Numbness Of Heart Quotes & Sayings

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

When all comes to all, the most precious element in life is wonder. Love is a great emotion, and power is power. But both love and power are based on wonder. — D.H. Lawrence

I have outlasted all desire,
My dreams and I have grown apart;
My grief alone is left entire,
The gleamings of an empty heart.
The storms of ruthless dispensation
Have struck my flowery garland numb,
I live in lonely desolation
And wonder when my end will come.
Thus on a naked tree-limb, blasted
By tardy winter's whistling chill,
A single leaf which has outlasted
Its season will be trembling still. — Alexander Pushkin

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thy happiness, - -
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease. — John Keats

You wouldn't know how to pinch the right buttons on a girl if we came with manuals. — Elizabeth Eulberg

Every parent who has ever said a few words over a goldfish in a toilet bowl
or felt the numbness of an unexpected diagnosis in a pediatrician's office will appreciate the heartfelt wisdom in It's Okay to Cry. Norm Wright tenderly and skillfully equips parents to help children cultivate a healthy response to life's many pains and sorrows. — Lori Borgman

Some attribute had departed from her, the permanence of which had been essential to keep her a woman. Such is frequently the fate, and such the stern development, of the feminine character and person, when the woman has encountered, and lived through, an experience of peculiar severity. If she be all tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her, or - and the outward semblance is the same - crushed so deeply into her heart that it can never show itself more. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

How shall I break up this numbness which discredits my sympathetic heart? — Virginia Woolf

I'm a disgruntled ex-civil servant, and I'm armed. If you don't process my license right now I'm going to start making small, yet significant holes in people. — Howard Tayler

It seemed to me a wicked tale, to blame a woman for men's folly. — Catherine M. Wilson

It was rather like a forced-on numbness of spirit. The long, long stress of a gale does it; the suspense of the interminably culminating catastrophe; and there is a bodily fatigue in the mere holding on to existence within the excessive tumult; a searching and insidious fatigue that penetrates deep into a man's breast to cast down and sadden his heart, which is incorrigible, and of all the gifts of the earth - even before life itself - aspires to peace. — Joseph Conrad

Wherever the citizen becomes indifferent to his fellows, so will the husband be to his wife, and the father of a family toward the members of his household. — Wilhelm Von Humboldt

Wikipedia is a victory of process over substance. — Ethan Zuckerman

Kill her for me," she said in that whiny little-girl voice.
Diego took a step toward me, wearing an expression that told me he was only too happy to oblige his lady love.
"Oh, what?" I said. I wasn't even scared. I didn't care anymore. The numbness in my heart had pretty much taken over my whole body. "You always do what she tells you? You know, we have a word for that now. It's called being whipped. — Meg Cabot

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

What he had loved in Marthe were those evenings when they would walk into the movie theater and men's eyes turned toward her, that moment when he offered her to the world. What he loved in her was his power and his ambition to live. Even his desire, the deepest craving of his flesh, probably derived from this initial astonishment at possessing a lovely body, at mastering and humiliating it. — Albert Camus

She had been defeated by herself alone, and the sadness of it left a dark shadow in her heart. It further sapped her confidence and left her ever more withdrawn, ever more capable of suppressing her feelings. Like her roughened hands, her sensitivity was slowly being hardened, and she drew relief from the numbness creeping through her. — Yo Yo

There are those, however, that are not frightened of grief: dropping deep into the sorrow, they find therein a necessary elixir to the numbness. When they encounter one another, when they press their foreheads against the bark of a centuries-old tree ... their eyes well with tears that fall easily to the ground. The soil needs this water. Grief is but a gate, and our tears a kind of key opening a place of wonder thats been locked away. Suddenly we notice a sustaining resonance between the drumming heart within our chest and the pulse rising from the ground — David Abram

Man had to invent and create out of himself the limitations of perception and the equanimity to live on this planet. And so to the core of psychodynamics, the formation of the human character, is a study in human self-limitation and in the terrifying costs of that limitation. — Ernest Becker

Do not worry about winning or losing; think of what you will gain. — M.F. Moonzajer

Perhaps it should be obvious: Adultery is a social threat that arouses raw anger and fear, which the bellicose then need to discharge rather than merely feel, traditionally on the philandering wife or the female home-wrecker. — Mary Gaitskill

The next day the German police picked them up, loaded them onto an armored truck and took them back to Colditz. Alexander was badly beaten by the German guards and taken to solitary, where he spent so long he lost track of time. With Pasha's death came the death of faith. Release me, Tatiana, release me, forgive me, forget me, let me forget you. I want to be free of you, free of your face, free of your freedom, free of your fire, free, free, free. The flight across the ocean was over, and with it all the warmth of his imagination. A numbness encroached on him, freezing him from the heart out, the anesthetic of despair creeping its tentacles over his ten-dons and his arteries, over his nerves and his veins until he was stiff inside and bereft of hope and bereft of Tatiana. Finally. But not quite. — Paullina Simons

The South Brooklyn seaside neighborhood was now showing signs of finally succumbing to the real estate developers. As the taxi wound through funky little side streets, I spotted a billboard advertising the IKEA warehouse located just off the Gowanus Expressway. Wine bars and condos wouldn't be far behind. — Nancy A. Collins

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

I turned away from him and went on my way, up the street and about my business. The past was dead. The future was resignation, fatality, and could only end one way now. The present was numbness, that could feel nothing. Like Novocaine needled into your heart. What was there in all the dimensions of time for me? ("Life Is Weird Sometimes" first chapter of unpublished novel THE LOSER) — Cornell Woolrich

It was strange how in that moment of tragedy, it had seemed so unreal, like an old-fashioned movie reel playing on a screen for my eyes only. The pain and broken heart were blocked off for a little while, leaving me numb with disbelief. Shock is what Dad called it. But after a while, the cruel reality started to seep into my tissues, and my body became a sponge, just sucking it all up until, finally, there was so much grief inside, I couldn't help feeling it.
That's how it happened for me. First, the numbness right after she died, next the agonising pain and then the place I was at now - the land of perpetual depression. — Karen Ann Hopkins