Neil Gaiman Quotes

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.

Blessed be shock. Blessed be the part of us that protects us from too much pain and sorrow. At the heart of life is a fusebox.

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

I know from my own clinical work that when people are beaten and hurt, they numb out so that they can't feel anymore.

When I'm photographing, I think - like any rescue worker who deals with tragedy - you have to have some protective barrier around your heart so you can do your job. You tend to have a delayed reaction to things. I feel things more deeply after I put the camera down.

If we didn't desensitize ourselves in some way, every day would feel like its own tragedy.

If someone has gone through a lot of emotional pain, including the loss of loved ones, that person may try to build a shell around his or her feelings to protect him- or herself from the pain.

Perhaps the worst thing about suffering is that it finally hardens the hearts of those around it.

Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.

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.

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

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.

There are times when one cannot accept facts for fear of shattering one's being. As I listened to Ian's news, all of Digit's life, since my first meeting with him as a playful little ball of black fluff ten years earlier, passed through my mind. From that moment on, I came to live within an insulated part of myself.

My love grows wide and shallow in an effort to spread my losses.

All liars ... lie to protect themselves, to shield their egos from the raw pain of truth.

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.

Labels not only free us from the obligation to think creatively; they numb our sensibilities, our power to feel. During the Vietnam War, the phrase body count entered our vocabulary. It is an ambiguous phrase, inorganic, even faintly sporty. It distanced us from the painful reality of corpses, of dead, mutilated people.

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

I've read that under trauma, that you have this ability to kind of disconnect from the experience.

it was like this. the brain could no longer bear the worries and pains that were imposed on it. it said: "i'm giving up; but if there is anyone else here who is interested in preserving the whole, let him assume part of my burden and it will be alright for a bit.

You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.

I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided.

At a certain level of suffering or injustice no one can do anything for anyone. Pain is solitary.

Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.

Repression is an evolutionary adaptation permitting us to function under the burden of our expanded consciousness. For what we are conscious of could drive us mad.