Quotes & Sayings About Shutting Out

It's insane, but no more insane than Japan shutting down its entire nuclear reactor fleet in the middle of a heat wave because an extreme tsunami washed over one plant, or the USA invading a noninvolved Middle Eastern nation because a gang of crazies from somewhere else knocked down two skyscrapers. In a sufficiently large crisis, sane and measured responses go out the window. But sanity — Charles Stross

The process of transforming the heart can be difficult because as we open it, we inevitably encounter our own pain and become more aware of the pain of others. In fact, much of our personality is designed to keep us from experiencing this suffering. We close down the sensitivity of our hearts so that we can block our pain and get on with things, but we are never entirely successful in avoiding it. Often, we are aware of our suffering just enough to make ourselves and everyone around us miserable. Carl Jung's famous dictum that "neurosis is a substitute for legitimate suffering" points to this truth. But if we are not willing to experience our own hurt and grief, it can never be healed. Shutting out our real pain also renders us unable to feel joy, compassion, love, or any of the other capacities of the heart. — Don Richard Riso

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

Gloria had lulled his mind to sleep. She, who seemed of all women the wisest and the finest, hung like a brilliant curtain across his doorways, shutting out the light of the sun. In those first years what he believed bore invariably the stamp of Gloria; he saw the sun always through the pattern of the curtain. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Rules?"
He nodded as he peeled the third egg. "There's not that many. No shutting me out. It's just you and me and no one else." He paused, and my
heart was jumping. "And finally, you keep looking damn sexy in my shirts. — J. Lynn

Shutting out your problems does not dismiss them. Ignorance is not bliss. On the contrary, it creates an opportunity for those problems to grow. — Carlos Wallace

The question may well be raised, however, whether we could have a community or a society based on this hypothesis of multiple realities. Might not such a society be a completely individualistic anarchy? That is not my opinion. Suppose my grudging tolerance of your separate world view became a full acceptance of you and your right to have such a view. Suppose that instead of shutting out the realities of others as absurd or dangerous or heretical or stupid, I was willing to explore and learn about those realities? Suppose you were willing to do the same. What would be the social result? I think that our society would be based not on a blind commitment to a cause or creed or view of reality, but on a common commitment to each other as rightfully separate persons, with separate realities. The natural human tendency to care for another would no longer be "I care for you because you are the same as I," but, instead, "I prize and treasure you because you are different from me. — Carl R. Rogers

Among other things they picked out a detail that Charles had been offered the Governorship of Hong Kong in its dying days by Thatcher in return for shutting up about the inner cities. He quite rightly in my view led the paper on this story. — Anthony Holden

Terrific! Have you done Step Three?" He waggled his brows as he opened up the top left drawer of my dresser.
"No. Hey! Do you mind, Nosy Newton?"
"Are these panties?" he asked, holding up two of my thongs. "Because they look like dental floss to me."
Oh my God. My almost father-in-law was digging around in my lingerie. Embarrassment bloomed in my face. "Ruadan, get out of my underwear!"
"Fine," he said, closing the left drawer and opening the right one. "Oh! Lookie here!"
"If you touch that box," I said menacingly, "I will cut off your head with your own swords. And I'm not talking about the one on your shoulders."
He laughed, shutting the drawer. "You won't need a vibrator anymore. You've got Patrick." His gaze slid toward the dresser. "Unless you have different toys in there. Nipple clamps?"
"I ... what ... oh God." I fell onto the bed, curled into the fetal position, and covered my face. — Michele Bardsley

It's Curt Schilling and his bloody sock staring down the Yankees in the Bronx. It's Derek Lowe taking the mound the very next night to complete the most improbable comeback in baseball history - and then seven days later clinching the World Series. It's Pedro Martinez and his six hitless innings of postseason relief against the Indians. Yes, it is also Cy Young and Roger Clemens, and the 192 wins in a Red Sox uniform that they share - the perfect game for Young, the 20 strikeout games for Clemens - but it is also Bill Dinneen clinching the 1903 World Series with a busted, bloody hand, and Jose Santiago shutting down Minnesota with two games left in the season to keep the 1967 Impossible Dream alive, and Jim Lonborg clinching the Impossible Dream the very next day, and Jim Lonborg again, tossing a one-hitter and a three-hitter in the 1967 World Series, and Luis Tiant in the 1975 postseason, shutting out Oakland and Cincinnati in back-to-back starts. They are all winners. — Tucker Elliot

it's a good thing I'm used to this;
the process of shutting things out
as they fall apart,
the pretence of cool
in a dry, hot season,
the taste of redemption
in a t.v. screen


if God had a voice
what would it say? — Hima Raza

The Birmingham campaign was a repeat of SCLC's 1961 campaign in Albany, Georgia, which turned out a complete failure. King was banking on being able to fill up the jails and still have recruits willing to engage in civil disobedience, shutting the system down, but the authorities simply made their jails "bottomless" by shipping detainees elsewhere. A couple years later, black residents of Albany rioted, suggesting what they thought about their experience with nonviolence (these riots are not mentioned in most chronologies of the movement). — Anonymous

I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one's own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful. — Virginia Woolf

Laws of silence don't work ... . When something is festering in your memory or your imagination, laws of silence don't work, it's just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that the house is burning. But not facing a fire doesn't put it out. — Tennessee Williams

War is a big word; it's cruel, it's hard, nobody wants that. Protecting yourself sounds much better. Putting up walls, shutting everyone out. And forgetting that those who you are so afraid of - they're not all that different from you. — C.M. Rayne

After forty-odd years you stop asking," she says. "Want some free advice?"
I nod.
"Don't trip over yourselves trying to be a perfect couple, love. Get out of each other's way; don't be afraid of falling out, shutting up, or telling little porky pies; do your share of the cleaning; don't leave your dirty undies inside out on the carpet; leave the seat down; buy her flowers once a month; and pinch her bum once a week - the rest's up to you. — Andy Jones

You're punishing him over and over for things that are out of his control. Now, I'm not saying you shouldn't have a fully loaded weapon next to you round the clock. But I think it's time you flipped this little scenario in your head. If you'd been taken by the Capitol, and hijacked, and then tried to kill Peeta, is this the way he would be treating you? demands Haymitch.
I fall silent. It isn't. It isn't how he would be treating me at all. He would be trying to get me back at any cost. Not shutting me out, abandoning me, greeting me with hostility at every turn. — Suzanne Collins

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

While writing the first draft is an exercise in shutting down all of the things we think we know so that the story features come tumbling out, the revision is the end of the joy ride. We pull on the gloves and sort of poke around inside the body. Is that a tumor? Will that limb need amputation? I nearly second-guessed myself into heart failure while learning to self-edit. — Patricia Hickman

Despite our founding principles and the many ways our constitution has protected individual liberties, we do, let's admit it, have a long history of shutting people out
african americans, women, gays and lesbians, people with disabilities
and throughout our history, we have found too many ways to divide and exclude people from their ownership of the law and protection under the law. — Hillary Clinton

If those sorts of moments would be the only pleasure life offered me, I'd be better off shutting out that one brilliant source of light to let my eyes begin to adjust to the darkness. — Arthur Golden

Americans will not and should not respond to a political creed that cherishes the past solely because it offers an excuse for shutting out the hard facts and difficult tasks of the present. — Nelson Rockefeller

The Eliots found it a queer sort of evening - a transition evening. Hitherto the Herb of Grace had been to them a summer home; they had known it only permeated with sun and light, flower-scented, windows and doors open wide. But now doors were shut, curtains drawn to hide the sad, grey dusk. Instead of the lap of the water against the river wall they heard the whisper of the flames, and instead of the flowers in the garden they smelt the roasting chestnuts, burning apple logs, the oil lamps, polish - all the home smells. This intimacy with the house was deepening; when winter came it would be deeper still. Nadine glanced over her shoulder at the firelight gleaming upon the dark wood of the panelling, at the shadows gathering in the corners, and marvelled to see how the old place seemed to have shrunk in size with the shutting out of the daylight. It seemed gathering them in, holding them close. — Elizabeth Goudge

For soon, the dark millenium will fall, and the world will be a different place, requiring different species. Cataracts will occlude the Sun, shutting out its hateful light, and fabulous new life-forms shall flourish and struggle beneath the perpetual stars. — Alan Moore

When the heart is hard and parched up, come upon me with a shower of mercy.
When grace is lost from life, come with a burst of song.
When tumultuous work raises its din on all sides shutting me out from beyond, come to me, my lord of silence, with thy peace and rest.
When my beggarly heart sits crouched, shut up in a corner, break open the door, my king, and come with the ceremony of a king.
When desire blinds the mind with delusion and dust, O thou holy one, thou wakeful, come with thy light and thy thunder. — Rabindranath Tagore

Pop music, disco music, and heavy metal music is about shutting out the tensions of life, putting it away. — Peter Tork

As a committed Christian, I have always struggled with locked doors - doors by which we on the inside lock out "the others" - Jews, Muslims, Mormons, liberals, doubters, agnostics, gay folks, whomever. The more we insiders succeed in shutting others out, the more I tend to feel locked in, caged, trapped. — Brian D. McLaren

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

Yeah, and we still have to deal with The Eye being ... Eyeish, and me learning to be Head of the Council, which will probably involve lots of boring books and - " Archer pressed his mouth to mine, effectively shutting me up and kissing the hell out of me. When he pulled back, he was grinning. "And you have an arrogant, screwed-up former demon hunter who is stupidly in love with you. — Rachel Hawkins

It's hard to explain how much that feeling of the bottom potentially falling out at any moment takes its toll. It makes you anxious, of course, and constant anxiety is impossible for the body to handle. So you develop a coping mechanism, and for us that meant shutting down. Everything we liked or wanted or felt joy in had to be hidden or suppressed. I'm sad to say that this method works. If you don't give as much credence or value to whatever it is that you love, it hurts less when it is inevitably taken from you. I had to pretend I had no joy. It will come as a shock to people who know me now, but being able to express joy was something it took me a long time to be confident enough to do. — Alan Cumming

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

Where I needed to go was where I ended up. I was shutting you out, like I shut everything out, and you pulled me back. You made me see what was important. What's real. You made me see you." His lips brush mine. "See me now, Sara." "I do see you." "No. You don't. You see what happened tonight and what you've decided that means for us. See me now, Sara, like you made me see you." He kisses the corner of my mouth and his lips travel down my jaw. "Really see me. — Lisa Renee Jones

If somebody has a monopoly position, and wants to keep that monopoly position, it means that you are effectively shutting out competition from other sources. — Alexander Stille

Protecting people from the truth is another way of shutting them out. — Blaize Clement

Naturalism attempts to fortify itself against God by altogether shutting Him out of public life, social policy, the courts, and eliminating all biblical influence in morality and ethics. — John F. MacArthur Jr.

The Senate used to be a place of great debate and accomplishment. Now it is run like a dictatorship shutting out the voices of millions of Americans. — John Cornyn

You know that feeling, when you've had the worst day of your life and it seems like the universe is out to get you? And then you get home and as soon as you walk through the door it's like you're shutting all of that out? The heavens smile on you and you get all cozy in the tub or bed or whatever and all that bad stuff just melts away? 'Cause you're in your safe place? — Caisey Quinn

Shutting people down creatively often doesn't get the best performance out of them. — Seth Rogen

I can just imagine myself sitting down at the head of the table and pouring out the tea," said Anne, shutting her eyes ecstatically. "And asking Diana if she takes sugar! I know she doesn't but of course I'll ask her just as if I didn't know. — L.M. Montgomery

The habit of shutting doors behind us is invaluable to happiness; we must learn to shut life's doors to cut out the futile wind of past mistakes. — Marjorie Holmes

Without the infinite personal God, all a person can do, as Nietzsche points out, is to make systems. In today's speech we would call them gameplans. A person can erect some sort of structure, some type of limited frame in which he lives, shutting himself up in that frame and not looking beyond it. — Francis A. Schaeffer

When something is Festering on your memory or in your imagination, laws of silence don't work, it's just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that the house is burning. But not facing a fire doesn't put it out. Silence about a thing just magnifies it. It grows and festers in silence, becomes malignant... — Tennessee Williams

I don't think you have a choice but to pull CO2 back that has already made it out, or is about to make it out, because we are not overnight shutting down all the coal plants. — Klaus Lackner

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

When you enter a grove peopled with ancient trees, higher than the ordinary, and shutting out the sky with their thickly inter-twined branches, do not the stately shadows of the wood, the stillness of the place, and the awful gloom of this doomed cavern then strike you with the presence of a deity? — Seneca.

A street full of electric light is a sign of civic failure and is an insulting injury to the soul. Shutting out the night is as disastrous as shutting out the light. — Michael Leunig

Bigotry dwarfs the soul by shutting out the truth. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

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

But that, in shutting out the light of day, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and must and will that reverse the appointed order of their Maker, I knew equally well. And could I look upon her without compassion, seeing her punishment in the ruin she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become a master mania, like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been curses in this world? — Charles Dickens

I guess what they say is true - sometimes you have to smack up against a brick wall before you can admit it's time to change or die. For me the death was an emotional one. It's taken me this long to figure out I was killing myself by shutting off my true feelings and desires. — Claire Thompson

Unless you can point to something that I have done or said that has changed the course of the public opinion in a negative way, you've got to check yourself sometimes and say, "Maybe I don't like the way that this thing is said, but it's expanding tolerance." If I said something that was shutting down something that was positive, call me out, but I don't really see me doing that. — Lizz Winstead

If ever you come upon a grove of ancient trees which have grown to an exceptional height, shutting out a view of sky by a veil of pleached and intertwining branches, then the loftiness of the forest, the seclusion of the spot and your marvel at the thick unbroken shade in the midst of the open spaces, will prove to you the presence of deity. — Seneca The Younger

When we go out to the country and just sit there, what we're really doing is just switching off various kinds of alertness that we don't have to use. When we do that, we are stopping being defensive. We are no longer shutting ourselves off from different types of experiences, we are welcoming them in. — Brian Eno

Isolating, shutting down, and feeling guilt about pain makes it linger so much longer. Reconnecting, trusting, and being open and honest is really the only cure. Reaching out and talking to loved ones and friends is a must. — Jaime Murray

An air of anticipation hung over the lab. The pied crow - whose name, according to Tasha, was Pitch, and who had been raised in captivity, bouncing from wildlife center to wildlife center before winding up living in my sister's private aviary - gripped her perch stubbornly with her talons and averted her eyes from the screen, refusing to react to the avatar that was trying to catch her attention. She'd been ignoring the screen for over an hour, shutting out four researchers and a bored linguist who was convinced that I was in the middle of some sort of creative breakdown. All — Elizabeth Bear

I hesitate, hand on my seatbelt buckle. I know I need to get going somewhere, but - well, what's the harm in scoping the area out? Making sure it's as safe as Remy seems to think it is?
"All right, Remy," I say, opening the door.
"Remy," he shoots back. "Jesus, you can't even remember my name? The sewers weren't kind to you, were they?"
"Wait - what?" I ask, shutting the door, locking it. No one's taking my Lucy.
He just looks exasperated, which just makes me confused.
"You called me Ruby," Remy said, indignantly.
I stare at him. There's a flutter of something wild, panicked in my chest I don't understand and I don't particularly want to examine. I'm tired and when I'm tired my tongue gets lazy. "Sorry. Tired. Idiot. — Alexandra Bracken

The five senses offer us five different ways of shutting out reality. What is intuition and what does it perceive? — Nanamoli Thera

I had to go back and reread the page a few times. As I read it, I kept drifting out of the book, out of the booth, and coasting on the green crest of the song, to the momentary idea that any point on Earth was mine for the visiting, that I'd lucked out living in the reality I was in. And I also got the feeling I was souring and damaging that luck by enjoying the contentment of pulling the shades on the sun, and shutting out my fellow employees and the world, and folding myself up in the construct of a brilliant novel like The Man in the High Castle, that all the reading I'd been doing up to this point hadn't enhanced my life, but rather had replaced and delayed it. — Patton Oswalt

True inward quietness is not that which may be produced by shutting out all outward causes of distraction
a process which, when carried out too severely, may intensify the inward ferment of the mind, especially in the young. It is rather a state of stable equilibrium; it is not vacancy, but stability
the steadfastness of a single purpose. — Caroline Emelia Stephen

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

I always appreciate people's opinions, but sometimes I have to take a step back and remember why I'm writing and what I want to do with it. Shutting out the voices is difficult but it's been good for me. — Veronica Roth

Then someone within closed the door, shutting Norah out into the howling dust of the night. The clouds parted briefly to reveal the full moon's cold eye, then closed again. Wind seared over the pavilion's double roof, its voice rising to a shriek. Distantly, among the maze of walls, came the frenzied barking of hundreds of tiny dogs. As she drifted towards wakefulness, Norah could not tell whether it was the wind that she heard just at the end, or whether, within the dark hall, the girl had begun to scream. — Barbara Hambly

One of the great errors organizations make is shutting down what is a natural, life-enhancing process-chaos. We are terrified of chaos. As a manager, it signals failure. But if you move out of control and into an appreciation of natural order, you understand that the only way a system changes is when it is far from equilibrium, when it moves from the 'quiet' we treasure and is confronted with the choice to die or reorganize. And you can't reorganize to a higher level unless you risk the perils of the path through chaos. — Margaret J. Wheatley

Late in the afternoon, thunder growling, that same old green pickup rolled in and he saw Jack get out of the truck, beat up Resistol tilted back. A hot jolt scalded Ennis and he was out on the landing pulling the door closed behind him. Jack took the stairs two and two. They seized each other by the shoulders, hugged mightily, squeezing the breath out of each other, saying, son of a bitch, son of a bitch, then, and easily as the right key turns the lock tumblers, their mouths came together, and hard, Jack's big teeth bringing blood, his hat falling to the floor, stubble rasping, wet saliva welling, and the door opening and Alma looking out for a few seconds at Ennis's straining shoulders and shutting the door again and still they clinched, pressing chest and groin and thigh and leg together, treading on each other's toes until they pulled apart to breathe and Ennis, not big on endearments, said what he said to his horses and his daughters, little darlin. — Annie Proulx

However, in this technique, because your eyes are open and because the gaze in not a tight gaze and because the whole emphasis of the practice is one of openess, even though you're mindful of the out-breath, you're not shutting out all other things that are going on. — Pema Chodron

The heart of Paris is like nothing so much as the unending interior of a house. Buildings become furniture, courtyards become carpets and arrases, the streets are like galleries, the boulevards conservatories. It is a house, one or two centuries old, rich, bourgeois, distinguished. The only way of going out, or shutting the door behind you, is to leave the centre. — John Berger

There is no tariff so injurious as that with which sectarian bigotry guards its commodities. It dwarfs the soul by shutting out truths from other continents of thought, and checks the circulation of its own. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

He takes the coffee from her, needing fresh air because if he doesn't get out of this room, he'll suffocate from memories. He's felt like that for more than a month now. There's no particular reason for it, but sometimes he feels like he can't breathe, like his body is shutting down. — Melina Marchetta

The opening bars of a new band's song comes on the radio and Sophie quickly flicks up the volume. A good omen. She's been listening out for the song for ages. She's in the early stages of falling in love with it, where she knows the chorus but not the verses and she makes up pretend words so she doesn't have to stop singing. She sings lustily, enjoying how stupid she must look to other people, with her mouth opening and shutting and her face twisting in rock-star anguish. — Liane Moriarty

Garrett has been the best friend a girl could want, so how could I be so stupid as to think about shutting him out for good? I've been so busy thinking about my unrequited love, I haven't even stopped to consider the other, more important part of our relationship.
Friendship.
Ignoring him now would make him think I don't care, that I don't want to be friends. I want to get over him, not lose him for good! How must he feel, with me not replying to his texts and e-mails like this? What kind of friend am I? — Abby McDonald

Promiscuous reading is necessary to the constituting of human nature. The attempt to keep out evil doctrine by licensing is like the exploit of that gallant man who thought to keep out the crows by shutting the park gate. — John Milton

But as much as life is sometimes about knowing what you want and going after it and finishing, maybe other times it's about slowing down and shutting up and waiting. There's not always a clear beginning and obvious end. Sometimes we're in the middle . . . and it's okay to camp out there for a while. — Melissa Tagg

Every day I strive to get to a place where I'm not effected by the external world, and I don't use the external world to define or tell me who I am. I strive for a state of equanimity and calm and a state of grace, so I can be free of definitions. If you are free, then you can create beautiful things. It's really just shutting out the noise. — Laurel Holloman

Shutting out all external objects, fixing the vision between the eyebrows, making even the inward and outward breaths, the sage who has controlled the senses, mind and understanding, who is intent upon liberation, who has cast away desire, fear and anger, he is ever freed. — The Bhagavad Gita

When we pray, "Give us this day our daily bread," we are, in a measure, shutting tomorrow out of our prayer. We do not live in tomorrow but in today. We do not seek tomorrow's grace or tomorrow's bread. They thrive best, and get most out of life, who live in the living present. They pray best who pray for today's needs, not for tomorrow's, which may render our prayers unnecessary and redundant by not existing at all! — E. M. Bounds

In this media-drenched, data-rich, channel-surfing, computer-gaming age, we have lost the art of doing nothing, of shutting out the background noise and distractions, of slowing down and simply being alone with our thoughts. — Carl Honore

I have reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries,
shutting out and shutting in, separating inside
from outside: I have
drawn no lines — A.R. Ammons

If he's shutting people out, what makes you think I'll be able to reach him?" "Because he loves you! It's obvious." Nic — Emily March

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

But in life people come and go. We don't always have control over it. But we can control how we respond. We can keep going, keep living the best we can. We can love the people we have instead of shutting them out. We can do our best to get to know them in the time we have. — Suzanne LaFleur

We work through this together, remember? No shutting me out. No epic sulks."
"I was figuring I could sulk for Idris in the next Olympics," Jace said ...
"You and Alec could go for pair sulking," said Clary with a smile. "You'd get the gold. — Cassandra Clare

The white noise from the old Walkman enveloped them both; like a blanket of new snow, it draped itself over them, shutting out all the curious looks.
And the world under the blanket was - surprisingly, wonderfully - absolutely, quiet. — Antonia Michaelis

I knew not how to answer, or how to comfort her. That she had done a grievous thing in taking an impressionable child to mould into the form that her wild resentment, spurned affection, and wounded pride, found vengeance in, I knew full well. But that, in shutting out the light of day, she had shut out infinitely more; that, in seclusion, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that, her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and must and will that reverse the appointed order of their Maker; I knew equally well. — Charles Dickens

The difference in their age had begun to matter, she had just turned forty and Jack was in his sixties, no longer the 'Brooding Heathcliff' that used to sign birthday cards to her. He wanted less and less to meet people, keeping her to himself, shutting the world out, drawing the heavy velvet curtains too early on a bright evening. If she announced that they might invite a few friends, he worried, began to wonder what time these friends might arrive and more importantly, what time they would leave. — Edna O'Brien

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

In my Indian bedroom, the carved, cut-out marble jalis, or screens, which were formerly used by Indian princes to keep their wives from other eyes, have a new purpose: they are not only decorations, but a means of security, for they can be locked without shutting off the air. — Doris Duke

Meditation is a mysterious method of self-restoration.
It involves "shutting" out the outside world, and by that means sensing the universal "presence" which is, incidentally, absolute perfect peace.
It is basically an existential "time-out" - a way to "come up for a breath of air" out of the noisy clutter of the world.
But don't be afraid, there is nothing arcane or supernatural or creepy about the notion of taking a time-out. Ball players do it. Kids do it, when prompted by their parents. Heck, even your computer does it (and sometimes not when you want it to).
So, why not you?
A meditation can be as simple as taking a series of easy breaths, and slowly, gently counting to ten in your mind. — Vera Nazarian

Reflecting on my experience, I find myself agreeing with the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr C. D. Broad, 'that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.' According — Aldous Huxley

It strikes her that, until these last weeks, she has lived in an impossibly small universe, willfully blinded to the vastness of existence outside of her chosen life. And perhaps, she thinks, that is how everyone lives. Perhaps it is exactly these blinders that the complacency and comfort of our days depends upon: we survive by shutting out the endless questions of what else might be. — Matthew Flaming

Too cold even to snow - that winter presents a strange and haunted season during which Werner prowls the static like he used to prowl the alleys with Jutta, pulling her in the wagon through the colonies of Zollverein. A voice materializes out of the distortion in his headphones, then fades, and he goes ferreting after it. There, thinks Werner when he finds it again, there: a feeling like shutting your eyes and feeling your way down a mile-long thread until your fingernails find the tiny lump of a knot. Sometimes days pass after hearing a first transmission before Werner snares the next; they present a problem to solve, something to wrap his mind around: better, surely, than fighting in some — Anthony Doerr

You can't come in without an invitation."
He leans a shoulder against Alison's framed photo of a wheat field at harvest. "That so?" His boot heel nudges the door behind him, shutting out the storm and the scent of rain. "Last I checked, I wasn't a vampire," he says, his voice low.
My fists clench tighter, and I step backward onto the line of carpet that borders the edge of the living room. "You sure have a lot in common with one."
"Because I suck?"
"More proof. You just read my mind. — A.G. Howard

The cardinal error of science lies in shutting the Creator out of His Creation. — Walter Russell

When men learnt to talk in the beginning of the civilised word they used language not as a means of communication alone but as a means of excluding others
using it as a way of setting themselves apart and shutting out strangers. — Charlotte Lamb

Ultimately - or at the limit - in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. 'The necessary condition for an image is sight,'Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: 'We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes. — Roland Barthes

Turning the pages of crime novels it occurs to me to ask how it's possible to write so much without saying the word "pain," "life," or "anxiety." I reject this stupid dehumanization. The behaving without motive. The horrific shutting out of what is most vital or important. — Alejandra Pizarnik

... it was as if she'd shut out the outside world.
No, actually, thought Anna-Maria, suddenly feeling uncomfortable. She isn't shutting out the outside world. She's shutting herself in. — Asa Larsson

Rabid's pink eyes lose their shimmer, hazy like cotton candy. Before the door closes he mutters, "Zombies in Toyland?"
Dad pauses shutting him out and exchanges a worried glance with Mom.
I giggle. "It's a game on my phone. Rabid beat my high score a few weeks ago." I smirk at my little advisor. "We'll play it again soon. I have to get my title back."
His eyes brighten. "Generous are you! Cookies, too? Rabid White hungry be. Always."
I laugh. "Yeah, always. I'll have Mom make you some cookies."
He grins, then hops away down the hall, looking more like a rabbit than a demented otherworldly being. — A.G. Howard

You know, my boy, he said, it's impossible to love men such as they are. And yet we must. So try to do good to men by doing violence to your feelings, holding your nose, and shutting your eyes, especially shutting your eyes. Endure their villainy without anger, as much as possible; try to remember that you're a man too. For, if you're even a little above average intelligence, you'll have the propensity to judge people severely. Men are vile by nature and they'd rather love out of fear. Don't give in to such love: despise it always. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

All I know is that protecting someone from the truth is just another way of shutting them out. — K. Bromberg

L am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground. So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind: Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned. — Edna St. Vincent Millay