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Page 229-30 from Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko...
"'Death isn't much,' she said. ...
'Sometimes they don't make it. That's all. It isn't very far away.' She looked up at him very intently, and then continued.
'There are much worse things, you know. The destroyers: they work to see how much can be lost, how much can be forgotten. They destroy the feeling people have for each other.'
He took a deep breath; it hurt his chest. He thought of Josiah then, and Rocky.
'Their highest amibition is to gut human beings while they are still breathing, to hold the heart still beating so the victim will never feel anything again. When they finish, you watch yourself from a distance and you can't even cry-not even for yourself.'
He recognized it then: the thick white skin that had enclosed him, silencing the sensations of living, the love as well as the grief; and he had been left with only the hum of the tissues that enclosed him. He never knew how long he had been lost there, in that hospital in Los Angeles.
'They are all around now. Only destruction is capable of arousing a sensation, the remains of something alive in them; and each time they do it, the scar thickens, and they feel less and less, yet still hungering for more.' She gathered up the bundles of twigs and started walking southwest.
'Old Betonine said there was some way to stop--'
'It all depends,' she said. 'How far are you willing to go?'"