Quotes About Desensitization

I felt nothing all the time, and it had started to feel normal. It should have scared me, but it didn't.

loading your brain with subliminal messages.... How loathsome to turn a sadistic murder into entertainment [in the newspaper] -- and yet how hard not to read about it. What dark comedy to realize that you are scanning for descriptions of torture as you disapprove. Which of course only makes it more entertaining. But naturally I was hoping they'd report something grisly, you say to your friends, who chuckle lighthearted acknowledgment of hypocrisy.

The traditional gross anatomy lab represented a sort of sink-or-swim mentality about dealing with death. To cope with what was being asked of them, medical students had to find ways to desensitize themselves. They quickly learned to objectify cadavers, to think of the dead as structures and tissues, and not a former human being. Humor--at the cadaver's expense--was tolerated, condoned even.

Life had stopped for her a long time ago. She was so out of touch with her feelings that she had no joy in her life and no concept of the fact that she could be wrong. She delivered her care of her insane patients in a killing manner, but she was convinced she was right.

In NY sensuality completely turns into sexuality - no objects for the senses to respond to, no beautiful river, houses, people. Awful smells of the street, and dirt... Nothing except eating, if that, and the frenzy of the bed.

The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.

People can turn off not just because a steady diet of images of violence has made them indifferent but because they are afraid.

An image is drained of its force by the way it is used, where and how often it is seen.

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

Ma è un fatto provato, per quanto molto strano, che anche la cosa più orribile perde parte del suo orrore quando si ripete continuamente.

Una cosa rara es que el horror pierde su espanto cuando se repite mucho.

Aber es ist eine seltsame Tatsache, dass das Entsetzliche seine Schrecken verliert, wenn es sich immer wiederholt.

New Rule: The White House doesn't have to release the dead Bin Laden photos, but don't pretend we can't take it. We've seen pictures of Britney Spears's vagina getting out of a car. Television has desensitizes us to violence, and porn has desensitized us to people getting shot in the eye.

At the time, I remained relatively calm before that spectacle of horrors, which is perhaps the most telling indication of just how desensitized I had become. The more I witnessed such atrocities and rubbed shoulders with death, the more I desired to stay alive, no matter the cost.

My business is trying to arouse human pity. There are few things that'll move people to pity, a few, but the trouble is when they've been used several times, they no longer work. So it happens, for instance, that a man who sees another man on the street corner with only a stump for an arm will be so shocked the first time that he'll give him sixpence. But the second time it'll only be a threepenny bit. And if he sees him a third time, he'll hand him over cold-bloodedly to the police.

Before I leave, the Eurotrash girl tells me she likes my gazelleskin wallet. I tell her I would like to tit-fuck her and then maybe cut her arms off, but the music, George Michael singing "Faith," is too loud and she can't hear me. Back upstairs I find Patricia where I left her

This is the process of "systematic desensitization." By confronting your fear, and by repeatedly doing the thing you fear, the fear eventually disappears.

It is quite amazing what I didn't feel after a while. I didn't really want to feel things.

He'd stood amidst the ranks more than once, sensing the soldiers alongside him seeking and finding that place in the mind, cold and silent, the place where husbands, fathers, wives and mothers became killers. And practice made it easier, each time. Until it becomes a place you never leave.

Porn, it turns out, eventually takes the sexiness - that is, the wildness - out of sex.

We have become a society that lacks empathy. Are we teaching empathy? The Internet desensitises, too.

After a dozen deaths, you learn not to care. After a hundred, you can't even if you wanted to.

Something inside me shuts down and I'm too numb to feel anything. It's like watching complete strangers in another Hunger Games. But I do notice they omit the part where I covered her in flowers. Right. Because even that smacks of rebellion.

There is so much stimuli coming at young people, you don't even have time to grieve before something new happens. We are desensitized to the issues.