Anesthetize Quotes & Sayings

To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more - and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize. — Susan Sontag

Now you know you're going to have to play music for the label, you know you're going to have to get an opinion from the manager. Now, I'm so much more conscious and it bothers me. I try to find my way back to writing without being too analytical or not thinking about whether this is good or is it bad. — Yukimi Nagano

Prayer ... panacea for some, placebo to others. I thought of it as an epidural administered through the soul to anesthetize the mind. — Clyde DeSouza

The English major is, first of all, a reader. She's got a book pup-tented in front of her nose many hours a day; her Kindle glows softly late into the night. But there are readers and there are readers. There are people who read to anesthetize themselves - they read to induce a vivid, continuous, and risk-free daydream. They read for the same reason that people grab a glass of chardonnay - to put a light buzz on. The English major reads because, as rich as the one life he has may be, one life is not enough. He reads not to see the world through the eyes of other people but effectively to become other people. What is it like to be John Milton, Jane Austen, Chinua Achebe? What is it like to be them at their best, at the top of their games? — Mark Edmundson

And yet there's nothing to understand. The problem is that children believe what adults say and, once they're adults themselves, they exact their revenge by deceiving their own children. "Life has meaning and we grown-ups know what it is" is the universal lie that everyone is supposed to believe. Once you become an adult and you realize that's not true, it's too late. The mystery remains intact, but all your available energy has long ago been wasted on stupid things. All that's left is to anesthetize yourself by trying to hide the fact that you can't find any meaning in your life, ... — Muriel Barbery

Julian sucks in a deep breath. Then, all in a rush, he says, "I love you." Just as I blurt out, "Don't say it." There's another beat of silence. Julian looks startled. "What?" he finally says. I wish I could take the words back. I wish I could say I love you, too. But the words are caught in the cage of my chest. "Julian, you have to know how much I care about you." I try to touch him, and he jerks backward. "Don't," he says. — Lauren Oliver

When we don't deal honestly with our lives and the losses we face, when we try to anesthetize the pain and move on, then the suppressed anger or fear or guilt will deal with us until we are ready to deal with those issues. — Sheila Walsh

How to Anesthetize theM asses [10w]
Build more shopping malls and get rid of the internet. — Beryl Dov

A wound not fully felt consumes from the inside. We must run very hard if we want to stay one step ahead of this pain. Exhausted, we try to bury it with drugs, alcohol, overwork, television, physical activity. We are a very creative species - we can use just about anything to anesthetize ourselves. But in doing so, we also remove ourselves from feeling the joy. — Oriah Mountain Dreamer

One might pray and not be a Christian, but one cannot be a Christian and not pray. — R.C. Sproul

Living in a culture that prefers to shut out the dark, avoid shadows, and anesthetize pain means that many people are isolated ... Family, friends, and co-workers, fearful of the dark, are reluctant to participate in our shadow experience and may urge us to be done with the dark before it is done with us. — Susan Wittig Albert

The light too brief to finish any work
the woman seeks to amplify the dark — Leatha Kendrick

Did you know the average age of a gamer is thirty-two? Now, I don't see anything inherently wrong with diversion and games, but that is certainly telling about our culture, isn't it? Instead of raising families or creating culture, we are sitting around in our living rooms with our eyes glued to the television, simulating life. We are escapists, cowards, and thieves. We hide, occasionally stealing crumbs from the table of those living the good life. We are avoiding the truth that screams at us from the stillness: 'There is more. You are more than this.' So we anesthetize the truth with busyness. Maybe if we just do more, this feeling of emptiness will go away. And we won't actually have to do any real work. — Jeff Goins

Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves. — Adam Phillips

If you think that happiness means total peace, you will never be happy. Peace comes from the acceptance of the part of you that can never be at peace. It will always be in conflict. If you accept that, everything gets a lot better. — Joss Whedon

It's a cycle ... Religion is a source of relief for those who seek to anesthetize the pain that comes from following its beliefs. — Steve Maraboli

Why are people so fucked up?" I asked
"Maybe you do need college, Poiter," Everett said. "You want to know why people are so fucked up? Son, that's about the only question I can answer with even a small measure of authority. It's because they're people. People, my friend, are worse than anybody. — Percival Everett

Let's face it: The Republican Party is no longer a broad-based conservative party in the historically accepted sense. It is an oligarchy with a well-developed public relations strategy designed to soothe and anesthetize its followers with appeals to tradition, security, and family even as it pursues a radical agenda that would transform the country into a Dickensian corporatocracy at home and a belligerent military empire abroad. — Mike Lofgren

The radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools tryin' to anesthetize the way that you feel. — Elvis Costello

Let me put it this way: I definitely need to understand the villains I play. The best cause pain to anesthetize themselves against their own pain. — Ron Perlman

Our thoughts and desires are based in hope, but our behaviors are based in fear. This misalignment often causes a feeling of hopelessness and continues the cycle of feeding outdated ideologies and Guru genres offering gimmicks to anesthetize the pain. — Steve Maraboli

The most powerful emotions that we experience have very sharp points, like the tip of a thorn. When they prick us, they cause discomfort and even pain. Just the anticipation or fear of these feelings can trigger intolerable vulnerability in us. We know it's coming. For many of us, our first response to vulnerability and pain of these sharp points is not to lean into the discomfort and feel our way through but rather to make it go away. We do that by numbing and taking the edge off the pain with whatever provides the quickest relief. We can anesthetize with a whole bunch of stuff, including alcohol, drugs, food, sex, relationships, money, work, caretaking, gambling, staying busy, affairs, chaos, shopping, planning, perfectionism, constant change, and the Internet. — Brene Brown

One thing I've noticed since I quit drinking is that a person usually has two or three sets of impulses scratching away at some internal door at any given time. If you're sober
if you're alert, and paying attention to those impulses, and not yielding to the instinct to anesthetize them
you can receive a lot of guidance about where to go, what to do next in life. — Caroline Knapp

Spoilers are cowardly. They're just people who want to anesthetize themselves against the tension and the experience that the director and the artist have set up. If you go in there knowing what's going to happen, it's like reading the last page of the book. It's just cowardly. — Simon Pegg

I am, as I have always been, of the opinion that while the niceties of normal moral constraints should be our guides, they must not be our masters. — Iain Banks

In the confusions of the next hours the Earth's population was substantially reduced, the biosphere was altered, and the Earth itself was marked with numbers of more conventional craters. For some years thereafter the survivors were existentially preoccupied and the peculiar dustbowl at Bonneville was left to weather by itself in the changing climatic cycles.

"The Man Who Walked Home — James Tiptree Jr.

To-day the truth is a command. — Albert Camus

The fact is that at different stages of your life, and under the influence of different inspirations, you write different things. The point is not necessarily to find your voice, which grinds out the same sort of thing again and again, but to find a vehicle for people who are far more important than the author: the characters. — Vikram Seth

Money and machines anesthetize neediness. They put us in charge, in control. As long as the money holds out and the machines are in good repair, we don't need to pray. — Eugene H. Peterson

Somehow, married or single, we'd rather anesthetize ourselves with love substitutes than go for the real thing, because let's face it: The real thing is pretty scary. — Tracy McMillan

To salve the pains of consciousness, some people anesthetize themselves with sunny thoughts. But not everyone can follow their lead, above all not those who sneer at the sun and everything upon which it beats down. Their only respite is in the balm of bleakness. Disdainful of the solicitations of hope, they look for sanctuary in desolate places - a scattering of ruins in a barren locale or a rubble of words in a book where someone whispers in a dry voice, I too am here. — Thomas Ligotti

He tried to get drunk, "to forget about life for awhile," as that old
Billy Joel song once said, but the scotch couldn't anesthetize his pain
and provide a retreat from the reality of his latest failures. — Keith Steinbaum

Clarke stared at the crash scene, eyes straining in the dark, waiting for the inevitable moment when her training would kick in, when her instincts would anesthetize her panic. But hovering at the edge of the wide expanse of debris, absorbing the destruction, all she felt was horror. It — Kass Morgan

I despise this false lucidity that comes with age. The truth is that they are just like everyone else: nothing more than kids without a clue about what has happened to them, acting big and tough when in fact all they want is to burst into tears.
And yet there's nothing to understand. The problem is that children believe what adults say and, once they're adults themselves, they exact their revenge by deceiving their own children. 'Life has meaning and we grown-ups know what it is' is the universal lie that everyone is supposed to believe. Once you become an adult and you realize that's not true, it's too late. The mystery remains intact, but all your available energy has long been wasted on stupid things. All that's left is to anesthetize yourself by trying to hide the fact that you can't find any meaning in your life, and then, the better to convince yourself, you deceive your own children. — Muriel Barbery

He shrugged his shoulders, like he had no idea what I was talking about. I loved that. — Jonathan Safran Foer

In a situation of manipulation, the Left is almost always tempted by a "quick return to power," forgets the necessity of joining with the oppressed to forge an organization, and strays into an impossible "dialogue" with the dominant elites. It ends by being manipulated by these elites, and not infrequently itself falls in an elitist game, which it calls "realism."
Manipulation, like the conquest whose objectives it serves, attempts to anesthetize the people so they will not think. For if the people join to their presence in the historical process critical thinking about that process, the threat of their emergence materializes in revolution ... One of the methods of manipulation is to inoculate individuals with the bourgeois appetite for personal success. This manipulation is sometimes carried out directly by the elites and sometimes indirectly, through populist leaders. — Paulo Freire

I felt the strangling tendrils of a cancerous horror whose roots reached into illimitable pasts and fathomless abysms of the night that broods beyond time. — H.P. Lovecraft

And leadership then is about mobilizing and engaging the people with the problem rather than trying to anesthetize them so you can go off and solve it on your own. — Ronald A. Heifetz

What I had mastered was fly-fishing Rule # 1: Remove all hooks from soft tissue under water, where near-freezing temperatures anesthetize exposed nerve endings and you can't hear your fellow anglers' hysterical laughter. — Jessica Maxwell

Images anesthetize. An event known through photographs certainly becomes more real than it would have been if one had never seen the photographs ... But after repeated exposure to images it also becomes less real ... 'concerned' photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it. — Susan Sontag

He began with the core principle he had intoned at the dawn of his political career 25 years before: A democratic Calvinist in the Netherlands could not vote Democratic in the United States because that party trays its origins to Thomas Jefferson, who in turn had endorsed the principles of the French Revolution. — James Bratt

If only ten or twenty Negroes had been put into slavery, we would call it injustice, but there were hundreds of thousands of them throughout the country. If this state of affairs had lasted for two or three years, we could say that it was unjust; but it lasted for more than two hundred years. Injustice which lasts for three long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life. — Richard Wright