William Faulkner
Novelist, Poet, Playwright
"Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain."
Numbness quotes
Numbness
83 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Virginia Woolf
Novelist
"Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent."
Haruki Murakami
Writer
"I have this strange feeling that I'm not myself anymore. It's hard to put into words, but I guess it's like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling."
Sylvia Plath
Poet, Novelist
"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."
Sylvia Plath
Poet, Novelist
"I lay and cried, and began to feel again, to admit I was human, vulnerable, sensitive. I began to remember how it had been before; how there was that germ of positive creativeness. Character is fate; and damn, I'd better work on my character. I had been withdrawing into a retreat of numbness: it is so much safer to NOT feel, NOT to let the world touch one."
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside numbness — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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Numbness quotes (page 1 of 5)
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"How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive."
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"How do you get so empty? Who takes it out of you?"
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"Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair."
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"I'm something that I used to be. I'm never where I feel I am, and if I seek myself, I don't know who's seeking me. My boredom with everything has numbed me. I feel banished from my soul."
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"I am nothing. I’m like someone who’s been thrown into the ocean at night, floating all alone. I reach out, but no one is there. I call out, but no one answers. I have no connection to anything."
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"When we look squarely at injustice and get involved, we actually feel less pain, not more, because we overcome the gnawing guilt and despair that festers under our numbness. We clean the wound - our own and others' - and it can finally heal."
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"Grief, as I read somewhere once, is a lazy Susan. One day it is heavy and underwater, and the next day it spins and stops at loud and rageful, and the next day at wounded keening, and the next day numbness, silence."
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"When I fell out of the light, I entered The stomach of indifference, the wordless cupboard."
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"As long as I kept my body moving I could forget about the emptiness inside."
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"She still felt shell-shocked by all of it, numb. Beneath the numbness, though, was a raw and terrible anger that was unlike anything she'd felt before. She had so little experience with genuine anger that it scared her. She actually worried that if she started screaming, she'd never stop."
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"The music left only this bad hurt in her, and a blankness. She could not remember any of the symphony, not even the last few notes. She tried to remember, but no sound at all came to her. Now that it was over there was only her heart like a rabbit and this terrible hurt."
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"Until the bitter end, the emptiness inside her was hers alone."
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"I felt deeply tricked. Stunned. And furious. I also felt my default emotion: numbness."
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"There is a level of grief so deep that it stops resembling grief at all. The pain becomes so severe that the body can no longer feel it. The grief cauterizes itself, scars over, prevents inflated feeling. Such numbness is a kind of mercy."
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"It was too much. The comfortable people made comfortable jokes about weather and things but I sat mostly silent saying a word or so when necessary a word or so trying to hide from them the fact that I was a fool and feeling terrible And I was numb, numb again, numb again again and again, numbness and pain swelling in me."
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"I grow numb; I grow stiff. How shall I break up this numbness which discredits my sympathetic heart?"
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"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."
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"Violence is its own anesthetist. The numbness it induces feels very much like calm."
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"Apathy is a spiritual numbness that creeps in and corrupts the good that God intends for our life and the good that He wants us to accomplish for Him and His kingdom."
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"It was, just as Kinski had predicted, suicide. He should never have done it. It is widely held by those who knew him, and Kinski himself, that he never recovered from Woyzeck. But what was the ultimate result? If you are the viewer of this film, Kinski's portrayal shocks your feelings out of the vault of intellectualizing or passive observing. He forces you to feel with him, to align yourself with your buried emotions. He outs your sensitivity. Is this not something Christ-like? It is, for my money. Kinski is the pure cure for the 21st-century disease - the numbness unto droning."
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