Shutting Myself Away Quotes & Sayings

He kept telling me I was queer, and I didn't like it. The word, I mean. Shutting you away, somehow; roping you off with a lot of people you don't feel much in common with, half of whom hate the other half anyway, and just keep together so that they can lean up against each other for support. — Mary Renault

Why do religions have edges?" asked Teresa ...
"God is here," said the printed text on the wall. "Yes," said Sophie. "But," she asked, "isn't He everywhere? Then why do they make Him little?" And she thought of those edges, pressing against each other, hurting, jarring, offending, barring one human being from another, shutting away their understanding and their souls.
Yet if you have no edges, thought Sophie, how lonely, how drifting, you must consent to be. — Rumer Godden

You didn't mind someone shutting out the world as long as they were happy to take you inside with them. — Lauren Henderson

Morphine hits the backs of the legs first, then the back of the neck, a spreading wave of relaxation slackening the muscles away from the bones so that you seem to float without outlines, like lying in warm salt water. As this relaxing wave spread through my tissues, I experienced a strong feeling of fear. I had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyond the field of vision, moving as I turned my head, so that I never quite saw it. I felt nauseous; I lay down and closed my eyes. A series of pictures passed, like watching a movie: A huge, neon-lighted cocktail bar that got larger and larger until streets, traffic, and street repairs were included in it; a waitress carrying a skull on a tray; stars in a clear sky. The physical impact of the fear of death; the shutting off of breath; the stopping of blood. — William S. Burroughs

The techno-political thriller and the romance novel serve as antidotes to the imagination rather than stimulants to it. For this reason they make for ideal reading in airports and airplanes. They effectively shut down the imagination by doing all its work for it. They leave the spirit or the soul - and ambiguity, for that matter - out of the equation. By shutting down the imagination, genre novels perform a useful service to the anxious air traveler by reducing his or her ability to speculate. For the most part, people on airplanes, and here I include myself, would rather not use their speculative imaginations at all; one consequence of this situation is that great poetry is virtually unreadable during turbulence, when the snack cart has been put away and the seat belts fastened. Enough anxiety is associated with air travel without Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus making it worse. — Charles Baxter

We may proclaim that stress kills, but in reality it is not stress that kills; it is our reaction to it. Sometimes we react to the Light by finding various ways of shutting it out. But when we shut off the Light, we are in fact killing ourselves - so the idea is not to turn stress away, but to let it in. — Yehuda Berg

I opened the door of my mother's stand-alone wardrobe and let the smell of her wash over me. I loved having this one unspoiled part of her left just for me. I leaned forward, slipped my face in between the hanging silks and chiffons. Her scent was warm and possessive. If my idea of home had a smell, this would be it.
Home. Mother. Oh God, please. My face crumpled, and my knees gave out. I pitched forward into her hanging clothes, grabbing at her blouses and dresses, smelling of gardenias and dusk. I fell to the closet floor, pulling some with me. I toppled amongst her shoes; stinging eyes squeezed shut, mouth frozen open in a silent "O." They were out there somewhere, their lifeless bodies, still and cold, and they would never be coming home again. I curled my legs inside the wardrobe and pulled the door closed, shutting myself away with her memory. — Kirby Howell

May I have a glass of water? For some reason, my throat suddenly feels incredibly parched."
Harriet nodded but before she could take so much as a single step toward the kitchen, Lucetta brushed past her.
"I'll get it." She grabbed Millie's hand and began tugging her out of the room. "You can help."
"But it doesn't take two people to fetch a ... ouch ... Did you just pinch me? Because that felt remarkably like a pinch, and ... " Millie's voice faded away as Lucetta hauled her into the hallway and toward the kitchen, shutting the door firmly behind them. — Jen Turano

A good memory is surely a compost heap that converts experience to wisdom, creativity, or dottiness; not that these things are of much earthly value, but at least they may keep you amused when the world is keeping you locked away or shutting you out. — Michael Leunig

I take great care of myself by carefully shutting myself away — Vincent Van Gogh

These times are hard, but I won't walk away jaded, darker, different. I feel. I cry to heal. If you saw me in those moments, maybe you'd think I was a mess. But I don't call it a mess. I call it strength.

Real strength isn't about building walls. Real strength is about staying open, no matter what. It's about taking life - with all the pleasures that fade and all the pain that sticks around for too long - and not shutting down, not closing down, not building up those walls.

Resilience isn't hard, impenetrable, iron. Resilience is flexible, soft, warm.

Stay strong. The real kind of strong. Don't let your automatic mind reflexes make you jump away from pain and towards pleasure. Make choices. See clearly. And never, ever, stop feeling.

Don't go numb. The world, even with all its horror, is too beautiful to miss. — Vironika Tugaleva

I told Seven the Bartender that true love is felonious.

"Not if they're over eighteen," he said, shutting the till of the cash register.

By then the bar itself had become an appendage, a second torso holding up my first. "You take someone's breath away," I stressed. "You rob them of the ability to utter a single word." I tipped the neck of the empty liquor bottle toward him. "You steal a heart."

He wiped up in front of me with a dishrag. "Any judge would toss that case out on its ass."

"You'd be surprised."

Seven spread the rag out on the brass bar to dry. "Sounds like a misdemeanor, if you ask me."

I rested my cheek on the cool, damp wood. "No way," I said. "Once you're in, it's for life. — Jodi Picoult

I went away, after trying once more to rouse up Bashan by renewed calls and
encouragement. In vain. He cared as little for my going as for my coming. He seemed weighed down by bitter loathing and despair. He had the air of saying: "Since you were capable of having me put in this cage, I expect nothing more from you." And, actually,
had he not enough ground to despair of reason and justice?
[ ... ]
How could I explain to him we were treating him with great distinction, in shutting him up like a jaguar, without sun, air, or exercise, and plaguing him every day with a
thermometer? — Thomas Mann

For how many years have you gone through the house
shutting the windows,
while the rain was still five miles away
and veering, o plum-colored clouds, to the north
away from you
and you did not even know enough
to be sorry,
you were glad
those silver sheets, with the occasional golden staple,
were sweeping on, elsewhere,
violent and electric and uncontrollable
and will you find yourself finally wanting to forget
all enclosures, including
the enclosure of yourself, o lonely leaf, and will you
dash finally, frantically,
to the windows and haul them open and lean out
to the dark, silvered sky, to everything
that is beyond capture, shouting
i'm here, i'm here! now, now, now, now, now. — Mary Oliver

210Suffering engenders passion; and while the prosperous blind themselves, or go to sleep, the hatred of the unfortunate classes kindles its torch at some sullen or ill-constituted mind, which is dreaming in a corner, and sets to work to examine society. The examination of hatred is a terrible thing.
Suffering begets rage, and while the prosperous turn a blind eye, or nod off which is always the same thing as shutting your eyes, the hate of the unprosperous masses has hits torch lit by some malcontent or warped mind dreaming away in a corner, somewhere, and it begins to examine society. Examination by hate is a terrible thing. — Victor Hugo

She said it was different, because the balance of power was equal between women so sex was an even-steven transaction. I said "even-steven" was a sexist phrase, if she was going to be like that, and anyway that argument was outdated. She said I had trivialized the issue and if I thought it was outdated, I was living with my head in the sand.
(...)
I said there was more than one way of living with your head in the sand and that if Moira thought she could create Utopia by shutting herself up in a women-only enclave she was sadly mistaken. Men were not just going to go away, I said. You couldn't just ignore them . — Margaret Atwood

However, traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, in an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is played out inside. They learn to hide from their selves.

The more people try to push away and ignore internal warning signs, the more likely they are to take over and leave them bewildered, confused, and ashamed. People who cannot comfortably notice what is going on inside become vulnerable to respond to any sensory shift either by shutting down or by going into a panic - they develop a fear of fear itself. — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk