Numbed Quotes & Sayings

There I am then back in the saddle, in my numbed heart a prick of misgiving, like one dying of cancer obliged to consult his dentist. — Samuel Beckett

I believe that the place where an animal dies is a sacred one. There is a need to bring ritual into the conventional slaughter plants and use as a means to shape people's behavior. It would help prevent people from becoming numbed, callous, or cruel. The ritual could be something very simple, such as a moment of silence. In addition to developing better designs and making equipment to insure the humane treatments of all animals, that would be my contribution. — Temple Grandin

The split in America, rather than simply economic, is between those who embrace reason, who function in the real world of cause and effect, and those who, numbed by isolation and despair, now seek meaning in a mythical world of intuition, a world that is no longer reality-based, a world of magic. — Chris Hedges

It was not a physical fatigue - he went to the gym regularly and felt better than he had in years - but a draining lassitude that numbed the margins of his mind. He got up and went out to the verandah; the sudden hot air, the roar of his neighbor's generator, the smell of diesel exhaust fumes brought a lightness to his head. Frantic winged insects flitted around the electric bulb. He felt, looking out at the muggy darkness farther away, as if he could float, and all he needed to do was to let himself go. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

All the seven deadly sins are self destroying, morbid appetites, but in their early stages at least, lust and gluttony, averice and sloth know some gratification, while anger and pride have power, even though that power eventually destroys itself. Envy is impotent, numbed with fear, never ceasing in its appetite, and it knows no gratification, but endless self torment. It has the ugliness of a trapped rat, which gnaws its own foot in an effort to escape. — Angus Wilson

Take the god's gift. Become the Fury.
It was time to become the monster Merik had been all along. No more numbed distance. No more fighting the Nihar temper. Only vicious, hungry heat.
One for the sake of many; vengeance for those he'd lost. — Susan Dennard

The sacrifice to Legba was completed; the Master of the Crossroads had taken the loas' mysterious routes back to his native Guinea.
Meanwhile, the feast continued. The peasants were forgetting their misery: dance and alcohol numbed them, carrying away their shipwrecked conscience in the unreal and shady regions where the savage madness of the African gods lay waiting. — Jacques Roumain

The people are supposed to read books in these times of the School Board and, therefore, they do not need living speech. We are glad that the people should read, but much of what they read which is best worth reading was first heard from the pulpit! We know of no rivalry between the printed word and the preached Word - it is often the same thing. But I reckon that the most of you who have been converted to God will say that it was not what you read, but what you heard which was used of the Holy Spirit for your conversion! When heart speaks to heart with accents of emotion, it is somehow different from the paper. Some Brothers read their sermons and I do not condemn them, but I know that most of the people feel a kind of chill creeping over them as they hear the leaves rustle. It may be a prejudice, but I know that nine out of 10 are numbed by the foolscap for the reading. — Anonymous

He didn't finish most of the stories he started anymore, couldn't bear to. He felt weak at the thought of reading another story about vampires having sex with other vampires. He tried to struggle through Lovecraft pastiches, but at the first painfully serious reference to the Elder Gods, he felt some important part of him going numb inside, the way a foot or a hand will go to sleep when the circulation is cut off. He feared the part of him being numbed was his soul. — Joe Hill

Acting was all about making yourself feel things-love,rage,euphoria,agony. She had to unlearn those things now. She had to teach herself not to feel. Refusing to feel hurt also meant she numbed herself to joy, but the sacrifice was worth it. — Susan Wiggs

You grieve at first. And then slowly, with the yawning of the years, the disappeared gets scraped from your memory, the way your flesh can be peeled from your limbs. It's very harsh and extremely painful. But it gets done, square inch-by-square inch. Until, the skin that is your memory gets completely scarred and numbed. You live. The disappeared is detached from the dermis of remembering. And that is what is known as moving on. — Psyche Roxas-Mendoza

Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery. Love likes to shrink the distance that exists between me and you, while desire is energized by it. If intimacy grows through repetition and familiarity, eroticism is numbed by repetition. It thrives on the mysterious, the novel, and the unexpected. Love is about having; desire is about wanting. An expression of longing, desire requires ongoing elusiveness. It is less concerned with where it has already been than passionate about where it can still go. But too often, as couples settle into the comforts of love, they cease to fan the flame of desire. They forget that fire needs air. — Esther Perel

I tell you, the difference for me is between being victimized, terrorized, numbed by reading about different disasters, or reducing the anxiety by getting up and doing something about it, at whatever level. — Ted Danson

I wonder," James wrote, "if we haven't become so numbed by all these numbers that we are no longer capable of truly assimilating any knowledge which might result from them. — Michael Lewis

The feel of not to feel it, When there is none to heal it Nor numbed sense to steel it. — John Keats

And still Meriadoc the hobbit stood there blinking through his tears, and no one spoke to him, indeed none seemed to heed him. He brushed away the tears, and stooped to pick up the green shield that Eowyn had given him, and he slung it at his back. Then he looked for his sword that he had let fall; for even as he struck his blow his arm was numbed, and now he could only use his left hand. — J.R.R. Tolkien

It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog's, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets. — Cormac McCarthy

Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire. — Adrienne Rich

Somewhere, my thirst for distraction from the pains and poverties of life grew into a sweltering, parching thing. There are always feelings to be numbed, anxieties to tamp down, and panic attacks to avoid. The people of the Shire knew this, and so do I. I suppose I could have turned to things eternal - didn't Jesus promise us rest? - but we seem to have a way of losing ourselves in our manmade salves - the bottle, the pill, the cheeseburger, self-inflicted starvation. I suppose we're all drunk on something. — Seth Haines

But germs are the most common snowflake starters and lie at the heart of 85 percent of all flakes.2
So next time you gaze at a lovely snowstorm, inform your favorite germophobe or hypochondriac that living bacteria sit shivering in most of those untold billions of flakes. Then hand him or her a snow cone or organize a catch-a-snowflake-on-your-tongue party.
Once the ice-forming process is started, more molecules join the party, and the crystal grows. It can ultimately become either a snowflake or a rough granule of ice called by the odd name graupel. A snowflake contains ten quintillion water molecules. That's ten million trillion. Ten snowflakes - which can fit on your thumb tip - have the same number of molecules as there are grains of sand on the earth. Or stars in the visible universe. How many flakes, how many molecules fashioned the snowy landscape I was observing as I drove east? It numbed the brain. — Bob Berman

What would you do if someone breaks your heart and just when you are set to lose yourself in that abyss of emotions and feelings that you no longer understand, when you are numbed by the pain and life seems to be whizzing past you in fast forward , at this time that person comes back to heal you, only to break your heart all over again. Would you let her touch you one more time, to heal you to break you for the third time? No? And what if that person is someone you'd loved more than life, if she had changed the way you lived , would you hold back if she stood in front of you with her arms outstretched? — Atul Randev

My boredom with everything has numbed me. — Fernando Pessoa

Regimentation, methodization, systematization, standardization, organization, coordination, disciplined arrangements, conformity
these things are at the very heart of our national state policies, and are the poison that has killed our families and left individual survivors in a numbed, angry, nearly hysterical condition. — John Taylor Gatto

Late February, and the air's so balmy snowdrops and crocuses might be fooled into early blooming. Then, the inevitable blizzard will come, blighting our harbingers of spring, and the numbed yards will go back undercover. In Florida, it's strawberry season- shortcake, waffles, berries and cream will be penciled on the coffeeshop menus. — Gail Mazur

Has it ever struck you people how arrogant you are?" it asked, huge hands taking an attitude of query that bordered on accusation. "You're talking of slaughtering a nation. Thousands of innocent people destroyed, lands made barren, mountains leveled and the sea pulled up over them like a blanket. And you're feeling sorry for yourself that you had to wring a bird's neck as a boy? How can anyone have feelings that delicate and that numbed both at the same time? — Daniel Abraham

Denial was a weapon; it killed truth, numbed the mind, and I was a junkie. — John Hart

My mother is dead, my mother is dead," she kept saying it in her numbed state, because it had not sunk in. It is outside of her, it is a figment, both because it is so sudden and because she cannot pinpoint the exact moment, it being such and such a time in one land and a different time on the clock of the other. It had happened in lost time. The three previous days are jumbled, — Edna O'Brien

But our senses of smell were numbed from fighting Slimy, the Ancient Icky One. The — Gini Koch

In a world where the people are numbed and distracted, the only thing that sells is the unbelievable. — James Redfield

Oh, blessed Domi!" the Aon exclaimed, approaching quickly.
"Ashe!" she said, wiping her eyes with a quivering hand, numbed by shock.
"You never use the Lord's name!"
"If He has brought me to you, then He has His first Seon convert," Ashe said,
pulsing excitedly. — Brandon Sanderson

Surrendering that pain to stone had deadened me in a way that was a relief, but there was a darker side to that forgetting. I've seen folk who numbed their pain with strong drink or Smoke or other herbs and always the loss of their pain made them less connected. Less human. And so it was with me. Every — Robin Hobb

Imagine going through years of your life with the gut feeling that none of it really matters yet, that it will start at some point in the future, and that the present doesn't really count. Does this feeling seem familiar? Have you ever told yourself that everything will ultimately fall into place once you [fill in the blank]? Who wouldn't wind up numbed to real hope and possibility after exerting so much energy for stuff that really doesn't matter? — Ian Kerner

Healing is not healed.
Numbed is not healed.
Healing takes time.
Healing takes patience.
Healing takes love.
Healing sometimes triggers anger or sadness or sorrow or guilt or regret.
Long suppressed.
Long unaddressed
So we make up that healing is wrong,useless and to be avoided
And we head back to numbing
And look for love and connection
With the numbed and suppressed,unaddressed and repressed ...
Give space for the damage
Give space for the healing
Let the healing begin and begin and begin ... — Dave Rudbarg

Sometimes he missed the numbed, walking-underwater feeling feel that the cocktail of narcotics used to give him. But if a situation went down in here, he was going to need all of his wits to get out of it. — R.D. Ronald

Wilderness, wilderness ... We scarcely know what we mean by the term, though the sound of it draws all whose nerves and emotions have not been irreparably stunned, deadened, numbed by the caterwauling of commerce, the sweating scramble for profit and domination. — Edward Abbey

The Panther
His gaze is from the passing of bars
so exhausted, that it doesn't hold a thing anymore.
For him, it's as if there were thousands of bars
and behind the thousands of bars no world.
The sure stride of lithe, powerful steps,
that around the smallest of circles turns,
is like a dance of pure energy about a center,
in which a great will stands numbed.
Only occasionally, without a sound, do the covers
of the eyes slide open - . An image rushes in,
goes through the tensed silence of the frame
only to vanish, forever, in the heart. — Rainer Maria Rilke

It was freezing, but the cold effortlessly numbed my feet and aching hands. I walked quietly, barefoot, to the end of the block, leaving my shoes behind to remind me how to find my way home. — Jenny Lawson

Their dark silhouettes numbed the soft part of his brain, like a bee stinging and numbing a caterpillar, then laying eggs on the surface of its body. The bee larvae use the paralyzed caterpillar as a convenient source of food and devour it as soon as they're born. — Haruki Murakami

I think we're skating on surfaces. I know it in my own life - and I think that is where this frustration comes in. It's not the place we want to be, but it's the place our society requires that we be. There is no fulfillment there. So we become numbed, we become drugged, we become less than we are. And I think that we know that. — Terry Tempest Williams

Kate, the mother of thirteen, is forty-nine; delicately made; her skin creamlike where the weather has not got at it. She is smaller than several of her children. Her legs and feet, like those of most women in this country, are beautifully shaped by shoelessness on the earth. Her eyes, which are watchful not at all for herself but for her family, are those of a small animal which expects another kick as a matter of course and which is too numbed to dodge it or even much care. She calls her children "my babies." They call her mama, treat her protectively as they might a deformed child, and love her carelessly and gaily. An old photograph shows her fiber and bearing as a young woman, and perhaps it is the relinquishment of that unusual spirit, under the beating and breakage of the past two decades, that has made her now the most abandoned of these people: more than any of them, she is lost in some solitary region of her own. She is only half sane. — James Agee

When not deeply engaged in creative activities, or numbed out by the TV, I felt empty. My heart hurt. I often felt hollow or as if I were some sort of wispy ghost, barely existing. — Judith Wright

It was cold and windy, scarcely the day to take a walk on that long beach Everything was withdrawn as far as possible, indrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken, seabirds in ones or twos. The rackety, icy, offshore wind numbed our faces on one side; disrupted the formation of a lone flight of Canada geese; and blew back the low, inaudible rollers in upright, steely mist. — Elizabeth Bishop

History consists primarily of speaking and being answered, crying and being heard. If that is true, it means there can be no history in the empire because the cries are never heard and the speaking is never answered. And if the task of prophecy is to empower people to engage in history, then it means evoking cries that expect answers, learning to address them where they will be taken seriously, and ceasing to look to the numbed and dull empire that never intended to answer in the first place. — Walter Brueggemann

I want people to leave the theater wrestling with the idea that our pain - physical, emotional, and spiritual pain - is more than just a condition that needs to be silenced, numbed, or "fixed." — Karyn Kusama

Those who have been immersed in the tragedy of massive death during wartime, and who have faced it squarely, never allowing their senses and feelings to become numbed and indifferent, have emerged from their experiences with growth and humanness greater than that achieved through almost any other means. — Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

A smell of sandalwood boxes, a kind of glaze on the air from all the chintzes numbed his earthy vitality, he became all ribs and uniform. — Elizabeth Bowen

Artillery raining fire on his tiny village Jabla on the Line of Control (LoC). War has numbed him, so has devastation. Yet nothing had prepared him for the havoc of Saturday morning. He was taking a nap, having had his pre-dawn Ramzan meal. At first there — Anonymous

...and she no longer is having her emotional responses to...stress numbed by medication. "I've been off the drugs for two years, and sometimes I find it very, very difficult to deal with my emotions. I tend to have these rages of anger. Did the drugs bring such a cloud over my mind, make me so comatose, that I never gained skills on how to deal with my emotions? Now I'm finding myself getting angrier than ever and getting happier than ever too. The circle with my emotions is getting wider. And yes, it's easy to deal with when you're happy, but how do you deal with it when you're mad? I'm working on not getting overly defensive, and trying to take things in stride." (124) — Robert Whitaker

She was soothing chaos. Like that first taste of anesthesia, before you lost your senses. Or the venom that numbed you before it killed you. I really couldn't decide which. The verdict was definitely still out on that. — R.K. Lilley

no aperture is numbed ; no matter if it seems void — Huma Kirmani

I wash off the night in the water, my scrapes and aches numbed by the sea. My bones have become boughs, all scarred knees and gnarled kuckles. None of us are the same person we once were, since the human body replaces itself every seven years; there have been at least six different mes. — Philip Hoare

Superior insight into history used to be exhilarating for radicals: if we can see more clearly than the Enemy what is really going on, then we can use this knowledge to advance our values. But now the clearer one's insight, the more numbed one becomes. Thus during the war, some of us wrote articles in this magazine predicting that the conflict would not solve anything,... that the methods used by the Allies were infecting the moral atmosphere, that Russia and America would clash violently as soon as Germany was disposed of, etc., etc.... It turns out we were more right than [the rest]. This should make us feel prescient, confident. Instead, it is discouraging. — Dwight Macdonald

We get too comfortable with this orphanage universe, though. We sit in our pews, or behind our pulpits, knowing that our children watch "Christian" cartoons instead of slash films. We vote for the right candidates and know all the right "worldview" talking points. And we're content with the world we know, just adjusted a little for our identity as Christians. That's precisely why so many of us are so atrophied in our prayers, why our prayers rarely reach the level of "groanings too deep for words" (Rom 8:26). We are too numbed to be as frustrated as the Spirit is with the way things are. — Russell D. Moore

They want politics and think it will save them. At best, it gives direction to their numbed desires. But there is no politics but the manipulation of power through language. Thus the latter's constant debasement. — Gilbert Sorrentino

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

Mouth to mouth
I'm bringing you back to life.
Why did you drown like that
without telling?
What numbed you? What
rose over your head
was gradual and only
everybody's air,
standard & killing.
Your head floats on your hand,
on water, you turn
over, your heart returns
unsteadily to its two strong notes.
I'm bringing you back
to life, it's mutual. — Margaret Atwood

Now that they were no longer half-numbed with starvation, they had time both for leisure and for the first rudiments of thought. — Arthur C. Clarke

A sad smile crossed her face, and I knew right then what she was trying to tell me. Her eyes never left mine as she finally said the words that numbed my soul.
I'm dying, Landon. — Nicholas Sparks

If your senses are numbed with delusion and denial, you will stop looking for these true strengths and wind up living a second-rate version of someone's life rather than a worldclass version of your own — Donald O. Clifton

The doctor's words made me understand what happened to me was a dark, evil, and shameful secret, and by association I too was dark, evil, and shameful. While it may not have been their intention, this was the message my clouded mind received. To escape the confines of the hospital, I once again disassociated myself from my emotions and numbed myself to the pain ravaging my body and mind. I acted as if nothing was wrong and went back to performing the necessary motions to get me from one day to the next. I existed but I did not live. — Alyssa Reyans

A part of her was immune to pain, numbed by humiliating experiences and hatred while the part that had known finer emotions, powerless to alter the course of events, chose to remain nonchalant. — Neetha Joseph

The shock of twentieth-century technology numbed our brains and we are just beginning to notice the spiritual and social debris that our technology has strewn about us. — Neil Postman

He was tired and full of shame, and if Ernestino and the others wouldn't brave this rain, he would go it alone, he would find some place to sing, some place where, anonymous and numbed by drink, he could sing until he had forgotten everything. — Anne Rice

I don't like explosions. I don't mind progress. But digital photography has made every man, woman, child and chimpanzee a photographer of sorts and consequently has numbed down the general quality of photographs. — Elliott Erwitt

The smell of death overwhelmed us even before we passed through the stockade. More than 3200 naked, emaciated bodies had been flung into shallow graves. Others lay in the streets where they had fallen ... Eisenhower's face whitened into a mask. Patton walked over to a corner and sickened. I was too revolted to speak. For here death had been so fouled by degradation that it both stunned and numbed us ... — Omar N. Bradley

He's beginning to like me. I am a better and better audience as I get numbed, and although I've played this game of Impress You (and won it, too--though I don't like either of the prizes; winning is too much like losing) I'm too tired to go on playing tonight. — Joanna Russ

The fact is: America's obsession with meat and dairy has pretty much destroyed our sense of taste. The average burger and milkshake meal is so overloaded with fat, salt and sugar that it has numbed our taste buds to virtually anything else. — Jane Velez-Mitchell

Willy Lazeer is an acquaintance. His teeth and his feet hurt. He hates the climate, the Power Squadron, the government and his wife. The vast load of hate has left him numbed rather than bitter. In appearance, it is as though somebody bleached Sinatra, skinned him, and made Willy wear him. — John D. MacDonald

Shaken from sleep, and numbed and scarce awake,
Out in the trench with three hours' watch to take,
I blunder through the splashing mirk; and then
Hear the gruff muttering voices of the men
Crouching in cabins candle-chinked with light.
Hark! There's the big bombardment on our right
Rumbling and bumping; and the dark's a glare
Of flickering horror in the sectors where
We raid the Boche; men waiting, stiff and chilled,
Or crawling on their bellies through the wire.
"What? Stretcher-bearers wanted? Some one killed?"
Five minutes ago I heard a sniper fire:
Why did he do it? ... Starlight overhead
Blank stars. I'm wide-awake; and some chap's dead. — Siegfried Sassoon

In one lifetime it wouldn't be possible to find another woman with whom he can learn to be so free, whom he can please with such abandon and expertise. By some accident of character, it's familiarity that excites him more than sexual novelty. He supects there's something numbed or deficient or timid in himself ( ... ) [M]ight look like virtue or doggedness, but it's neither of these because he exercises no real choice. This is what he has to have: possession, belonging, repetition. — Ian McEwan

Arguably, the larger and more productive world that our technologies deliver is simultaneously an impoverished version of the older one - a version that rejects direct experience and therefore rejects an earlier conception of reality that had its own value. We see more, yet our vision is blurred; we feel more things, yet we are numbed. — Michael Harris

The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog's, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jedda, in Babylon. — Cormac McCarthy

Here," Myrnin said, his voice still gentle and low. "Amelie said you had to work. No one said you had to work alone." He picked up the next part and slotted it in, took the screwdriver from Claire's numbed fingers, and fastened it with a couple of deft, fast movements. "I'll be your hands."
She wanted to cry, because it was so sweet, but it wouldn't do any good. — Rachel Caine

Pain - physical, emotional and spiritual pain - is more than just a condition that needs to be silenced, numbed or "fixed." Pain in all its forms is also a message, a kind of distress signal to our hearts and minds. There are times when it's really important to tune into that message and just listen to it. When we don't listen, our understanding of the world gets more and more distorted, and we become capable of doing things we very often regret. — Karyn Kusama

The fine wall of leaden crystal that had protected her heart - somehow numbed her into disbelief - shattered. — Alice Sebold

Never before in his life had he known what happiness was. He knew at most some very rare states of numbed contentment. But now he was quivering with happiness and could not sleep for pure bliss. It was as if he had been born a second time; no, not a second time, the first time, for until now he had merely existed like an animal with a most nebulous self-awareness. but after today, he felt as if he finally knew who he really was: nothing less than a genius ... He had found the compass for his future life. And like all gifted abominations, for whom some external event makes straight the way down into the chaotic vortex of their souls, Grenouille never again departed from what he believed was the direction fate had pointed him ... He must become a creator of scents ... the greatest perfumer of all time. — Patrick Suskind

There, then, is the role of the amateur: to look the world back to grace. There, too, is the necessity of his work: His tribe must be in short supply; his job has gone begging. The world looks as if it has been left in the custody of a pack of trolls. Indeed, the whole distinction between art and trash, between food and garbage, depends on the presence or absence of the loving eye. Turn a statue over to a boor, and his boredom will break it to bits - witness the ruined monuments of antiquity. On the other hand, turn a shack over to a lover; for all its poverty, its lights and shadows warm a little and its numbed surfaces prickle with feeling. — Robert Farrar Capon

She licked again, taking her time,even though she didn't need to; her first stroke numbed the bite site. No, this second taste was for her, not him, and there was no lying about that. "I'm starting to feel like a Tootsie Pop, here" he rasped. She couldn't contain a smile. " Yes ... how did that old commercial go?" She licked him. "One." She licked him again, and he moaned. "Two." She licked him once more, and his hips came off the bed, "Three. — Larissa Ione

Sarah, though, was still sometimes ruled by stark pain, lost to everything else. Grief slipped away, only to attack from behind. It changed shape endlessly. It lacerated her, numbed her, stalked her, startled her, caught her by the throat. It deceived her eye with glimpses of Charles, her ear with the sound of his voice. She would turn and turn, expecting him, and find him gone. Again. Each time Sarah escaped her sorrow, forgetful amid other things, she lost him anew the instant she remembered he was gone. — Kate Maloy

I am scared, numbed from the marital wars - that deadly, deadening combat which is the opposite, the antithesis of the sharp painful struggles of lovers. Lovers fight with knives and whips, husbands and wives poisoned marshmallows, sleeping pills, and wet blankets. — Susan Sontag

I have never felt any rest in sleep. For a few seconds I am numbed, then a new life begins, freed from the conditions of time and space, and doubtless similar to that state which awaits us after death. Who knows if there is not some link between those two existences and if it is not possible for the soul to unite them now? — Gerard De Nerval

No concept of danger,
reality, flow or
compassion.
you can feel the despair
escaping from their
machines,
their lives as hopeless and
as numbed as yours. — Charles Bukowski

If that's the case, I understand why emotions are hard for you. You've numbed yourself to make room for the grief you carry. — Brent Jones

People get numbed when they see picture after picture, year in and year out, of people starving. — Iman

I used to think fear either numbed or nudged. Now I knew fear did neither. Fear was a key that fit every person's hollow spaces---those things that kept us cold at night and that place where we retreated when no one was looking---and all it could do was unlock what was already there. — Roshani Chokshi

No, what numbed these fields, peopled with bad dreams was not the oppressive grip of a plague but rather an ailing retreat, a sort of sad widowhood. Man had started to subdue these vacant expanses, then had grown weary of eating into it, and now even the desire to preserve what had been claimed had perished. He had established everywhere an ebb, a sorrowful withdrawal. His cuttings into the forest, which were seen at long intervals, had lost their hard edges, their distinct notches: now a thick brushwood had driven its sabbath into the broad daylight of the glades, hiding the naked trunks as high as their lowest branches. — Julien Gracq

People with a compressed structure, out of necessity, have crushed, numbed, and muffled their feelings. Not only do they need space, but it sometimes takes them long periods of time to be able to feel and then articulate their feelings. As a result, they often have markedly delayed reactions to events and people. — Elliot Greene

The free expression of resentment against one's parents represents a great opportunity. It provides access to one's true self, reactivates numbed feelings, opens the way for mourning and - with luck - reconciliation. — Alice Miller

Come," he said, holding out his hand for her. She shook her head. Richard paused, then frowned. "I said, come." "And I said, no." He frowned again. "The cold has numbed your thinking, lady. 'Tis your duty to obey me." "I'm not your trained dog to come when you call." "You forget your place." "My place, buster, is not at your feet, licking your boots!" "There are many who would beg for the chance to do just that! — Lynn Kurland

I am not sure if we are numbed to the reality of rape, but here's the sad irony. While the word rape can add an edginess to your language, talking about actual rape is taboo. I didn't know this until one of my friends was raped. Then I knew this, because I didn't want to tell anyone. If she were mugged, I would have told everyone and raged. — Christine Stockton

Chaos often fosters the greatest creativity. Breakdowns often precede the greatest breakthroughs. And when the pain is greatest is often when we're on the brink of the greatest realization ... When the pain is burned through rather than numbed, when our darkness is brought to light and then forgiven, then and only then can we move on. And move on we do. — Marianne Williamson

Nothing had changed. Their lives had been expended in the cheerless labor, their wills broken, their intelligences numbed. Now they were in the earth to which they had given their lives; and slowly, year by year, the earth would take them. Slowly the damp and rot woudl infest the pine boxes which held their bodies, and slowly it would touch their flesh and finally it would consume the last vestiges of their substances. And they would become a meaningless part of that stubborn earth to which they had long ago given themselves. — John Edward Williams

We fight monsters and unholy creatures for a living here. Grotesque, evil, violent, dangerous; they're certainly all these things. And yet, we somehow manage to go to sleep each night and wake up each morning. The terror wears off. What was horrific becomes mundane. We lose ourselves to a numbed normalcy after a while, a self-inflicted detachment. You forget how you got here, what it was like before. And then someone comes along, someone new, someone who sees it all with fresh eyes, and it snaps you out of your daily coma, reminding you of what you've forgotten. Of what you've become. — Bill Blais

As a result of continuous work with these highly toxic substances, our minds were so numbed that we no longer had any scruples about the whole thing. Anyway, our enemies had by now adopted our methods and as they became increasingly successful in this mode of warfare we were no longer exclusively the aggressors, but found ourselves more and more at the receiving end. — Otto Hahn