Anaesthesia, that's one technique: if it hurts, invent a different pain.
Until the bitter end, the emptiness inside her was hers alone.
He'd been numb a long time, years. All his nights down Ninsei, his nights with Linda, numb in bed and numb at the cold sweating center of every drug deal. But now he'd found this warm thing, this chip of murder. Meat, some part of him said. It's the meat talking, ignore it.
I'm up all night against my will My medicine won't let me feel anything at all The doctor gave me sleeping pills and I took one Then I feel all alone, sleeping like a stone.
Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state's monopoly of armed violence.
I felt a kind of numbness, an enervation, but more particularly an odd fragility - as if my body had actually become frail, hypersensitive and somehow disjointed and clumsy, lacking normal coordination. And soon I was in the throes of a pervasive hypochondria.
Of course there is nothing the matter with the stars It is my emptiness among them While they drift farther away in the invisible morning
Your superhuman power was to be able not to feel. Is it there inside everybody, this self that comes out while you are in captivity? You become the closest approximation of yourself that can tolerate living there.
It's important to cultivate detachment. One way to do this is to practice imagining yourself dead, or in the process of dying. If there's a window, you must imagine your body falling out the window. If there's a knife, you must imagine the knife piercing your skin. If there's a train coming, you must imagine your torso flattened under its wheels. These exercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance.
They give me a shot and a handful of pills to swallow. I stare at the thin red wall of my inner eyelid and listen to my skin and I can't be sure how the medication is affecting me. I can't remember how I'm supposed to feel. I can't remember my name. I have never seen my face.
Nobody believes the identities we've made for ourselves. I feel like everybody in the world is fake now - as though people had true cores once, but hucked them away and replaced them with something more attractive but also hollow.
The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detachment.
My main goal is to stay alive. To keep fooling myself into hanging around. To keep getting up every day. Right now I live without inspiration. I go day to day and do the work because it's all I know. I know that if I keep moving I stand a chance. I must keep myself going until I find a reason to live. I need one so bad. On the other hand maybe I don't. Maybe it's all bullshit. Nothing I knew from my old life can help me here. Most of the things that I believed turned out to be useless. Appendages from someone else's life.
There is a feeling of disbelief that comes over you, that takes over, and you kind of go through the motions. You do what you're supposed to do, but in fact you're not there at all.
For me it is not a detachment to take a picture. It's a way of touching somebody - it's a caress… I think that you can actually give people access to their own soul.
The airy sky has taken its place leaning against the wall. It is like a prayer to what is empty And what is empty turns its face to us and whispers: 'I am not empty, I am open'.
Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance. It is tumbleweed distress that thrives on thin air, growing despite its detachment from the nourishing earth. It can be described only in metaphor and allegory
In Gnosticism, the physical world did not ultimately matter - which meant physical suffering did not matter either. Seeking 'enlightenment' meant cultivating an attitude of detachment, even indifference.
A defensive war is apt to betray us into too frequent detachment. Those generals who have had but little experience attempt to protect every point, while those who are better acquainted with their profession, having only the capital object in view, guard against a decisive blow, and acquiesce in small misfortunes to avoid greater.
My work is very dear to me, and certainly I have had all the emotional highs and lows that go with trying to get it to an audience. But I do have some kind of detachment that seems somewhat unusual in my trade. I'm a writer who writes every day. I don't have a period of months where I can't get anything done and I wander around tearing my hair out. When I come back from a book tour, for instance, I might have one day where I sleep late and then check my e-mail, and then go for a walk, and then the next day I'm really itching to get back at writing a story.
Particularly on social media, there is that level of detachment, some people feel like they can say whatever pops in their head .
I have sought earnestly and with great diligence that good and high virtue by which man may draw closest to God... and as far as my intelligence would permit, I find that high virtue to be pure disinterest, that is, detachment from creatures. Our Lord said to Martha 'Unum est necessarium', which is to say; to be untroubled and pure, one thing is necessary and that is disinterest.
...for me there is too little of life to spend most of it forcing myself into detachment from it.
He is not simply looking into the mirror because he is transfixed by what he sees. Rather, the artist’s success depends as much as anything on his powers of detachment, on de-narcissizing himself… Freud… studied his own dreams not because he was a “narcissist,” but because he was a student of dreams. And whose were at once the least and most accessible of dreams, if not his own?
What are we going to do?" asked the Professor. "At this moment," said Syme, with a scientific detachment, "I think we are going to smash into a lamppost.
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