Emotional Disengagement Quotes

The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is boredom.

I lapsed into my pathetic cut-off period. Often with humans, both good and bad, my senses simply shut off, they get tired, I give up. I am polite. I nod. I pretend to understand because I don’t want anybody to be hurt. That is the one weakness that has lead me into the most trouble. Trying to be kind to others I often get my soul shredded into a kind of spiritual pasta. No matter. My brain shuts off. I listen. I respond. And they are too dumb to know that I am not there.

Get through the moment. Avoid confrontation. Run away. That's pretty much how we get through our own lives, watching television. Smoking crap. Self-medicating. Redirecting our own attention. Jacking off. Denial.

Depressive lucidity, usually described as a radical withdrawal from ordinary human concerns, generally manifests itself by a profound indifference to things which are genuinely of minor interest. Thus it is possible to imagine a depressed lover, while the idea of a depressed patriot seems frankly inconceivable.

The most disappointing thing to me after 'Tusk' was the politics in the band. They said, 'We're not going to do that again.' I felt dead in the water from that. On 'Mirage,' I was treading water, saying, 'Okay, whatever,' and taking a passive role.

Indifference looks like detachment, but it is not; indifference is simply no interest. Detachment is not absence of interest - detachment is absolute interest, tremendous interest, but still with the capacity of non-clinging. Enjoy the moment while it is there and when the moment starts disappearing, as everything is bound to disappear, let it go. That is detachment.

Apathy adds up, in the long run, to cowardice.

Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.

Boredom is the inner conflict we suffer when we lose desire, when we lack a lacking.

I never live in the present. I'd do interviews and people will say, 'Isn't this great?' or 'Can you believe?' And I would react, like, 'No, I can't believe it because I'm not living in this moment.'

I was neither doing these people nor myself a favor by showing up when my heart wasn't in it. There were not getting the real me, the whole me, the true me.

Indifference is a misguided way of defending ourselves.

But after I got them to leave and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn't any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.

Neither poetry, nor ambition, nor love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me.

I sort of gave up on this whole human adventure a long time ago, divorced myself from it emotionally. It gives me an artistic detachment that I find valuable. I think the human race has squandered its gift, and I think this country has squandered its promise, for the sake of cell phones and Jet Skis.

If I have no connection with the character, then it's all fake - it's just blah, blah, blah.

For one who is indifferent, life itself is a prison. Any sense of community is external or, even worse, nonexistent. Thus, indifference means solitude. Those who are indifferent do not see others. They feel nothing for others and are unconcerned with what might happen to them. They are surrounded by a great emptiness. Filled by it, in fact. They are devoid of all hope as well as imagination. In other words, devoid of any future.

The ultimate obscenity is not caring, not doing something about what you feel, not feeling! Just drawing back and drawing in; becoming narcissistic.

I don't want to care. If I care about things, it'll just be worse, it'll just be another thing to worry about. It's less painful if I don't care.

under our love making I felt a bleakness that couldnt be dispelled. The sadness was in both of us, and I think we pitied ourselves that night, as if we were other people looking down on the couple who lay together on the bed

and she realized that she (her soul) was not at all involved, only her body, her body alone. The body that had betrayed her and that she had sent out into the world among other bodies.

First I might say that when a person, when a man separates from his wife, at the out start it's a physical separation but it's not a psychological separation. He still thinks of her in, in probably warm terms. And, but after the physical separation has taken, existed for a period of time, it becomes a psychological separation as well as physical. And he can then look at her more objectively. My split or separation from the Black Muslim movement at first was only a physical separation, but my heart was still there and it was impossible for me to, for me to look at it objectively.

The capacity for not feeling lonely can carry a very real price, that of feeling nothing at all.

The opposite of love is not to hate but to separate. If love and hate have something in common it is because, in both cases, their energy is that of bringing and holding together

Sunday night, I reread The Catcher in the Rye until I felt tired enough to fall asleep. Only I never got tired enough. And I couldn't read, because reading didn't feel the same.