Marya Hornbacher Quotes

We become so numb to what we're saying.

It is quite amazing what I didn't feel after a while. I didn't really want to feel things.

I think, at the end of the day, I have an outsider's heart.

Even in the presence of others he was completely alone.

The capacity for not feeling lonely can carry a very real price, that of feeling nothing at all.

It's odd that you can get so anesthetized by your own pain or your own problem that you don't quite fully share the hell of someone close to you.

One death to a man is a serious thing: a dozen neutralize one another.

We live in an anaesthetized society.

Despair is a narcotic. It lulls the mind into indifference.

You can get numbed. People can get hardened. It's not their fault; they just get hardened. News media get hardened. Proprietors get even harder.

I have this morbid fascination with being completely alienated from everybody, and a lot of the time I really do feel that way.

I remember thinking I couldn't be bothered to feel any emotions any more.

I am loved by thousands, but I feel like the loneliest man in the world.

And even though I'm standing in the middle of the biggest crowd I've ever seen in my life, I suddenly feel very alone.

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.

The physical shock took away the pain of being.

Violence is its own anesthetist. The numbness it induces feels very much like calm.

Terrified of being alone, yet afraid of intimacy, we experience widespread feelings of emptiness, of disconnection, of the unreality of self. And here the computer, a companion without emotional demands, offers a compromise. You can be a loner, but never alone. You can interact, but need never feel vulnerable to another person.

She watched the prairies the rivers, the towns slipping past at an untouchable distance below - and she noted that the sense of detachment one feels when looking at the earth from a plane was the same sense she felt when looking at people: only her distance from people seemed longer. - Dagny Taggart

Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.

I had gone to no such place but to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking and not knowing who it was with you, and the world all unreal in the dark and so exciting that you must resume again unknowing and not caring in the night, sure that this was all and all and all and not caring.

I wonder if I shall ever see her again, and I realize that I scarcely care. I can feel the sheets beneath me, and the cold air on my chest. I feel fine. I feel absolutely fine. I feel nothing at all.

I am someone who has a cold heart. If I am beside a great grief I throw barriers up so the loss cannot go too deep or too far. There is a wall instantly in place, and it will not fall.

Did you ever walk through a room that's packed with people, and feel so lonely you can hardly take the next step?

I lived," Dor said, "but I was not alive.