Roger Ebert Quotes

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

A good story needs conflict, and virtual reality is a great hypothetical way to create conflict. ... In some ways, the future is going to be more boring than we think.

I'm a person with virtually no feelings.

As long as I kept my body moving I could forget about the emptiness inside.

I wept not — so to stone I grew within.

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.

Honestly, when you're writing you try to stay on the story, on the character's mind, trying to throw stuff at them. There is danger, and the scares have to kick in the right places with the drama. And you try not to do too much to try to create those moments. Those moments create themselves.

In this world of numbness and information overload, the ability to feel, my boy, is a rare gift indeed.

With a film, things constantly have to go up in the story, and you're constantly putting pressure on the main character. It allows to go really deep into what its relationship is.

Feeling is not selective, I keep telling you that. You can’t feel pain, you aren’t gonna feel anything else, either.

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.

Fee-fi-fo-fum - Now I'm borrowed. Now I'm numb.

There is no such thing as closure, and it wouldn't be worth having if it were available, because all it would mean is that something that was quite an important part of you had gone numb.

I want to be untouchable and beautiful and completely dead inside.

Luke indicated Simon and Clary with a wave of his hand. 'I brought some people to see you.' Jace's eyes moved to them. They were as blanked as if the had been painted. 'Unfortunately, ' he said, 'I only had the one pencil.

I'd be in my hotel room, smoking too much, drinking, going to clubs, just being numb. That was being in jail to me. I wasn't happy at all on the streets. That was the addict speaking.

That’s the trouble with being scared all the time. Eventually, people just go numb.

Plastic man got no brain, plastic man don't feel no pain.

The world belongs to who doesn't feel. The primary condition to be a practical man is the absence of sensitivity.

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.

How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

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.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.

At this moment, many people have stopped living. They do not become angry, nor cry out; they merely wait for time to pass. They did not accept the challenges of life, so life no longer challenges them

I wish I could explain it so someone could understand it. I'm afraid it's something I can't put into words. There's just this heavy, overwhelming despair - dreading everything. Dreading life. Empty inside, to the point of numbness. It's like there's something already dead inside. My whole being has been pulling back into that void for months. (81)