood Smith
As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation--the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. If you had watched your patient carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life--his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty. ~ C.S. Lewis
Numbness quotes by C.S. Lewis
It was like being a prisoner on death row who survives month after month and becomes accustomed to the life, while he registers with an objective eye the horror of the new arrivals: registers it with the same numbness tha he brings to the murders and deaths themselves. All survivor literature talks about this numbness, in which life's functions are reduced to minimum, behavior becomes completely selfish and indifferent to others, and gassing and burning are everyday occurences. In the rare accounts by perpetrators , too, the gas chambers and ovens become ordinary scenary, the perpetrators reduced to their few functions and exhibiting a mental paralysis and indifference, a dullness that makes them seem drugged or drunk. ~ Bernhard Schlink
Numbness quotes by Bernhard Schlink
I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between stars. ~ Raymond Chandler
Numbness quotes by Raymond Chandler
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
Numbness quotes by Desmond Tutu
Should could no longer feel grief. She was now like a Geiger counter that had been subjected to too much radiation, no longer capable of giving any reaction, noiselessly displaying a reading of zero. ~ Liu Cixin
Numbness quotes by Liu Cixin
.."I let people walk away, the one who loved me, the one who cares for me, I push them to their limits but the saddest part is...I felt nothing, too much pain makes me numb.. ~ Gracetamio
Numbness quotes by Gracetamio
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
Numbness quotes by Marie Lu
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
Numbness quotes by Lili Wilkinson
We're all doctors trading sadness for numbness
grass looks much greener but it's green-painted cement
the mayor's machines are there cleaning the pavement
you can't make dirt clean so we'll just lemon-scent it ~ Modest Mouse
Numbness quotes by Modest Mouse
Oddly, the burned hand didn't seem to hurt much anymore; it was only numb. It would have been better if there had been pain. Pain was at least real. ~ Stephen King
Numbness quotes by Stephen King
He just wanted to stop thinking. It was easier that way. The numbness hadn't left him; if anything it was spreading. When he looked at the pictures, there was no emotion, even though he knew there should be. He should be sad.
But he wasn't.
He felt nothing.
The drinking didn't help.
Somewhere in the darkest recess of his brain, a button was pushed. Everything he cared about simply vanished. He'd malfunctioned. ~ Jeyn Roberts
Numbness quotes by Jeyn Roberts
Who took away the part so essential to the whole Left you a hollow body Skin and bone. ~ Tracy Chapman
Numbness quotes by Tracy Chapman
In the end, those who were carried off early no longer need us: they are weaned from earth's sorrows and joys, as gently as children outgrow the soft breasts of their mothers. But we, who do need such great mysteries, we for whom grief is so often the source of our spirit's growth––: could we exist without them? Is the legend meaningless that tells how, in the lament for Linus, the daring first notes of song pierced through the barren numbness; and then in the startled space which a youth as lovely as a god had suddenly left forever, the Void felt for the first time that harmony which now enraptures and comforts and helps us. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Numbness quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke
Shea, particularly, had passed the point where his chief emotion was fear; now he felt only a sense of numbness that dulled his mind into self-imposed surrender, a robot-like acceptance of the fact that he was being led to the proverbial slaughter. ~ Terry Brooks
Numbness quotes by Terry Brooks
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