Quotes & Sayings About Being Lifeless

I've found many truths in my social experiences. I thought being alive and being human was all the qualification you need to be a somebody but you need, tangible, inanimate and lifeless things to have your existence validated by other mortals ... We need lifeless things to make our lives valuable. — Crystal Evans

New York may end up being no more than a scrim, a spectral film that is none other than our craving for romance - romance with life, with masonry, with memory, sometimes romance with nothing at all. This longing goes out to the city and from the city comes back to us. Call it narcissism. Or call it passion. It has its flare-ups, its cold nights, its sudden lurches, and its embraces. It is our life finally revealed to us in the most lifeless hard objects we'll ever cast eyes on: concrete, steel, stonework. Our need for intimacy and love is so powerful that we'll look for them and find them in asphalt and soot. — Andre Aciman

We left behind the other kids; their path-working, drinking, and being grown up- and rejected all that made them grumpy, uncreative and lifeless. We dumpstered, squatted, and shoplifted our lives back. Everything fell into place when we decided our lives were meant to be lived. Life serves the risk taker ... — CrimethInc.

Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. It is also tiresome. People cannot abide being around you when you are depressed. They might think that they ought to, and they might even try, but you know and they know that you are tedious beyond belief: you are irritable and paranoid and humorless and lifeless and critical and demanding and no reassurance is ever enough. You're frightened, and you're frightening, and you're "not at all like yourself but will be soon," but you know you won't. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Suffering the nasty twisting of body parts that should never be twisted, the card soldiers fell, lifeless, and Arch's bodyguards were soon pushing through the tangles of Outerwilderbeastie, cruching twigs and leaves underfoot.
Visit the labs?" Blister said, refurring the squate network of building in Wondertropolies' warehouse district, where a consortium of Alyss' scientists and engineers had tried to transform a host of captured Glass Eyes into a benign force. On the lab grounds were the incinerator baths
large pits into which the Glass Eyes were being herded and melted down, sorched into ash. There would be lots of Glasss Eyes to choose from at the labs, bbut Ripkins shook his head.
To much security," he said.
Find one that roaming?"
It'll be easier for us to avoid notcie," Ripkins said.
Yeah, but it'd be more fun to hit the labs. — Frank Beddor

But when a man draws a lifeless thing into his passionate longing for dialogue, lending it independence and as it were a soul, then there may dawn in him the presentiment of a world-wide dialogue with the world-happening that steps up to him even in his environment, which consists partially of things. Or do you seriously think that the giving and taking of signs halts on the threshold of that business where an honest and open spirit is found? — Martin Buber

Friendship is a priceless gift, that cannot be bought or sold, but it's value is far greater than a mountain made of gold. For gold is cold and lifeless, it can neither see nor hear. And in time of trouble it is powerless to cheer. It has no ears to listen, no heart to understand, it cannot bring you comfort or reach out a helping hand. So when you ask God for a gift, be thankful if he sends, not diamonds, pearls, or riches, but the love of real true friends. Thank you my friends for being in my life! — Natalie

There's a lot of work being done today that doesn't have any soul in it. The technique may be the utmost perfection, yet it is lifeless. It doesn't have a soul. I hope my furniture has a soul to it. — Sam Maloof

Pretty enough to make Henley the Huntsman want to save me ... but not too pretty, because too pretty is what sets my stepmother off. And she wants me gone - she wanted me gone years ago."
Viv twisted restlessly. "I don't know what she's waiting for. Waiting to make him hate me, I guess. Make him loyal to her so he'll cut my heart out when she asks him to ... And then if Henley doesn't kill me, there's the matter of being pretty enough to attract some necrophiliac playboy. Someday my prince will come - and be enamored of my lifeless body. There's some happily-ever-after for you. — Sarah Cross

Acting is not just doing! It is who you are being and what you are experiencing that causes you to do - to need to act. Then doing turns arounds and changes your being. But doing without being is lifeless. — Jason Bennett

Jesus is ready to set us free from the heavy yoke of an oppressive way of life. Plenty of wealthy Christians are suffocating from the weight of the American dream, heavily burdened by the lifeless toil and consumption we embrace. This is the yoke from which we are being set free. And as we are liberated from the yoke of global capitalism, our sisters and brothers in Guatemala, Liberia, Iraq, and Sri Lanka will also be liberated. Our family overseas, who are making our clothes, growing our food, pumping our oil, and assembling our electronics
they too need to be liberated from the empire's yoke of slavery. Their liberation is tangled up with our own. — Shane Claiborne

Many years ago I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace.
But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts us absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many lifeless bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas. — Kurt Vonnegut

With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs. — Mary Shelley

Even now, talking about those days, tears well up in my eyes, my indefatigable heart pounds rebelliously and still suffers, and my former, stormy passion bursts into my soul with these remembrances! Tedious, profound, burning recollections oppress me. I don't love him any longer: love for my first friend died and grew cold long since, but even now, when I start talking about him, it's as if I begin to love him all over again! The human heart feels deeply - its innermost depths are immeasurable, dark, and strange; and that which is lost in it often comes to the surface unexpectedly and fills the whole being with long-lost, lifeless feeling. — Evgeniya Tur

Having no feeling himself, such a preacher creates none, and the people sit and listen while he keeps to dry, lifeless statements, until they come to value him for being "sound", and they themselves come to be sound, too; and I need not add, sound asleep also, — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

I had many things to say, I did not have the words to say them. Painfully aware of my limitations, I watched helplessly and language became an obstacle. It became clear that it would be necessary to invent a new language ... I would pause at every sentence, and start over and over again. I would conjure up other verbs, other images, other silent cries. It still was not right. But what exactly was "it"? "It" was something elusive, darkly shrouded for fear of being usurped, profaned. All the dictionary had to offer seemed meager, pale, lifeless. — Elie Wiesel

Anxiety, alienation, loneliness, emptiness, and meaninglessness are the fruits of living as an isolated subject admist a multitude of lifeless objects. Although our scope of involvement may extend to numerous and diverse fields of interest and concern, as long as the notion of having predominates, our being remains empty and superficial. — Stephen Batchelor

During World War II, Joseph Stalin was once asked by an American writer, according to Professor Dean Russell, how he could justify conscripting all the property of all the people for use by the government to fight the war. Stalin answered by asking why they considered it more immoral and illogical to conscript lifeless property than to conscript life itself, as was being done in the United States and all other capitalistic countries. His American challenger had no answer, because there was no answer. — Ron Paul

We have our thoughts, our hopes, our fears, and yet we know that in a moment a change may come over any one of us that will convert a living, breathing human being into a mass of lifeless clay. — William Jennings Bryan

With the morbid realisation that his sexual being was a dull thing, a lifeless thing, a mass-produced marionette with chipped paint and fraying strings — Will Self

Brother - "
"I thought we'd already decided we weren't that, either."
Grabbing his shoulder, I stopped him before he could reach the door. "Look, I'm sorry! I'm sorry I did this to you."
He turned to look at me, his brow raised high. "You're sorry. So, what ... we go back to being cool again?"
"I don't know, man. But we can't do this."
"And why can't we? You couldn't stand to let me have one normal day with her. Have I done anything to you since she and I broke up?" He paused, but I didn't respond. "No. I haven't. You dealt with it by being an ass, so let me deal with this my way. And my way doesn't include acting like you didn't steal my girl from me."
"I didn't steal Harper!"
He opened the door and took a step outside, his shaking hand gripping the outer knob. When he looked back at me, his eyes were flat and lifeless. "You stole my entire world. — Molly McAdams

The things you were talking about. The lights and the flowers. Do they expect those things to make them romantic, not the other way around?"
"Darling, what do you mean?"
"There wasn't a person there who enjoyed it," she said, her voice lifeless, "or who thought or felt anything at all. They moved about, and they said the same dull things they say anywhere. I suppose they thought the lights would make it brilliant."
"Darling, you take everything too seriously. One is not supposed to be intellectual at a ball. One is simply supposed to be gay."
"How? By being stupid? — Ayn Rand

Lots of earthquakes and landslides and disturbances keep happening on a daily basis simply because the mountain is growing. The same is true with human life: if one is striving to grow, earthquakes and landslides keep happening in one's life.
Those who are stagnant, who don't grow, their life seems to be stable and steady, and looks better. But it's lifeless. For one who is striving to grow, an enormous amount of upheaval happens in his life. But all the upheavals are worth a little bit of growth that could happen within a human being. — Jaggi Vasudev