Withdrawal Quotes

Sadly, in too many cases surrender is having been ‘outrun’ by fear rather than having ‘run out’ of heart.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Fear left unrestrained always leaves us running ‘from’ something. Fear harnessed compels us to run ‘to’ something. And fear denied leaves us running in circles.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Safety is not a destination that we reach for, rather it is a retreat that we escape to. And if our lives are marked by the incessant search for safety, we will live the whole of it going in reverse.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Comfort is a stance of avoidance rather than the pursuit of excellence.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

If I’m perplexed by the fact that I’m constantly lost, maybe somewhere in my head I’ve determined that being lost serves a greater purpose than being found.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

External relationships seem to have been emptied by a massive withdrawal of the real libidinal self. Effective mental activity has disappeared into a hidden inner world; the patient's conscious ego is emptied of vital feeling and action, and seems to have become unreal. You may catch glimpses of intense activity going on in the inner world through dreams and fantasies, but the patient's conscious ego merely reports these as if it were a neutral observer not personally involved in the inner drama of which it is a detached spectator. The attitude to the outer world is the same: non-involvement and observation at a distance without any feeling, like that of a press reporter describing a social gathering of which he is not a part, in which he has no personal interest, and by which he is bored. Such activity as is carried on may appear to be mechanical. When a schizoid state supervenes, the conscious ego appears to be in a state of suspended animation in between two worlds, internal and external, and having no real relationships with either of them. It has decreed an emotional and impulsive standstill, on the basis of keeping out of effective range and being unmoved.

~ Harry Guntrip

It was a dictum of his that the soul's energy thrives when the body's desires are feeblest.

~ Athanasius Of Alexandria

To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less...selfish.

~ Alan Bennett

They sell courage of a sort in the taverns. And another sort, though not for sale, a man can find in the confessional. Try the alehouses and the churches, Hugh. In either a man can be quiet and think.

~ Ellis Peters

I don't purchase people with money, or hiss like a snake to attract their attention, all i do is to rest on my couch because i have the conviction that no human can progress with an exception without a power behind.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

The loss of innocence is inevitable, but the death of innocence disturbs the natural order. The death of innocence causes an imbalance and initiates an internal war that manifests differently in each individual, but almost always includes anger, withdrawal and severe depression.

~ B.g. Bowers

I have become intoxicated again.You are such a potent wine, my friend.To escape your withdrawal effects,tomorrow I will drink in excess.Alas, why make me love?I was aware, conscious, and sensible before.I am ill by cause of this illusion.The devil plays tricks on me more and more.I was a harp you immaculately plucked at will.Your score, the nightingale song withinnotes composed to imprison and bear me wings.Oh, if only they could hear how it sings!I am now beyond parched.My strings left untouched.You are no longer an oasis, my friend,but a mirage soon coming to an end.

~ Kamand Kojouri

She wasn’t crying at all. This was what scared him the most. Where had she locked up the things he’d seen her feeling that day when she heard? She wasn’t that big a girl to hold all of it—to hold her brother’s life and his death inside of her. To hold all his long-limbed raging tidal motion and all the loss of that.

~ Francesca Lia Block

When his wife died, for a while it was the end of the world, because part of him had died with her. As the long, slow recovery proceeded, he had gratefully and guiltily accepted the return of equilibrium. But he had not paid attention to a parallel phenomenon: his reversion to what he had been before his marriage. Though changed by whatever he had learned during their years together, and by whatever healing had taken place, he had fallen back into the old patterns of withdrawal. Nursing the dreadful wound of her absence, he had failed to notice the subtler void opening up within himself.

~ Michael D. O'brien

Friends with benefits? More than friends? Don't sample the goodies unless you're willing to risk addiction and withdrawal.

~ Ann Landers

Undoubtedly, our weariness is not based on the fact that we’re running. Rather, our weariness is all too frequently based on the fact that many of the things that we’re running from are the very things we should be running to.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The dark might be dark, but at least we don’t have to look at ourselves when we’re standing in it.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

My husband says this longing for isolation is not a good quality, that if I wanted to be a hermit I should have moved to the West Coast and adopted a lot of cats, not gotten married and had children that demand to be fed several times a day.

~ Anna White

When you build a fence around yourself, you'll wonder why people are afraid to approach you, because the pride in the fence is the cause of your blindness.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Others saw in the trend still another instance of a disturbing tendency in the American suburb: the longing for withdrawal, for self-enclosure, for expensive isolation.

~ Steven Millhauser

The question is frequently asked: Why does a man become a drug addict?The answer is that he usually does not intend to become an addict. You don’t wake up one morning and decide to be a drug addict. It takes at least three months’ shooting twice a day to get any habit at all. And you don’t really know what junk sickness is until you have had several habits. It took me almost six months to get my first habit, and then the withdrawal symptoms were mild. I think it no exaggeration to say it takes about a year and several hundred injections to make an addict.The questions, of course, could be asked: Why did you ever try narcotics? Why did you continue using it long enough to become an addict? You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in the other direction. Junk wins by default. I tried it as a matter of curiosity. I drifted along taking shots when I could score. I ended up hooked. Most addicts I have talked to report a similar experience. They did not start using drugs for any reason they can remember. They just drifted along until they got hooked. If you have never been addicted, you can have no clear idea what it means to need junk with the addict’s special need. You don’t decide to be an addict. One morning you wake up sick and you’re an addict. (Junky, Prologue, p. xxxviii)

~ William S. Burroughs

If you can stop using substance or stop your addictive behavior for extended periods of time without craving, you are not dependent. You are dependent only if you can't stop without physical or psychological distress (you have unpleasant physical and/or psychological withdrawal symptoms) or if you stop and then relapse.

~ Chris Prentiss

For the painful essence of withdrawal does not reside in the present suffering it brings - withdrawal is painless on the level of the immediate moment - but in the prospect of suffering to come, the rich future that one can imagine one's torture enjoying.

~ Jean-Philippe Toussaint

It was not long before I discovered that withdrawing addicts lost their composure in exactly the same manner that careless millionaires lose their money: gradually, then suddenly.

~ Andrew Davidson

Junk sickness is the reverse side of junk kick. The kick of junk is that you have to have it. Junkies run on junktime and junkmetabolism. They are subject to junk climate. They are warmed and chilled by junk. The kick of junk is living under junk conditions. You cannot escape from junk sickness anymore than you can escape from junk kick after a shot.

~ William S. Burroughs

A nod at Beatrice who held absolutely still. She said she would come with me. She insisted on it. She stamped her little foot at me.He pointed down to her toes as if she were a child yet.Then he straightened his shoulders. But I sent her back to the nursery, where she belonged, and told her to play with her dolls instead. As everyone knows, a female on a hunt is a distraction at best and bad luck at worse.Which explained why Beatrice went into the woods with her hound alone, George thought. She looked now as though she had gone to some other place where she could not hear her father's words and thus could not be hurt by them. George wondered how often she was forced to go to that place.Did King Helm not see how much she was like him? It seemed she was rejected for any sign of femininity yet also rejected for not showing enough femininity, How could she win?

~ Mette Ivie Harrison

It was gentler here, softer, its seethe the quietest of whispers, as if, in deference to a drawing room, it had quite deliberately put on its 'manners'; it kept itself out of sight, obliterated itself, but distinctly with an air of saying, 'Ah, but just wait! Wait till we are alone together! Then I will begin to tell you something new! Something white! something cold! something sleepy! something of cease, and peace, and the long bright curve of space! Tell them to go away. Banish them. Refuse to speak. Leave them, go upstairs to your room, turn out the light and get into bed - I will go with you, I will be waiting for you, I will tell you a better story than Little Kay of the Skates, or The Snow Ghost - I will surround your bed, I will close the windows, pile a deep drift against the door, so that none will ever again be able to enter. Speak to them!...' It seemed as if the little hissing voice came from a slow white spiral of falling flakes in the corner by the front window - but he could not be sure.(Silent Snow, Secret Snow)

~ Conrad Aiken