Karen Russell Quotes

What to say? That the end of love is a haunting. A haunting of dreams. A haunting of silence. Haunted by ghosts it is easy to become a ghost. Life ebbs. The pulse is too faint. Nothing stirs you. Some people approve of this and call it healing. It is not healing. A dead body feels no pain.

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

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.

He felt strangely numb. As though from a great distance, he was aware that he was being beaten. The last sensations of pain left him. He no longer felt anything, though very faintly he could hear the impact of the club upon his body. But it was no longer his body, it seemed so far away.

I almost said, you're not broken, you're just going through something. But i couldn't. She knew. There was something terribly wrong with her, all the way inside. She was like a big diamond with a dead spot in the middle. I was supposed to breathe life into that dead spot, but it hadn't worked.

People talk about the pain of grief, but I don't know what they mean. To me, grief is a devastating numbness, every sensation dulled.

Neither facts nor pictures seem to sink into our centers of feeling any more.

I grow numb; I grow stiff. How shall I break up this numbness which discredits my sympathetic heart?

The physical shock took away the pain of being.

Abandonment doesn't have the sharp but dissipating sting of a slap. It's like a punch to the gut, bruising your skin and driving the precious air from your body.

On Harry dug, deeper and deeper into the hard, cold earth, subsuming his grief in sweat, denying the pain in his scar.

After great pain, a formal feeling comes — The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs — The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore, And Yesterday, or Centuries before? The Feet, mechanical, go round — Of Ground, or Air, or Ought — A Wooden way Regardless grown, A Quartz contentment, like a stone — This is the Hour of Lead — Remembered, if outlived, As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow — First — Chill — then Stupor — then the letting go —

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.

Experience is valuable only when it has brought suffering and when the suffering has left its mark upon both body and mind.

When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.

He was numb except for dreading the loss of numbness.

People who cannot feel punish those who do.

I can’t imagine what my school friends must have thought was going on because I was wandering around in some kind of dream. I felt as though my insides had been taken out which is, I now realize, the right feeling.

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.

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.

I have never felt any pain that I can remember.

And a rock feels no pain; And an island never cries.

Pain is always preferable to numbness.

I think many of us get separated from the mothership - our body - early on. I think the mothership is also the Earth, and life itself. Trauma separates us from that and dissociates us from our hearts.