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1 " And in this curious state I had the realization, at the moment of seeing that stranger there, that I was a person like everybody else. That I was known by my actions and words, that my internal universe was unavailable for inspection by others. They didn't know. They didn't know, because I never told them. "
― Kim Stanley Robinson , Icehenge
2 " Physical brains are subject to the laws of physics; mental states are subject to the laws of logic. Those who think mental states are entirely physical hold a logically contradictory position. In order to think rationally about their thoughts , they must have the freedom to do so, but this freedom is unavailable if the laws of physics and chemistry are controlling their thoughts. "
3 " This pursuit of unavailable distant people has oedipal roots.… fearing the consequences, they make certain that they fail at the attempt.”―Distancing, Kantor (p.115) "
― Kantor
4 " THE NEXT DAY WAS RAIN-SOAKED and smelled of thick sweet caramel, warm coconut and ginger. A nearby bakery fanned its daily offerings. A lapis lazuli sky was blanketed by gunmetal gray clouds as it wept crocodile tears across the parched Los Angeles landscape.When Ivy was a child and she overheard adults talking about their break-ups, in her young feeble-formed mind, she imagined it in the most literal of essences. She once heard her mother speaking of her break up with an emotionally unavailable man.She said they broke up on 69th Street. Ivy visualized her mother and that man breaking into countless fragments, like a spilled box of jigsaw pieces. And she imagined them shattered in broken shards, being blown down the pavement of 69th Street.For some reason, on the drive home from Marcel’s apartment that next morning, all Ivy could think about was her mother and that faceless man in broken pieces, perhaps some aspects of them still stuck in cracks and crevices of the sidewalk, mistaken as grit.She couldn’t get the image of Marcel having his seizure out of her mind. It left a burning sensation in the center of her chest. An incessant flame torched her lungs, chest, and even the back door of her tongue. Witnessing someone you cared about experiencing a seizure was one of those things that scribed itself indelibly on the canvas of your mind. It was gut-wrenching. Graphic and out-of-body, it was the stuff that post traumatic stress syndrome was made of. "
― Brandi L. Bates , Remains To Be Seen
5 " Our first kiss was there on the bridge in the woods. How do you describe a first kiss? It is like trying to hold water in your hands. There is an ancient Chinese proverb that compares kissing to drinking salted water. “You drink, and your thirst increases,” it says. Time, I’m sure, passed by, but we remained unavailable for comment. "
― , Beware of Love in Technicolor
6 " How to tell your pretend-boyfriend and his real boyfriend that your internal processors are failing:1. The biological term is depression, but you don't have an official diagnostic (diagnosis) and it's a hard word to say. It feels heavy and stings your mouth. Like when you tried to eat a battery when you were small and your parents got upset.2. Instead, you try to hide the feeling. But the dark stain has already spilled across your hardwiring and clogged your processor. You don't have access to any working help files to fix this. Tech support is unavailable for your model. (No extended warranty exists.)3. Pretend the reason you have no energy is because you're sick with a generic bug.4. You have time to sleep. Your job is canceling out many of your functions; robots can perform cleaning and maintenance in hotels for much better wage investment, and since you are not (yet) a robot, you know you will be replaced soon.5. The literal translation of the word depression: you are broken and devalued and have no further use.6. No one refurbishes broken robots.7. Please self-terminate. "
― A. Merc Rustad , The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015
7 " But given that depression happened to me, and I did have support, I found it was possible after a time, to achieve a kind of joy totally disconnected from the world. I wanted to be unavailable and in that place without the pain. I still want it. It is coloured white and filled with a singing silence. It is an endless ice-rink. It is Antarctica. "
8 " There is a moment, if you trip or slip, before your hand shoots out to break your fall, when you feel the earth rushing up at you and you cannot help yourself, a passing, fraction-of-a-second terror. I felt that way hour after hour after hour. Being anxious at this extreme level is bizarre. You feel all the time that you want to do something, that there is some affect that is unavailable to you, that there’s a physical need of impossible urgency and discomfort for which there is no relief, as though you were constantly vomiting from your stomach but had no mouth. "
― Andrew Solomon , The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
9 " Meditation is a spiritual human activity like mourning, fasting, or praying, and is not limited to one religious group while remaining unavailable to others. (103) "
― David Brazzeal , Pray Like a Gourmet: Creative Ways to Feed Your Soul
10 " When our caregivers are unavailable, most of time it has nothing to do with LOVE for the child, however, the child cannot possibly know this. The child winds up believing that the unavailable parent is not available due to some defect within the child. We believe that if we were “enough” the parent would CHOOSE to be available. "
― Mary Crocker Cook , Awakening Hope. a Developmental, Behavioral, Biological Approach to Codependency Treatment.
11 " It takes confidence to be wholeheartedly intimate and passionately committed. Men who are emotionally unavailable have a self-confidence deficit, plain and simple. So man up and get rid of those insecurities or whatever it is that keeps you from opening up. Because if you're not man enough to talk about your own feelings, then you're not man enough to be in a committed relationship. "
12 " Our dreams and stories may contain implicit aspects of our lives even without our awareness. In fact, storytelling may be a primary way in which we can linguistically communicate to others—as well as to ourselves—the sometimes hidden contents of our implicitly remembering minds. Stories make available perspectives on the emotional themes of our implicit memory that may otherwise be consciously unavailable to us. This may be one reason why journal writing and intimate communication with others, which are so often narrative processes, have such powerful organizing effects on the mind: They allow us to modulate our emotions and make sense of the world. "
― Daniel J. Siegel , The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are
13 " The quest for an ever-whiter shade of bread, which goes all the way back to the Greeks and Romans, is a parable about the folly of human ingenuity -- about how our species can sometimes be too smart for its own good. After figuring out an ingenious system for transforming an all but nutritionally worthless grass into a wholesome food, humanity pushed on intrepidly until it had figured out a way to make that food all but nutritionally worthless yet gain! Here in miniature, I realized, is the whole checkered history of " food processing." Our species' discovery and development of cooking (in the broadest sense of the word) gave us a handful of ingenious technologies for rendering plants and animals more nutritious and unlocking calories unavailable to other creatures. But there eventually came a moment when, propelled by the logic of human desire and technological progress, we began to overprocess certain foods in such a way as to actually render them detrimental to our health and well-being. What had been a highly adaptive set of techniques that contributed substantially to our success as a species turned into a maladaptive one -- contributing to disease and general ill health and now actually threatening to shorten human lives. "
14 " The only unavailable choice was whether or not to have Parkinson's. Everything else was up to me. "
― Michael J. Fox , Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist
15 " I think you’re just as emotionally unavailable as I am. I avoid men because I’m afraid I’ll lose my heart, and you go from girl to girl to keep from giving yours away. "
16 " The flesh,' as Saint Paul used the term, refers, ironically, not to our bodies but to fallen human nature. The 'carnal' spirit is the one that devours things for itself and refuses to make them an oblation to God. The carnal spirit is cruel, egocentric, avaricious, gluttonous, and lecherous, and as such us fevered, restless, and divided. The spiritual man, on the other hand, is alone the man who both knows what flesh is for and can enter into its amplitude. The lecher, for example, supposes that he knows more about love than the virgin or the continent man. He knows nothing. Only the virgin and the faithful spouse knows what love is about. The glutton supposes that he knows the pleasures of food, but the true knowledge of food is unavailable to his dribbling and surfeited jowls. The difference between the carnal man and the spiritual man is not physical. They may look alike and weigh the same. The different lies, rather, between one's being divided, snatching and grabbing at things, even nonphysical things like fame and power, or being whole and receiving all things as Adam was meant to receive them, in order to offer them as an oblation to their Giver. "
― Thomas Howard , Evangelical is Not Enough: Worship of God in Liturgy and Sacrament
17 " They say that the eyes are the windows to the soul, so what happens when the person's eyes are unavailable to look into? You read their words. "
18 " No society has succeeded in abolishing the distinction between ruler and ruled... to be a ruler gives one special status and, usually, special privileges. During the Communist era, important officials in the Soviet Union had access to special shops selling delicacies unavailable to ordinary citizens; before China allowed capitalist enterprises in its economy, travelling by car was a luxury limited to tourists and those high in the party hierarchy Throughout the 'communist' nations, the abolition of the old ruling class was followed by the rise of a new class of party bosses and well-placed bureaucrats, whose behaviour and life-style came more and more to resemble that of their much-denounced predecessors. In the end, nobody believed in the system any more. That, couple with its inability to match the productivity of the less bureaucratically controlled, more egoistically driven capitalist economies, led to its downfall. "
― Peter Singer , Marx: A Very Short Introduction
19 " Since my symptoms began 13 years ago, I’ve tried every form of pain management I could access — NSAIDS, nonopioid analgesics, neurologic medications, acupuncture, laser therapy, physical therapy, prolotherapy, massage, and trigger-point injections. Most of these have been unhelpful; others provide temporary relief, often at great expense. At the end of the day, when my body is fully depleted of its resources and in the most pain, a single dose of Percocet is the only tool that silences the pain enough for me to fall asleep.I honestly don’t know what I’d do if Percocet became unavailable to me, and the very thought scares me. I’ve been taking it for five years. To avoid any chance of addiction, I only take it at night and have stayed on a consistently low dose. "
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20 " Love addicts often pick partners who are emotionally unavailable because deep down, they don’t feel worthy of having a healthy, loving relationship. A love addict craves and obsesses about becoming enmeshed or ‘one’ with another human being at all costs, even if it means putting themselves in potential danger. "
― Christopher Dines , The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours