Distancing Self Quotes & Sayings

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

With her own hand she'd painted herself into a corner, and then out of the picture altogether. — Jhumpa Lahiri

I am meeting Diaspora Jews all the time, and we are developing programmes to prevent distancing. We have a joint history, but we cannot take matters for granted. Israel is home for all of us, and part of the beauty of the country is its social diversity. — Ofra Strauss

A familiarity had been activated in a reoccurring
theme that had been ignited from a recognizable old pattern of self distancing behavior. The tone of Laura's voice and the poise of her body language seemed to shrug at the expectations of Ed's reconciliatory efforts. It felt to Ed as though their relationship was right back to the same rugged place that it had been at before their vacation; right back to a recondite square one. It seemed like any connecting that had been accomplished had all unraveled into a recoiled heap of uncertainty. — Calvin W. Allison

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

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 aspects of patriotism that hush dissent, encourage going along, and sanction comfortable distancing and compliance with what is indecent and unacceptable ... those aspects are too fundamental to ignore or gloss over. — Bernadine Dohrn

Good managers succeed because of, not in spite of, their teams and raise their game by raising the game of the whole team, not by distancing themselves from them in pointing out their errors. — Tim Phillips

When we stop distancing ourselves from the pain in the world, our own or others', we create the possibility of a new experience, one that often surprises because of how much joy, connection, or relief it yields. Destruction may continue, but humanity shines through. — Mark Epstein

Few Iranians these days go through the fiction of calling themselves 'Persian.' Calling yourself Persian is a way of distancing themselves from Iran. — Reza Aslan

Not enough people realize that ADHD is not a disorder about loss of focus. It is a disorder of loss of emotional control, which is triggered by outside influences, self-esteem and our interpretation of events. Whether this is positive or negative it triggers us to hyper focus on what consumes our thoughts. Staying positive is critical and distancing oneself from hurtful people is essential, in order to live a life with purpose. — Shannon L. Alder

Distancing yourself from some painful event is probably the ignition for the process of forgiveness. — Stephen Richards

... "Don't Somalis take the part and mistake it for the whole too?" Jeebleh knew e was in a distancing mode, apart from 'them'. ... — Nuruddin Farah

Every era in the continent's vaunted developmental story had its own taxonomy of waste people-unwanted and unsalvageable. Each era had its own means of distancing its version of white trash from the mainstream ideal. — Nancy Isenberg

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

Is something the matter?" "I thought you'd prefer distancing yourself from Arabella. She just took to the floor with Mr. Sumner." Theodore narrowed his eyes as he searched the crowd. Sure enough, Arabella was in Grayson's arms, laughing at something the man was whispering in her ear. No one except him should be whispering in her ear. He took a breath and twirled Felicia around in circles, trying to get closer to Arabella. "What are you doing?" Felicia hissed. "I need to speak to Arabella." "From what I've heard, she doesn't want to speak to you. Eliza told me she's beyond annoyed with you." "Yes, well, I'm a bit annoyed with her at the moment, so we're fairly even. When we get closer to them, I'm going to hand you off to Grayson and take Arabella. — Jen Turano

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 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

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

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

I found that looking at the Israeli/Palestinian conflict from an outside vantage point was actually quite distancing. The history of the conflict, the personalities, the violence, the distrust, and the seeming lack of viable solutions made meaningful involvement feel impossible. What changed that, for me, was changing the vantage point. — Jason Alexander

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

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

My father could be very distancing. My clearest memory is of him squatting, watering plants for hours and hours at a time, completely silent. He was very self-contained; my mother was more outgoing and chatty and social. I'm certainly more like her. — John Malkovich

The paradoxical virtue of reading lies in distancing ourselves from the world so that we may make sense of it. — Daniel Pennac

People demonize certain types of crime - it's a way of distancing ourselves from the monsters ... — John Geddes

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

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

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

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

To think critically, it is first maturing and distancing a bit from self, no matter what level one lives on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. — Pearl Zhu

In addition to the kind of critical reflection on one's previous assumptive or tacit system of values we saw Jack undertake, there must be, for Stage 4, a relocation of authority within the self. While others and their judgments will remain important to the Individuative-Reflective person, their expectations, advice and counsel will be submitted to an internal panel of experts who reserve the right to choose and who are prepared to take responsibility for their choices. I sometimes call this the emergence of the executive ego.
The two essential features of the emergence of Stage 4, then, are the critical distancing from one's previous assumptive value system and the emergence of the executive ego ...
We find that sometimes many persons complete half of this double movement, but do not complete the other. — James W. Fowler

It is always easiest to run with the herd; at times, it can take a deep reservoir of courage and conviction to stand apart from it. Yet distancing yourself from the crowd is an essential component of long-term investment success. — Seth Klarman

Although it might seem as though anonymity, invisibility, and other such distancing factors grant us the freedom to engage in more authentic forms of self-expression than we're usually permitted, [John] Suler warns against the temptation to regard disinhibition as "revealing of an underlying 'rue self." He suggests instead that the inhibited self and disinhibited self are simply different *sides* of the *same* person. So Suler challenges the intuitive notion that whatever inhibits us thereby diminishes the authenticity of our self-expression. — Mimi Marinucci

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

It is highly abnormal today to be happy in this highly abnormal world. It can only come with complete distancing from all things around, all events around and all people and our equations with them. We transact, interact only to the extent of necessity and our well-being.The question is then what remains of us from such acute levels of detachments that we build as safety barriers to safeguard our happiness ? If our happiness is so fragile, then are we truly happy ? If we are immersed in the world and still happy then we must surely possess the highest degree of tolerance for the vilest of things. The picture that emerges of a happy individual is not a happy one. — Srividya Srinivasan

Truly, from a very early age, I started distancing myself from other kids, not out of willingness, but just out of the nature of my energy. I liked to do things solely, and I already had a taste of the quest for perfection, which is unusual in a little kid. — Philippe Petit

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

Maybe the key to moving on was distancing herself from Wes. Not all the way. Just a little bit.
Enough to let someone else in. — Cindi Madsen

I was tops at the Scarlet O'Hara school of emotional distancing. I always thought about the uncomfortable stuff tomorrow, and, as everyone knows, tomorrow never comes. — Karen Chance

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

The whole problem of the sound-work is distancing oneself from the dramatic. — Pierre Schaeffer

Much of the research on the Nazi era makes a science out of distancing oneself from it or conjuring its demons. The conceit is that people were monsters then - as if they were completely different from people today. — Gotz Aly

In 1962 the president of the American Historical Association, Carl Bridenbaugh, warned his colleagues that human existence was undergoing a "Great Mutation" - so sudden and so radical "that we are now suffering something like historical amnesia." He lamented the decline of reading; the distancing from nature (which he blamed in part on "ugly yellow Kodak boxes" and "the transistor radio everywhere"); and the loss of shared culture. — James Gleick

She missed him. And she was scared, deep down, because she felt him pulling away from her, and even though he assured her he wasn't, she didn't believe him. — Harriet Evans

Philosophy is a distancing, if not debilitating, activity. — Michael J. Sandel

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

I had great femme mentors, I had good role models of gentle men, I found ways to be a butch that did not require being an ass in public, ways of masculinity that were not misogyny - which is what I see more often than I used to these days, this way of butches distancing themselves from any and all things feminine by embodying the worst excesses of men, from relatively harmless ones like spitting on the street and wearing too much cheap cologne to behaving as though women were an entirely separate species of second-class citizen, the objects of jokes and derision. — S. Bear Bergman

My fear was not the fear of God but, as in the case of the whole Turkish secular bourgeoisie, fear of the anger of those who believe in God too zealously( ... ) I experienced the guilt complex as something personal, originated less from the fear of distancing myself from God than from distancing myself from the sense of community shared by the entire city . — Orhan Pamuk

I assume that in great men whose names I dare not mention, the anarchic element was very powerful. You see, when fundamental changes are to occur in law, custom, and society, they presuppose a great distancing from established principles. And the anarch, should he take any action, is capable of working this lever. — Ernst Junger

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

The healing process kicks into gear with with the words "This is what you did to me." That statement is not gentle or polite; it's absolutely direct. In fact, I know that seeing it might feel like a punch in the stomach. I deliberately removed the distancing veil of "objectivity" from the words "This is what you did" by adding 'to me'. — Susan Forward