Disconnecting Quotes

Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.

It's quite nice to switch off and not see anything to do with cricket.

I don't read work emails after 7 P.M. or on weekends.

I think it's nice sometimes not to be plugged in 24/7 to email and the Internet and everything else. It's nice to get away.

If you're always worried about being on your phone, then you really are missing out on everything that's happening in front of you.

Beyond just the respect that you want to have, people just miss out on being in the moment when they have a screen in front of their face. I just don't know to tell people. I feel it's like, you know, 'Turn off your phone and go to the theater.'

I've given up email. Well, almost. At the weekend I set up one of those auto-reply messages, informing my correspondents that I would no longer be checking my emails, and that instead they might like to call or write, as we used to in the olden days.

When I go on the plane to fly home, I'm literally capable of forgetting what I do for a job. That also comes about because I choose to take massive breaks between projects, and because I choose to do this ridiculous thing of keeping home, home.

Not many years ago, it was access to information and movement that seemed our greatest luxury; nowadays it’s often freedom from information, the chance to sit still, that feels like the ultimate prize. Stillness is not just an indulgence for those with enough resources – it’s a necessity for anyone who wishes to gather less visible resources.

To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself.

My brain and body and nervous system, they see a plane ride, a long plane trip, as an opportunity to sleep with nothing coming in, nothing to do. I just go offline the minute I'm on the plane.

I want to be able to leave my phone at home.

I like to [unplug] and enjoy being a human.

During the summers, when I'm in Maine, I work at a desk that's located beyond all tendrilly wi-fi reaches. It takes me a few days to break the constant e-mail-checking habit, then I find I don't want to check my e-mail ever, and often don't for days.

My mind is constantly going. For me to completely relax, I gotta get rid of my cell phone.

Berlin would be a great place to have no cell phone, I think. Especially if you were able to live in a central location.

I don't look at my emails on the weekend or after 6 o'clock in the day.

I lost my phone and I just really didn't look for it. It was the nicest feeling, like six weeks. ... A couple of times I needed to use a telephone, and I was always able to touch someone that had a telephone and say, "Hey, can I use your phone? May I please?" And they'd say, "Sure." And that was it! So it was OK, it was a real vacation. I took a real vacation from myself.

If I could throw my phone away, I would probably do it. It's always on silent, and I don't like when it rings and people are calling. We could live without those things in the past when we just had a phone on the street somewhere, on the corner or at the house. I have no interest in telling all the people what I do every day and where I am.

Canceling my landline phone account, cutting off service to my home for good, and rendering the telephones that had long sat on tables in every room as useless as my closeted bread machine, I took the final step in a lifelong attempt to free myself from the wires that tethered me.

When I'm at home, I don't discuss business. I don't talk business. I don't answer the phone. It's just me, my wife, my children, my dogs. That's my world.

Brexit is actually a step back in the sense that you are going back from being connected to being on your own.

It's very powerful to shut down your computer and escape into the real world.

When I go biking, I repeat a mantra of the day's sensations: bright sun, blue sky, warm breeze, blue jay's call, ice melting and so on. This helps me transcend the traffic, ignore the clamorings of work, leave all the mind theaters behind and focus on nature instead. I still must abide by the rules of the road, of biking, of gravity. But I am mentally far away from civilization. The world is breaking someone else's heart.

The dirty little secret that nobody likes to talk about is that things just might have been better before the Internet. We had more time to ourselves before cell phones and text messaging and Facebook consumed our lives.