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

“At the core of this grief is our longing to belong. This longing is wired into us by necessity. It assures our safety and our ability to extend out into the world with confidence. This feeling of belonging is rooted in the village and, at times, in extended families. It was in this setting that we emerged as a species. It was in this setting that what we require to become fully human was established. Jean Liedloff writes, "the design of each individual was a reflection of the experience it expected to encounter." We are designed to receive touch, to hear sounds and words entering our ears that soothe and comfort. We are shaped for closeness and for intimacy with our surroundings. Our profound feelings of lacking something are not reflection of personal failure, but the reflection of a society that has failed to offer us what we were designed to expect. Liedloff concludes, "what was once man's confident expectations for suitable treatment and surroundings is now so frustrated that a person often thinks himself lucky if he is not actually homeless or in pain. But even as he is saying, 'I am all right,' there is in him a sense of loss, a longing for something he cannot name, a feeling of being off-center, of missing something. Asked point blank, he will seldom deny it.”
― Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

“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

“...Every one of the social and psychological causes of depression and anxiety they have discovered has something in common. They are all forms of disconnection. They are all ways in which we have been cut off from something we innately need but seem to have lost along the way.”
― Johann Hari, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions

“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

“Overthinking arises when you are disconnected - disconnected from the body, mind, soul, society and the nature.”
― Amit Ray, Yoga The Science of Well-Being

“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

“I am unable to connect with negativity and toxic people today. Please check back at a later time. ”
― Germany Kent

“It is ironic that as we are becoming a globally connected population of over 7 billion people, that we are rapidly approaching the disconnection phase that environmental collapse will bring.”
― Steven Magee

“My soul and body have tottered along together of late, tripping and hindering one another like unpracticed Siamese twins.”
― Henry David Thoreau, The Journal, 1837-1861

“Shame unravels our connection to others. In fact, I often refer to shame as the fear of disconnection - the fear of being perceived as flawed and unworthy of acceptance or belonging. Shame keeps us from telling our own stories and prevents us from listening to others tell their stories. We silence our voices and keep our secrets out fo the fear of disconnection.”
― Brené Brown, I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn’t): Telling the Truth about Perfectionism, Inadequacy, and Power

“Yes: in the sea of life enisl'd,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.”
― Matthew Arnold, Empedocles On Etna And Other Poems

“I had an uncomfortable feeling I sometimes get in conversation with another person, as if the fundamental part of myself had evaporated-not in the sense of being gone, but as if it has undergone a phase transition and is hovering over my actual body as a vapor. That's the best I can describe it, as if my consciousness and my physical person are suddenly separated.”
― Nell Freudenberger, Lost and Wanted

“I hate this, but it’s true: being with happy people freaks me out,' she said. 'When I see them, all I could think about is how quickly their joy could end. A punch to the face. One phone call. Some hard truth. A shatter of ego. Or a house fire. Maybe there’s something wrong with me. Maybe my brain needs some sort of contrast. I get scared for them. Eggshells who care about things like almond milk. I get jealous actually. I think, 'How could you be that way?”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“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