Top 100 Of'numbness'and Quotes
#1. This behavior may ... counteract feelings of'numbness'and depersonalization that aries duriing periods of extreme stress.-153 Girl,Interrupted
Susanna Kaysen
#2. In this world of numbness and information overload, the ability to feel, my boy, is a rare gift indeed.
Patrick Ness
#3. But what would that be like
feeling the tide rise
out of the numbness inside
David Whyte
#4. 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 Buonarroti
#5. Wasn't it time she risked getting hurt again, instead of just accepting the numbness of never letting anyone in?
Jeaniene Frost
#6. The same numbness and disappointment every day sends some people looking for something tragic for proof of life.
Bryant McGill
#7. 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
#8. Personal voice- prophesy- disrupts the state of communal numbness in which most of us exist.
Walter Brueggemann
#9. Someone who would bear my shock, reflect back my outrage, so I could see it better, feel more than this electric numbness.
Jennie Fields
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. You know, I think the people I feel saddest for are the ones who once knew what profoundness was, but who lost or became numb to the sensation of wonder, who felt their emotions floating away and just didn't care. I guess that's what's scariest: not caring about the loss.
Douglas Coupland
#13. 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
#14. Numbness and cynicism, I suspect, are more often the products of frustrated compassion than of evil intentions.
David Hilfiker
#15. I felt deeply tricked. Stunned. And furious. I also felt my default emotion: numbness.
Augusten Burroughs
#16. 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
#17. Who took away the part so essential to the whole Left you a hollow body Skin and bone.
Tracy Chapman
#18. 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
#19. He was numb except for dreading the loss of numbness.
Thomas Harris
#20. The thought came creeping, just as the numbness came creeping, stealing over his senses, softly, smoothly, there in the silken silence.
Robert Bloch
#21. Eventually, however, the denial turned into emptiness and my childhood ended.
Floyd C. Forsberg
#22. Sometimes you feel things so much, so intensely, it becomes a new kind of numbness, the oblivion of overstimulation.
Leah Raeder
#23. 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
#24. In grownups, mercury can cause memory loss, tremors, vision loss and numbness of the fingers and toes. It can also adversely affect fertility and blood pressure regulation, and a growing body of evidence suggests that exposure to mercury may lead to heart disease.
Frances Beinecke
#26. While the ghettos may have their share of violence and crime, the posh suburbs are home to more subtle demonic forces
numbness, complacency and comfort. These are the powers that can eat away at our souls.
Shane Claiborne
#27. 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
#28. I don't sleep. I just let my body lie itself into numbness and lie to myself that I can't hear, see, or feel anything.
Will Advise
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. She wanted something she didn't have words for- peace, numbness, something.
Melissa Marr
#32. He'd been numb a long time, years. All his nights down Ninsei, his nights with Linda, numb in bed and numb at the cold sweating center of every drug deal. But now he'd found this warm thing, this chip of murder. Meat, some part of him said. It's the meat talking, ignore it.
William Gibson
#33. When things don't go the way you want them to, sometimes instead of feeling disappointment or heartache, you just become numb.
April Mae Monterrosa
#34. Physical pain was easy. It would always pass in the end. All it needed was time - a ticking clock.
Sidney Knight
#35. 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
#36. After a day of heat and hunger, one is weak and listless. But a certain stuport, an internal numbness, has its benefits: man could not survive here without it, for otherwise the biological, animal part of his nature would bite to death everything that is still human in him.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#37. 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?
Anna Kamienska
#38. You've faced horrors in these past weeks ... I don't know which is worse. The terror you feel the first time you witness such things, or the numbness that comes after it starts to become ordinary.
Tasha Alexander
#40. The only thing I'd understand right from the very beginning was that our love was supported by loneliness. That neither one of us could haul ourselves up out of the deadly numbness we felt when we lay together, so silent, in darkness so isolating it seemed to shine. This was the edge of night.
Banana Yoshimoto
#41. Crossing the Ring of Fire is..moving from the emotional shutdown of numbness through the flames of fear and entering into the healing arms of change.
David W. Earle
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. Someone is going to tell you to get use to this. That feeling of being scared and sad. They're going to say it'll be better when you learn to ignore it. Don't listen to them. Hold on to it, remember it ... Don't let yourself forget it. It's too easy to lose.
-Carl Grimes
Robert Kirkman
#47. 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
#48. We conform to pain until we don't notice it anymore; it's what you call - numb - and it tragically blots out our pleasure too.
Bryant McGill
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#54. Once I was free; there was no cage that could bind me, and I had yet to create my box of numbness within my mind to be my silent protector.
J.D. Stroube
#55. Too weary and dazed by unfinished sleep even to swear. There comes a degree of numbness in fatigue and exasperation which can be expressed only by a sullen silence.
Humphrey Cobb
#56. The numbness will go away, he thought. It'll take time, but I'll do it, or Faber will do it for me. Someone somewhere will give me back the old face and the old hands the way they were. Even the smile, he thought, the old burnt-in smile, that's gone. I'm lost without it
Ray Bradbury
#57. 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
#58. How much had I missed in these months of despair and numbness?
Sarah J. Maas
#59. 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
#60. Then Jess gave himself over to the numbness that was buzzing to be let out from a corner of his brain.
Katherine Paterson
#61. We do not truly speak except at a distance. There is no word not severed.
Edmond Jabes
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here.
Sylvia Plath
#65. 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
#66. I wasn't glad that I hadn't died. And I wasn't sad that I hadn't. I wasn't anything.
Kathleen Rooney
#67. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another's vantage point, as if new, it may still take the breath away.
Alan Moore
#68. 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 at numbness, silence.
Anne Lamott
#69. I'd always escaped into books, but now reading had become something more. It allowed me to be somewhere else, to feel something else, not just the numbness that overtook my body and made me wonder if I was still alive.
Demitria Lunetta
#70. 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
#71. This was my first conscious barter. Trading pain for the closest vice, I slipped into a knowing numbness. Prayer seemed an impotent remedy
Seth Haines
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. I'm something that I used to be. I'm never where I feel I am, and if I seek myself, I don't know who's seeking me. My boredom with everything has numbed me. I feel banished from my soul.
Fernando Pessoa
#76. I think there's a certain numbness in modern society, that accepts certain kinds of violence, but represses other kinds of violence.
Nick Cave
#77. 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
#78. I want someone to pinch me so I can feel something, anything. I'm sick of this numbness, of feeling so alone and outside of everything, but I know it's too dangerous to wake up.
- Ruth Mendenberg
Carol Matas
#79. Anaesthesia, that's one technique: if it hurts, invent a different pain.
Margaret Atwood
#80. When I fell out of the light, I entered The stomach of indifference, the wordless cupboard.
Sylvia Plath
#81. For this nirvana, I willingly
give in to the numbness of
my wrist.
A.P. Sweet
#82. But now and then, beneath the outer numbness, something stirred, like a living pain waiting for the anesthetic to wear away.
Zilpha Keatley Snyder
#83. You took away the numbness. You made me remember how to feel, how to care about someone other than myself.
Kelly Oram
#84. I had nothing and I was still changed. Like a costume, my numbness was taken away. Then hunger was added.
Louise Gluck
#85. I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.
Sylvia Plath
#86. Ties are straightened and expressions banished.
Rana Dasgupta
#87. 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
#88. How shall I break up this numbness which discredits my sympathetic heart?
Virginia Woolf
#89. 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
#90. Between blow and pain, there is that instant of numbness, an unreal moment ...
Parke Godwin
#91. Absent the edge, we drown in numbness.
David Whyte
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. Numbness was what I craved. It was the rope I used to climb out of the black hole I'd otherwise be trapped in. Numbness was my savior, not my fear.
Bella Forrest
#96. There was a numbness in Clary's hands, a hard pressure in her chest. It was lovely, she could see that: the city rising up beside her like a towering forest of silver and glass, the dull gray shimmer of the East River, slicing between Manhattan and the boroughs like a scar.
Cassandra Clare
#97. 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
#98. There is a level of grief so deep that it stops resembling grief at all. The pain becomes so severe that the body can no longer feel it. The grief cauterizes itself, scars over, prevents inflated feeling. Such numbness is a kind of mercy.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#99. ...He called up the numbness with which he armed himself to get through each day.
Sandra Brown
#100. We don't exist unless there is someone who can see us existing, what we say has no meaning until someone can understand, while to be surrounded by friends is constantly to have our identity confirmed; their knowledge and care for us have the power to pull us from our numbness.
Alain De Botton
