Distancing Self Quotes

“With her own hand she'd painted herself into a corner, and then out of the picture altogether.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“I had found a woman whom I had not known, and who from day to day had grown stranger to me, yet closer. Now she seemed to be slipping away from me again, into a realm where all names are forgotten, where there is only darkness and perhaps certain unknown laws of darkness. She rejected that dark realm; she came back, but she no longer
belonged to me as I had tried to believe. Perhaps she had never belonged to me; who, after all, belongs to whom, and what is it to belong to someone, to belong to one another? Isn't it a forlorn illusion, a convention? Time and again she turned back, as she called it, for an hour, for the duration of a glance, for a night. And always I felt like a bookkeeper who is not allowed to audit. I could only accept without question whatever this unaccountable, unhappy, damned, and beloved creature chose to be and to tell me. ... Loneliness demands a companion and does not ask who it is. If you don't know that, you may have been alone, but you were never lonely.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, The Night in Lisbon

“It’s no good to physically distance yourself from someone in your life, if you’re just gonna let them live in your mind.”
― Curtis Tyrone Jones

“A month ago, Gavin had given his employer four weeks' notice. "I'll get a job around here," he'd told her. "Something low-stress, part-time, maybe. We're not paying rent, and Dad's left us plenty. You should quit, too." A year earlier this news would have filled her with delicious, full fat, chocolate-coated joy. But now, after a grueling routine of shitty work, shitty- weird home life in a house where the shadow of a dead boy walked more solidly than the grownups, shitty headaches, shitty worry about a husband who couldn't keep his dick out of other women, the golden offer just weirded Laine out. She didn't trust it.”
― Stephen M. Irwin, The Dead Path

“That is the way with us when we have any uneasy jealousy in our disposition : if our talents are chiefly of the burrowing kind, our honey-sipping cousin (whom we have grave reasons for objecting to) is likely to have a secret contempt for us, and any one who admires him passes an oblique criticism on ourselves.”
― Mary Ann Evans, Middlemarch

“Drama loves company. Distance yourself from foolishness and peace will find you and naturally become a part of your lifestyle.”
― Germany Kent

“I have a new thing about living, it's not going to be the same any more. It's going to be more wonderful than anything has ever been. I'm so happy.'
[...]
'This will hurt you, of course, but - I can't help that, I can't think of anyone but myself when I'm happy. You said I was always to think of myself.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Julius