There's much to be said for feeling numb. Time passes more quickly. You eat less, and because numbness encourages laziness, you do fewer things, good or bad, and the world's probably a better place for it.
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains/ My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk.
I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.
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.
And he remembered thinking then that if she died, he was certain he wouldn't cry. For it would be the dying face of an unknown, a street face, a newspaper image, and it was suddenly so very wrong that he had begun to cry, not at death but at the thought of not crying at death, a silly empty man near a silly empty woman.
Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.
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.
Outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness. I look down into the warm, earthy world. Into a nest of lovers' beds, baby cribs, meal tables, all the solid commerce of life in this earth, and feel apart, enclosed in a wall of glass.
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.
Anaesthesia, that's one technique: if it hurts, invent a different pain.
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.
We do not truly speak except at a distance. There is no word not severed.
I am feeling fine. I remember these words and recite them. These are the things you say when asked how you are. After all, it would be odd to say: I'm not feeling. Or, more to the point: I'm not, I have ceased to be. Where am I?
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.
Winning intoxicates you, and numbs you to the sufferings of others.
She began to feel like the plastic doll she had been named after, without even a hole where her mouth was supposed to be.
Until the bitter end, the emptiness inside her was hers alone.
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'.
When I fell out of the light, I entered The stomach of indifference, the wordless cupboard.
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.
or simply: