Jack London Quotes

At some point, you no longer feel pain. Sensation disappears and reason is dulled, until you lose all grasp of time and place.

No. Take the heart first. Then you don't feel the cold so much. The pain so much. With the heart gone, there's no reason to stay your hand. Your eyes can look on death and not tremble. It's the heart that betrays us, makes us weep, makes us bury our friends when we should be marching ahead. It's the heart that sickens us at night and makes us hate who we are. It's the heart that sings old songs and brings memories of warm days.

What do you do?' she asks, holding out the vest. 'What do you do?' 'What do you do?' she asks, her voice shaking. 'Don't ask me, please. Okay, Clay?' 'Why not?' She sits on the mattress after I get up. Muriel screams. 'Because... I don't know,' she sighs. I look at her and don't feel anything and walk out with my vest.

The physical shock took away the pain of being.

He was numb except for dreading the loss of numbness.

We build a shell around it, like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function , day in, day out. Immune to others’ pain and loss.

She had changed him. The ice was in his eyes and in his heart, like he had predicted with that song, but now they were deep embedded there, all the pain of the world. Not pain to make you feel for somebody else but pain to make you stop feeling.

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

I don't react to a tragic happening any more. I took so many bad things as a kid and some people think I don't care about anything. It's just too hard for me to get emotional. I can't cry no more.

I saw the dead without really seeing them.

When you're on the battlefield, you switch off your soul; otherwise, you would die of terror - you would die of fear. You switch off your soul, and you act like an animal or a machine.

You can only get hurt so much before you get numb.

I feel like even if I was to, say, trip and fall over on the way to the car and scratch all my arm, by the time I got in the car, it would be blacked out in my head.

Pain collected into deep pockets and I was aware of this painbut somehow I could not seem to feel it. It was like a body-deafness.

The body shuts down when it has too much to bear; goes its own way quietly inside, waiting for a better time, leaving you numb and half alive.

A man can gasp out his life beside you-and you feel none of it. Pity, Sympathy, sure-but you don't feel the pain. Your belly is whole and that's what counts. A half-yard away someone's world is snuffled out in roaring agony-and you feel nothing. That's the misery of the world.

Shock is a merciful condition. It allows you to get through disaster with a necessary distance between you and your feelings.

So what’s it like to live without emotions? (Geary) It’s hard. Imagine a world without taste. A world where you can see the colors and all, but you can’t feel it. A beautiful clear day can never choke you up. A child’s laughter doesn’t make you smile. You don’t look at a bunny and think ‘how cute.’ You feel absolutely nothing. It’s like being wrapped in thick cotton all the time. (Arik)

As soon as I knew that I would be all right, I was sure that I was dead and didn't know it. I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence. I waited for the moment that would snap me out of my seeming life.

I clung to nothing, in a way I was calm. But it was a horrible calm—because of my body; my body, I saw with its eyes, I heard with its ears, but it was no longer me; it sweated and trembled by itself and I didn’t recognize it any more.

There are stories that are true, in which each individual's tale is unique and tragic, and the worst of the tragedy is that we have heard it before, and we cannot allow ourselves to feel it to deeply. We build a shell around it like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function, day in, day out, immune to others' pain and loss. If it were to touch us it would cripple us or make saints of us; but, for the most part, it does not touch us. We cannot allow it to.

You can kill a lifetime without feeling anything but skin.

What does it mean when your heart's already numb? You're a professional.

During the fight my senses dim, and basically, I don't feel any pain.

Pain ... after you've lived with it long enough, isn't pain anymore. It's something else.