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Quotes About Withdrawal

Raskolnikov realised in that moment that it was no longer possible for him to talk to anyone about anything, ever.
~ David Zane Mairowitz
Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort.
~ Jean Cocteau
Jeg trekker meg tilbake til en verden der styggheten eksisterer.
~ Jean Giraudoux
For the painful essence of withdrawal does not reside in the present suffering it brings - withdrawal is painless on the level of the immediate moment - but in the prospect of suffering to come, the rich future that one can imagine one's torture enjoying.
~ Jean-Philippe Toussaint
It is not, however, only the word, it is also the thing, in all its infinite complexity, that he [Kafka] articulates with unrivaled courage and clarity. For, since he fears power in any form, since the real aim of his life is to withdraw from it, in whatever form it may appear, he detects it, identifies it, names it, and creates figures of it in every instance where others would accept it as being nothing out of the ordinary.
~ Elias Canetti
After Megan's death, Tyler spiraled downward into an abyss of steely blankness, as if Megan were the only color in his life, and without it, there was only white, black, and gray. He numbed his pain with booze, and slowly, wrenchingly, pulled away from all of us, isolating himself in an angry cocoon, where none of us could reach him and he didn't want to be reached.
~ Allison Winn Scotch
I'll never be in a dunk contest again. I don't ever want to be a part of it.
~ Gerald Green
Those times we refused each other, we seemed to disappear. — Richard Jackson, from "Unable to Refuse," The Heart as Framed: New and Select Poems (Press 53, 2022)
~ Richard Jackson
I knew you were a badass," continued Adrian. "But I didn't realize just how much until I saw you dropping guardians out there." "Does that mean you're going to be nicer to me?" I teased. "I'm already nice to you," he said loftily. "Do you know how badly I want a cigarette right now? But no. I manfully suffer through nicotine withdrawal—all for you.
~ Richelle Mead
Despite its efforts to modernize its plants and make them competitive, one sees a gradual withdrawal from those arenas
~ Rita Gunther McGrath
The grid of Circuits I and II creates four quadrants. Note that Hostile Strength (the tyrant) is inclined to paranoid withdrawal; he must govern, but he is also afraid. Cf. the careers of Hitler, Stalin, Howard Hughes, etc. and the inaccessible Castle and Court in Kafka's allegories. Note also that the dependent neurotic is not in retreat at all; he or she advances upon you, demanding fulfillment of emotional "needs" (imprints).
~ Robert Anton Wilson
The Shadow. It cannot be grasped. Chase your shadow and it will, flee; turn your back on it and it will follow you. It is also a person's dark side, the thing that makes them mysterious. After they have given us pleasure, the shadow of their withdrawal makes us yearn for their return, much as clouds make us yearn for the sun.
~ Robert Greene
He'd always found it vaguely depressing, and yet it shouldn't have mattered that the world was full of people he'd never know when he'd removed himself so completely from the world anyway. This
~ Kevin Wignall
First inclination is to become a monk and leave the situation.
~ Young MC
recluse, I have begun to understand, is not a person for whom a connection with another person is unattainable or meaningless, but one who feels she must abstain from people because a connection is an affliction, or worse, an addiction.
~ Yiyun Li
I was very bored at school. I found it very easy and slow and grey. My teachers didn't really know how to handle me, because I was very sarcastic. I was over-confident, arrogant, a typical youngest child. I went through periods of withdrawing into myself and school psychologists tried to figure me out, work out why I didn't fit in. I found that irritating, too.
~ zafon carlos ruiz iv
wasn't. This stutter-step of disaster after natural disaster was just a blip next to LED lights, driverless cars, a possible end to poverty through gene-edited crops. Mulled wine and stockings over the fireplace. Crisp smell of the six-foot fir that had been cut down so it could be adorned with plastic and glass baubles that polluted the house. As the tree died in celebration, there in our family room. Maybe I was withdrawn during their
~ Jeff Vandermeer
These conventions, as it was always held and understood, possessed all the power of the people assembled in mass; and therefore it was conceded that they, and they only, could take action for the withdrawal of a State from the Union. The consent of the respective States to the formation of the Union had been given through such conventions, and it was only by the same authority that it could properly be revoked
~ Jefferson Davis
Was it an insurrection? When certain sovereign and independent States form a union with limited powers for some general purposes, and any one or more of them, in the progress of time, suffer unjust and oppressive grievances for which there is no redress but in a withdrawal from the association, is such withdrawal an insurrection? If so, then of what advantage is a compact of union to States? Within the Union are oppressions and grievances; and the attempt to go out brings war and subjugation.
~ Jefferson Davis
Now, I ask, where among the delegated grants to the Federal Government do you find any power to coerce a State; where among the provisions of the Constitution do you find any prohibition on the part of a State to withdraw; and, if you find neither one nor the other, must not this power be in that great depository, the reserved rights of the States?
~ Jefferson Davis
And just stared, unmoved, as though watching a world in which she was no longer an inhabitant.
~ Jeffrey Stepakoff
My real despair came because Aphrodite withdrew her favours. Aphrodite needs nothing from me. She always has new singers to celebrate her. So what if they are my students, acolytes, and imitators? So what if they learned everything they know from me? The goddess of love favours the young. She always has
~ Erica Jong
she often had a temper that made a PMS-ing harpy going into nicotine withdrawal look like a chubby fuzzy bunny that burped daisies and shot rainbows out its ass.
~ Amy Lane
Through loyalty to the past, our mind refuses to realize that tomorrow's joy is possible only if today's makes way for it that each wave owes the beauty of its line only to the withdrawal of the preceding one.
~ Andre Gide