Disconnection Quotes

“It is an absolute human certainty that no one can know his own beauty or perceive a sense of his own worth until it has been reflected back to him in the mirror of another loving, caring human being.”
― John Joseph Powell, The Secret of Staying in Love

“They are so caught up in their happiness that they don't realize I'm not really a part of it. I am wandering along the periphery. I am like the people in the Winslow Homer paintings, sharing the same room with them but not really there. I am like the fish in the aquarium, thinking in a different language, adapting to a life that's not my natural habitat. I am the people in the other cars, each with his or her own story, but passing too quickly to be noticed or understood.

. . . There are moments I just sit in my frame, float in my tank, ride in my car and say nothing, think nothing that connects me to anything at all.”
― David Levithan, Every Day

“If I don't see the reason of someone being my friend, chances are, we are just floating and I need a ship to set sail.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Book of Maxims, Poems and Anecdotes

“Along with the mystical wonderment and sense of ecological responsibility that comes with the recognition of connectedness, more disturbing images come to mind. When applied to economics, connectedness seems to take the form of chain stores, multinational corporations, and international trade treaties which wipe out local enterprise and indigenous culture. When I think of it in the realm of religion, I envision smug missionaries who have done such a good job of convincing native people everywhere that their World-Maker is the same as God, and by this shoddy sleight of hand have been steadily impoverishing the world of the great fecundity and complex localism of belief systems that capture truths outside the Western canon. And I wonder—if everything's connected, does that mean that everything can be manipulated and controlled centrally by those who know how to pull strings at strategic places?”
― Malcolm Margolin

“in the end, everyone can understand themselves only. You are the only one to which you never have to explain what you mean. Everything else is misunderstanding.”
― Renate Dorrestein, Buitenstaanders

“A fixation with connecting with 'friends' online comes with the risk of disconnection with friends waiting for you to be present in the offline world.”
― Craig Hodges

“Current neuroscience research shows that the pain and feelings of disconnection are often as real as physical pain. And just as healing physical pain requires describing it, talking about it, and sometimes getting professional help, we need to do the same thing with emotional pain.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“And so perhaps it was entirely possible - common, even - for you to look into the eyes of someone you'd been falling in love with, someone you had spent every waking moment with, whose breathing sounded as familiar as your own - and fail to recognize them at all.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“Your vulnerable partner may frequently put himself down and sometimes respond to positive feedback, but, in general, he is chronically self-critical and may seem neglectful or dejected most of the time. It often looks like depression. If this is your partner, you may become aware of this pattern over time through the absolute sense of isolation, neglect, and disconnection that unfolds.”
― Ramani Durvasula, Should I Stay or Should I Go?: Surviving a Relationship with a Narcissist

“Pop culture and love songs, in particular, can contribute to our belief that love is all about chemistry and insanity. It is when you are enduring careless, neglectful, unkind, and disconnected words and behavior from a partner, and falling back on “chemistry” as the rationale, that you need to take a long hard look at the idea of chemistry as a factor that may be imprisoning you in a one-sided, narcissistic relationship. Sometimes the good guys and gals get their opportunity once a person has already been through the wringer with a narcissist. After a person experiences the scorpion’s sting, the comfort of a kind person can become a soft and loving place to land.”
― Ramani Durvasula, Should I Stay or Should I Go?: Surviving a Relationship with a Narcissist

“I feel the overwhelming ache from surviving day after day in this
miserable system that looks like a miserable world.
To live is to feel everything, and to feel everything is to ask
for an unbearable existence.”
― Belle Townsend, Push and Pull

“My interest in music was non-existent. I never put on a record or picked up a guitar or sat at the keyboard and didn't care if I ever did again.”
― Mark Lanegan, Devil in a Coma

“And when someone tells me that they want more out of life,
I think of how capitalism
conditions us to chase dopamine,
to always want more.
Instant gratification has white knuckles
from death gripping our attention.
We share our lives online
only to have ourselves sold back to us.
We are taught that there is always more,
but only if we can afford it.”
― Belle Townsend

“We are in the era of nature disconnection.”
― Steven Magee

“Marcus waves an unseen hand.”
― Evan Dara, Flee

“It is a common occurrence to sit with a precious but struggling son or daughter of God who shares that while they have many friendly people in their life with whom they share a hobby, workspace, or the banter of small talk, they don’t feel they really have any core friends who regularly see and pursue them. They express restlessness at the lack of a place to belong. They are lonely. At the same time, these are almost always the same people who tell me they are “just too busy” to join a small group, ministry team, or even attend church regularly. Chalking their struggles up to God’s injustice, their brokenness, or a problem with the church, most don’t stop to consider a far more obvious truth. We’ve positioned our lives at a pace that is not conducive for building deep friendships. We spend 38 days a year staring at a screen in third person, but have lost the relational rhythms of building roots with actual people.”
― Chuck Ammons, En(d)titlement: Trade a Culture of Shame for a Life Marked by Grace

“The curious culture of the modern suburb will believe anything it is told in the papers about the wickedness of the Pope, or the martyrdom of the King of the Cannibal Islands, and, in the excitement of these topics, never knows what is happening next door. In this case, however, the two forms of interest actually coincided in a coincidence of thrilling intensity. Their own suburb had actually been mentioned in their favourite newspaper. It seemed to them like a new proof of their own existence when they saw the name in print. It was almost as if they had been unconscious and invisible before; and now they were as real as the King of the Cannibal Islands.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Secret of Father Brown

“A life disconnected from the source will not be free from malfunctioning.”
― Daniel ANIKOR, CATCH THEM YOUNG

“She couldn’t believe the peculiar and pretentious state of the world that she had once felt so at home in...”
― H.C. Roberts, Harp and the Lyre: Extraction

“…but then came another blow and something in him disconnected, like he’d been detached from a rock and was falling through an open pit, dark and icy, a pit with no walls and no end.”
― Yuri Herrera, The Transmigration of Bodies

“If you feel disconnected from reality or the 3D world, you can still become wealthy or financially stable by tapping into the spiritual aspects of yourself. Delusion wins with these individuals.”
― Robin S. Baker

“I stared at the reflection in the mirror, trying to recognize the person looking back at me. It had been weeks since I started this journey of understanding my emotions and the invisible walls I'd build around myself.”
― Dr. Erlange Elisme

“(...) les tenía mucho cariño, y a sus padres les daba absolutamente igualm y fue de esta manera como descubrió que los separaba un terrible abismo inabarcable.”
― Rachel Yoder, Nightbitch

“Era como si las madres se quedaran mirando fijamente algo que ni tan siquiera eran capaces de recordar. ¿Qué era...?”
― Rachel Yoder, Nightbitch

“For many people, the expression “disconnecting from the world” essentially means disconnecting from society—for this is the only world they know.”
― Sov8840

“Modern life has domesticated us. We wake to alarms, live by schedules, and often feel disconnected from the natural rhythms that sustained our ancestors for millennia.”
― Ken Breniman, Subversive Acts of Humanity : A Survival Guide for Choosing Evolution over Self-Destruction

“We live in a world where touch is both desperately needed and heavily stigmatized.”
― Ken Breniman, Subversive Acts of Humanity : A Survival Guide for Choosing Evolution over Self-Destruction

“Without touch, what kind of culture do we create? One where isolation and disconnection reign.”
― Ken Breniman, Subversive Acts of Humanity : A Survival Guide for Choosing Evolution over Self-Destruction

“Imagine a world without touch… Relationships grow colder, trust erodes, and loneliness becomes the norm.”
― Ken Breniman, Subversive Acts of Humanity : A Survival Guide for Choosing Evolution over Self-Destruction

“In a world where nothing matters, the most atrocious events are no longer horrifying; the most piteous victims no longer stir our compassion; the most frightening possibilities, like nuclear war and ecological destruction, no longer frighten us. Sometimes we explain it away as "compassion fatigue", but really it is a disconnection from reality. None of it seems real. We sit back, benumbed, watching the world slide slowly toward a precipice as if it were an on-screen enactment. Similarly, we watch the years of our own lives march on, indifferent to the preciousness of each passing moment. Only once in a while an alarm goes off, we panic for a moment with a thought like, "This is real! This is my life! What am I here for?" And then our environment tempts us back into stupor.”
― Charles Eisenstein, The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self by Eisenstein, Charles