Atrophied Quotes & Sayings

This will sound ridiculous, I guess, but my life had started to feel so stagnant, like it was atrophied. Everything shrunk down to the roles I played. I had loved doing them, Dee, I really had, but they were drying up, and they weren't really me. — Sue Monk Kidd

Barefoot Running Yes, barefoot running is a workout! It's challenging and works all of the small muscles in your feet and lower legs that have atrophied through years of shod running. If you're new to running without shoes, start with 1-2 minutes on a soft surface like an artificial turf field, grass, or golf course. Keep the pace easy and take the next 2-3 days off from running barefoot. — Jason Fitzgerald

The problem of the novelist who wishes to write about a man's encounter with God is how he shall make the experience
which is both natural and supernatural
understandable, and credible, to his reader. In any age this would be a problem, but in our own, it is a well- nigh insurmountable one. Today's audience is one in which religious feeling has become, if not atrophied, at least vaporous and sentimental. — Flannery O'Connor

All that we "know" is what registers on our brains, so what you perceive (your individual reality-tunnel) is made up of nothing but thoughts - as Sir Humphrey Davy noted when self-experimenting with nitrous oxide in 1819, and as Buddha noticed by sitting alone until all his social imprints atrophied and dropped away. — Robert Anton Wilson

Many authors, as Hanck in particular had noted, were basically little people, spiritually shriveled, atrophied and care-worn personalities. Petty. Vulnerable and frightened. They needed help in their daily lives in order to seem bigger, or at least like everyone else. They sought compensation in poetry, resorted to words because words seemed harmless and free of prejudice; they didn't bite, they didn't provoke, they didn't infect. And besides, they didn't cost a thing. They were a suitable material for revenge-seeking cretins. — Klas Ostergren

But I'm not the one digging her grave; I didn't open her hole in the earth when I drove away that night or when I couldn't make her come with us. My dad dug it years ago; he forced her to lie down in it and kept her there by fear and beatings. And when she tried to get out, he stomped her back in. She has been lying there for twenty-five years. Her muscles have atrophied, her joints have stiffened, and she can't see anything except him and the tight little space she calls home. I don't know how she'll get out; I can tug and pull and yank, but it won't make any difference. She was right: she's gotta solve it her own way. — Swati Avasthi

Realism is for lazy-minded, semi-educated people whose atrophied imagination allows them to appreciate only the most limited and convention subject matter. Re-Fi is a repetitive genre written by unimaginative hacks who rely on mere mimesis. If they had any self-respect they'd be writing memoir, but they're too lazy to fact-check. Of course I never read Re-Fi. But the kids keep bringing home these garish realistic novels and talking about them, so I know that it's an incredibly narrow genre, completely centered on one species, full of worn-out cliches and predictable situations--the quest for the father, mother-bashing, obsessive male lust, dysfunctional suburban families, etc., etc. All it's good for is being made into mass-market movies. Given its old-fashioned means and limited subject matter, realism is quite incapable of describing the complexity of contemporary experience. — Ursula K. Le Guin

During my time in orbit, I lost bone mass, my muscles atrophied, and my blood redistributed itself in my body, which strained my heart. Every day, I was exposed to ten times the radiation of a person on Earth, which will increase my risk of a fatal cancer for the rest of my life. — Scott Kelly

Their looks and personalities were still intact, but some thing had atrophied ever so slightly. Their faces bore the distinct wear of goals gone too long unfulfilled. — Galt Niederhoffer

Love is the air that I breathe, like oxygen. When I lack it, I feel atrophied, asphyxiated. When I have it, I feel I am growing. And so this growth is linked to others, or to a collective other. If I realize that I do not love you, my faith diminishes, and I breathe less and less of the oxygen of life. When I feel linked to you, in communion with you, there is a current of love that passes between us, and the intensity can multiply. And the more this love grows, the more the faith becomes luminous, the more I feel linked to the collective other. I am speaking of God. — Jean-Bertrand Aristide

One must make allowances for a parental instinct that has been starving for twenty-five or thirty years. It is famished, it is crazed with hunger by that time, and will be entirely satisfied with anything that comes handy; its taste is atrophied, it can't tell mud cat from shad. A devil born to a young couple is measurably recognizable by them as a devil before long, but a devil adopted by an old couple is an angel to them, and remains so, through thick and thin. — Mark Twain

The truth, indeed, is out - but the ears to hear it and the minds to learn from it seem to have been atrophied by a cultivated ignorance and a nearly total loss of critical insight. — Murray Bookchin

I do not think that there is any doubt that educated people possess a far wider range of humour than the uneducated class. Some people, of course, get overeducated and become hopelessly academic. The word "highbrow" has been invented exactly to fit the case. The sense of humour in the highbrow has become atrophied, or, to vary the metaphor, it is submerged or buried under the accumulated strata of his education, on the top soil of which flourishes a fine growth of conceit. — Stephen Leacock

Once the body has atrophied, you will become vulnerable to many conditions. — Steven Magee

The sound shivers through the walls, through the table, through the window frame, and into my finger. These distraction-oholics. These focus-ophobics. Old George Orwell got it backward. Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother's holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed ... and this being fed, it's worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world. — Chuck Palahniuk

The "west"-what curse has fallen upon it that at the term of its trajectory it produces only these businessmen, these shopkeepers, these racketeers with their blank stares and atrophied smiles ... is it with such vermin as this that a civilization so delicate and so complex must come to an end? — Emil Cioran

Of the demonstrably wise there are but two: those who commit suicide, & those who keep their reasoning faculties atrophied with drink. — Mark Twain

Obviously, our children, who have been playing with their computers since the age of five or six, don't have quite the same brain as those who were brought up on wooden or metal toys, whose brains are certainly atrophied by comparison. — Claude Vorilhon

I don't like being away from theater that long. The muscles get atrophied if you don't exercise them. — Clarke Peters

We get too comfortable with this orphanage universe, though. We sit in our pews, or behind our pulpits, knowing that our children watch "Christian" cartoons instead of slash films. We vote for the right candidates and know all the right "worldview" talking points. And we're content with the world we know, just adjusted a little for our identity as Christians. That's precisely why so many of us are so atrophied in our prayers, why our prayers rarely reach the level of "groanings too deep for words" (Rom 8:26). We are too numbed to be as frustrated as the Spirit is with the way things are. — Russell D. Moore

The vampire gagged. The muscles of its neck constricted, widened, constricted again, and it disgorged a six-inch-long metal cylinder onto my desk. The bloodsucker grasped it, twisted the cylinder's halves apart, and retrieved a roll of papers. "Photographs," Ghastek said, handing me a couple of sheets from the roll.
"That's disgusting."
"He is thirty years old," Ghastek said. "All his internal organs, with the exception of the heart, atrophied long ago. The throat makes for a very good storage cavity. People seem to prefer it to the anus."
Translation: be happy I didn't pull it out of my ass. Thank the gods for small favors. — Ilona Andrews

That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called "visions," the whole so-called "spirit-world," death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God. — Rainer Maria Rilke

When a third wave of poverty overwhelmed me, I knew with even greater certitude than when I had lived in Clerkenwell that the only complete solution to my problem was suicide. I never brought it off. I was afraid. A lifetime of never making positive decisions, accepting instead the lesser of the evils presented to me, had atrophied my will. It was not so much that I longed for death as that I didn't long for life. Emptiness, though, was not a sufficiently definite feeling to lead to a violent act. Instead of sitting in my room and balancing the relative convenience of various ways of ending it all, I ought to have been busy trying to summon up a reasonable amount of despair. Hopelessness was thinly spread like drizzle over my whole outlook. But, in an emergency, I could not find a puddle of despondency deep enough to drown in. — Quentin Crisp

Strangers can be consequential when you want to practice an atrophied or unexplored facet of you, as they don't know how you usually act. — Kare Anderson

The one thing about being a dude and writing from a female perspective is that the baseline is, you suck. The baseline is it takes so long for you to work those atrophied muscles - for you to get on parity with what women's representations of men are. — Junot Diaz

The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is queen, infinite fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice. — George Santayana

My court skills may have atrophied. — David E. Kelley

And we're content with the world we know, just adjusted a little for our identities as Christians. That's precisely why so many of us are so atrophied in our prayers, why our prayers rarely reach the level of 'groanings too deep for words'. — Russell D. Moore

When my sons arrived in the family, their legal status was not ambiguous at all. They were our kids. But their wants and affections were still atrophied by a year in the orphanage. They didn't know that flies on their faces were bad. They didn't know that a strange man feeding them their first scary gulps of solid food wasn't a torturer. Life in the cribs alone must have seemed to them like freedom. That's what I was missing about the biblical doctrine of adoption. Sure it's glorious in the long run. But it sure seems like hell in the short run ... — Russell D. Moore

Debates educated a nation. That educative function had atrophied during decades of making decisions behind closed doors. — Robert A. Caro

Archaic humans paid for their large brains in two ways. Firstly, they spent more time in search of food. Secondly, their muscles atrophied. Like a government diverting money from defence to education, humans diverted energy from biceps to neurons. It's hardly a foregone conclusion that this is a good strategy for survival on the savannah. A chimpanzee can't win an argument with a Homo sapiens, but the ape can rip the man apart like a rag doll. — Yuval Noah Harari

Many teachers think of children as immature adults. It might lead to better and more 'respectful' teaching, if we thought of adults as atrophied children. — Keith Johnstone

The scientific mind is atrophied, and suffers under inherited cerebral weakness, when it comes in contact with the eternal woman
Astarte, Isis, Demeter, Aphrodite, and the last and greatest deity of all, the Virgin. — Henry Adams

Being a person who has had plastic surgery and goes to the gym five days a week to work my muscles up so they don't look atrophied as a 60-year-old, I don't disparage people who want to maintain their appearance. But what I don't want is a society that tells me I have to. — Faye Wattleton

The human eye has to be one of the cruelest tricks nature ever pulled. We can see a tiny, cone-shaped area of light right in front of our faces, restricted to a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. We can't see around walls, we can't see heat or cold, we can't see electricity or radio signals, we can't see at a distance. It is a sense so limited that we might as well not have it, yet we have evolved to depend so heavily on it as a species that all other perception has atrophied. We have wound up with the utterly mad and often fatal delusion that if we can't see something, it doesn't exist. Virtually all of civilization's failures can be traced back to that one ominous sentence: 'I'll believe it when I see it.' We can't even convince the public that global warming is dangerous. Why? Because carbon dioxide happens to be invisible. — David Wong

And all of these involved remembering that someone existed whom you hadn't thought of in a while, an ability that had atrophied in the minds of people who could not remember a time without social networking, just as people near the end of the twentieth century had lost the ability to remember the long and semi-random strings of digits that made up phone numbers once cellphones began to do that for them. — Dexter Palmer

Business of all kinds, over the centuries, had atrophied certain sense receptors and areas of the human brain, so that for most of the fellows taking part, the present-day rituals were no more, and even maybe a little less, than hollow mummery. — Thomas Pynchon

Men tell us sometimes there is no such thing as an atheist. There must be. There are some men to whom it is true that there is no God. They cannot see God because they have no eye. They have only an abortive organ, atrophied by neglect. — William Henry Drummond

Respectability, regularity, and routine - the whole cast-iron discipline of a modern industrial society - have atrophied the artistic impulse, and imprisoned love so that it can no longer be generous and free and creative, but must be either stuffy or furtive. — Bertrand Russell

Almost all education has a political motive: it aims at strengthening some group, national or religious or even social, in the competition with other groups. It is this motive, in the main, which determines the subjects taught, the knowledge offered and the knowledge withheld, and also decides what mental habits the pupils are expected to acquire. Hardly anything is done to foster the inward growth of mind and spirit; in fact, those who have had the most education are very often atrophied in their mental and spiritual life. — Bertrand Russell

The lengths to which you're prepared to go to please a housekeeper make me wonder about the servant situation in Scotland. Good help must be thin on the ground." Vale widened his eyes and took a drink.
"She's more to me than a housekeeper," Alistair growled.
"Wonderful!" Vale slapped him on the back. "And about time, too. I was beginning to worry that all your important bits might've atrophied and fallen off from disuse."
He felt unaccustomed heat climb his throat. "Vale ... — Elizabeth Hoyt

I do know people and there are people in my family who have had Alzheimer's and dementia, and I appreciate the importance of communication and having contact with them. Communicating is an interesting thing with a condition like that. Sometimes it's difficult to communicate. If the brain becomes atrophied or certain channels of the brain become atrophied, then contact is what becomes really important. — Elliott Gould

Children, taught either years beneath their intelligence or miles wide of relevance to it, or both: their intelligence becomes hopelessly bewildered, drawn off its centers, bored, or atrophied. — James Agee

What I do not know and cannot even hope to understand before I die is why human beings are willfully, coldly, matter-of-factly cruel to each other ... What nerve has atrophied in the torturer, or worse is sensually moved? — Storm Jameson

We fit our sphere as a Chinese woman's foot fits her shoe, exactly, as though God had made both - and yet He knows nothing of either. In some of us the shaping to our end has been quite completed. The parts we are not to use have been quite atrophied and have even dropped ott, but in others, and we are not less to be pitied, they have been weakened and left. We wear the bandages, but out limbs have not grown to them, we know that we are compressed, and chafe against them. — Olive Schreiner

But there you put your finger on what it is that separates the sheep from the goats, and vice versa: imagination. Those who possess it have an afterlife; those who don't possess it, or in whom it has greatly atrophied, are reborn as plants or animals. It's as simple, and unfair, as that. You could almost say that heaven is no more than a fantasm generated by the excess energies of the pooled imaginations of the blessed. — Thomas M. Disch

With all her masculine vigour and glory, Greece fell, gradually atrophied, because one half of her had been, of set purpose, intellectually and politically paralyzed. — Tennessee Celeste Claflin

The all-pervading disease of the modern world is the total imbalance between city and countryside, an imbalance in terms of wealth, power, culture, attraction and hope. The former has become over-extended and the latter has atrophied. The city has become the universal magnet, while rural life has lost its savour. Yet it remains an unalterable truth that, just as a sound mind depends on a sound body, so the health of the cities depends on the health of the rural areas. The cities, with all their wealth, are merely secondary producers, while primary production, the precondition of all economic life, takes place in the countryside. The prevailing lack of balance, based on the age-old exploitation of countryman and raw material producer, today threatens all countries throughout the world, the rich even more than the poor. To restore a proper balance between city and rural life is perhaps the greatest task in front of modern man. — Ernst F. Schumacher