Quotes about Emotional Distance

To be suddenly alone when all you have ever known is connection. To be alone in the dark while you felt the distant pieces of yourself decay.

I felt a tremendous distance between myself and everything real.

They seemed disconnected, hollow somehow, deeply withdrawn.

Our sympathy is cold to the relation of distant misery.

When one is a stranger to oneself then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others.

nothing but an icy loneliness that fills the head with emptiness and the heart with sadness.

was suspended in a place of no feeling,

Non-being, i.e., distance from society, social distance is the very heritage of the oppressed.

Which means to the oppressor that social distance is a humiliation.

It is to be something less than free, or worse, someone less than white.

I like for you to be still: it is as though you were absent,
and you hear me from far away and my voice does not touch you.

Most people are on the world, not in it — have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them — undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.

It is not physical solitude that actually separates one from others; not physical isolation, but spiritual isolation. It is not the desert island nor the stony wilderness that cuts you from the people you love. It is the wilderness in the mind, the desert wastes in the heart through which one wanders lost and a stranger.

His cold remains all naked to the sky,
On distant shores unwept, unburied lie.

In each person, there is a point of absolute nonconnection with everything else and with everyone. This is fascinating and frightening. It means that we cannot continue to seek outside ourselves for the things we need from within.

Non-being, i.e., distance from society — social distance — is the very heritage of the oppressed. Which means to the oppressor, social distance is a humiliation. It is to be something less than free, or worse, someone less-than-white.

For what does the Karen carry but her dwindling power, dying & desperate? Dangerous & dangling like a gun hung from a tongue?

In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.