Because there wasn’t anything else to do, he settled at the kitchen table with a bottle of mead and nearly emptied it. The anesthetic effect he hoped for hadn’t happened, though. At least not yet.
You're right that not everything we do has to have some kind of social agenda, but that doesn't mean it can only be anesthetizing crap.
The trouble is not that schools don't work; they do. They're excellent machines for achieving historically accepted purposes. In suburban schools are children of the rich, who grow up to privilege and anesthetic oblivion to pain - and who then use th...
If you aren't creeped out by the No Birth Control Left Behind rhetoric of the White House and Planned Parenthood, you aren't listening closely enough. The anesthetic of progressive benevolence always dulls the senses. Wake up.
With plastic surgery, the general anesthetic is like a black-velvety sleep, and that's what death is - without waking up to someone clapping and going, 'Joan, wake up, it's all over and you're looking pretty'.
He tried to get drunk, “to forget about life for awhile,” as that old Billy Joel song once said, but the scotch couldn't anesthetize his pain and provide a retreat from the reality of his latest failures.
Lie naked on the table, and let them cut. Criticism is surgery, and humility is the anesthetic that allows you to tolerate it. In the end, the process will make you a stronger, more flexible, and truly creative writer. It will replace attitude with g...
When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not (i)emerge(i), do not (i)leave(i): they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.
In the end the British will walk out because 100,000 British cannot control 350 million Indians if those Indians refuse to cooperate.” A small minority cannot control an uncooperative majority, so they must be distracted, divided, tyrannized, or an...
To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started ...
For many, the search for Jesus is initiated from experiencing an event in life so powerful, it awakens the dragons of faith; from pain so deep, it calls on the hidden fears of the soul in an effort to survive. For others it means a serious personal l...
The object of Zen is not to kill all feelings and become anesthetized to pain and fear. The object of Zen is to free us to scream loudly and fully when it is time to scream.
For us, fear comes where terror comes to others because we are anesthetized to the guns constantly pointed at us. And the terror we have known is something few Westerners ever will. Israeli occupation exposes us very young to the extremes of our emot...
Be grateful. These feelings, no matter how painful, are part of living. Today, we are alive—not anesthetized, not sedated, not passed out. Take control of your feelings and through action you can change. Today, as every day of sober living, we have...
It is not only negative feelings that become blocked. The repression extends to more and more of his emotional capacity.When one is given an anesthetic in preparation for surgery, it is not merely the capacity to experience pain that is suspended; th...
Germans grew reluctant to stay in communal ski lodges, fearing they might talk in their sleep. They postponed surgeries because of the lip-loosening effects of anesthetic. Dreams reflected the ambient anxiety. One German dreamed that an SA man came t...
Virginia Woolf: This is my right; it is the right of every human being. I choose not the suffocating anesthetic of the suburbs, but the violent jolt of the Capital, that is my choice. The meanest patient, yes, even the very lowest is allowed some say...
[Mrs. Hudson starts to clear space for the tea tray] Sherlock Holmes: Don't touch. Everything is in its proper place... as per usual, Nanny. [on her way out, Mrs. Hudson notices the dog laying on the floor] Mrs. Hudson: Oh, he's killed the dog. Again...
I think fear neutralizes alcohol, weakens its anesthetic power. It's good for small fears; your boss, your wife, your bills, your dentist; all right then to take a drink. But for big ones it doesn't do any good. Like water on blazing gasoline, it wil...
One thing I've noticed since I quit drinking is that a person usually has two or three sets of impulses scratching away at some internal door at any given time. If you're sober--if you're alert, and paying attention to those impulses, and not yieldin...
I know the difference between sadness and depression. Clinical depression has no source from which it springs-it just is. Intractable sadness has nothing to do with synapses, or brain chemistry, or essential salts, it's born of something. It's the pr...