Frantic World Quotes & Sayings

Self-regulation can be taught to many kids who cycle between frantic activity and immobility. In addition to reading, writing, and arithmetic, all kids need to learn self-awareness, self-regulation, and communication as part of their core curriculum. Just as we teach history and geography, we need to teach children how their brains and bodies work. For adults and children alike, being in control of ourselves requires becoming familiar with our inner world and accurately identifying what scares, upsets, or delights us. — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

The whole of the Sermon [Matt 5-7] is framed within Jesus's announcement that what his fellow Jews had longed for over many generations was now at last coming to pass - but that new kingdom didn't look like they had thought it would. Indeed, in some ways it went in exactly the other direction. No violence, no hatred of enemies, no anxious protection of land and property against the pagan hordes. In short, no frantic intensification of the ancestral codes of life. Rather, a glad and unworried trust in the creator God, whose kingdom is now at last starting to arrive, leading to a glad and generous heart toward other people, even those who are technically "enemies." Faith, hope, and love: here they are again. They are the language of life, the sign in the present of green shoots growing through the concrete of this sad old world, the indication that the creator God is on the move, and that Jesus's hearers and followers can be part of what he's now doing. — N. T. Wright

Adoption, I was to learn although not immediately, is hard to get right.
As a concept, even what was then its most widely approved narrative carried bad news: if someone "chose" you, what does that tell you?
Doesn't it tell you that you were available to be "chosen"?
Doesn't it tell you, in the end, that there are only two people in the world?
The ones who "chose" you?
And the other who didn't?
Are we beginning to see how the word "abandonment" might enter the picture? Might we not make efforts to avoid such abandonment? Might not such efforts be characterized as "frantic"? Do we want to ask ourselves what follows? Do we need to ask ourselves what words come next to mind? Isn't one of those words "fear"? Isn't another of those words "anxiety"? — Joan Didion

Early evening traffic was beginning to clog the avenue with cars. The sun slanted down behind him. Harry glanced at the drivers of the cars. They seemed unhappy. The world was unhappy. People were in the dark. People were terrified and disappointed. People were caught in traps. People were defensive and frantic. They felt as if their lives were being wasted. And they were right. — Charles Bukowski

We tore each other's clothes off like they were on fire. She was gorgeous. Firm and strong and a shape like a dream. Skin like silk. She pulled me to the floor through bars of hot sunlight from the window. It was frantic. We were rolling and nothing could have stopped us. It was like the end of the world. We shuddered to a stop and lay gasping. We were bathed in sweat. Totally spent. — Lee Child

The frenzy with which much of the church busies herself with things peripheral to the kingdom in a frantic attempt by her own ingenuity and effort to make God's name holy or make his kingdom come is a sign that something is radically wrong. The church has lost connection with Christ, her living head; she has listened to the siren calls of this world; she has succumbed to the prevailing culture instead of what Christ Jesus created her to be. — Harold L. Senkbeil

Mindfulness has never been more important considering how the events of the world move in such an accelerated, frantic time. Our attention goes from here to the next thing to the next thing, and we're triggered from one response of fear to one of connection to the threat of loss. — Barnet Bain

POPPY (standing up to Paul): I see family life as invading everyone's privacy and saying whatever I feel and treating everyone as they're treasured because they're my family and thus special as compared to the rest of the world. I see a good family as loud and frantic and intrusive. — Bijou Hunter

Socialist ideology, like so many others, has two main dangers. One stems from confused and incomplete readings of foreign texts, and the other from the arrogance and hidden rage of those who, in order to climb up in the world, pretend to be frantic defenders of the helpless so as to have shoulders on which to stand. — Jose Marti

Parisians are always in a big hurry, but are especially frantic if they're behind you. They're desperate to be where they rightfully feel they belong: in front of you. It's a whole other story when you're behind them, especially when it's their turn: suddenly they seem to have all the time in the world. — David Lebovitz

We speak often, and sentimentally, of being 'enchanted' by the natural world. But what if it's the other way around? What if we are enchanted, literally, by the human world we live in? That seems entirely more likely - that the consumer world amounts to a kind of lulling spell, chanted tunefully and eternally by the TV, the billboard, the suburb. A spell that convinces us that the things we want most from the world are comfort, convenience, security. A spell that by now we sing to each other. A spell that, should it start to weaken, we try to strengthen with medication, with consumption, with noise. A slight frantic enchantment, one that has to get louder all the time to block out the troubling question constantly forming in the back of our minds: 'Is this all there is? — Bill McKibben

POPPY: 25 December 2016

POPPY (standing up to Paul): You see family life as respecting boundaries and saying what makes people happy and treating everyone like they're treasured but only in a sanitized way.

I see family life as invading everyone's privacy and saying whatever I feel and treating everyone as they're treasured because they're my family and thus special as compared to the rest of the world.

I see a good family as loud and frantic and intrusive...He fits me, and I don't want to change. Not for you or anyone. I'm deeply in love with myself, and Emmett respects that...

"I'm not her (Christine). I don't have a dream to fix animal boo-boos. Loving Emmett and living close to my family are the only dreams I see as worth having. — Bijou Hunter

You're so beautiful," he says, dragging his hands through my hair. When our mouths meet, it's less desperate, less frantic than before, because we know we have all the time in the world in front of us. No more roadblocks, no more missed opportunities, our future starts now, together. — Heather Leigh

And our task is harder even than that," he said, "for we also have to invoke the grey fumes without denying the palpitating breath of roses. We have to give glimpses of a world that sometimes seems to work like a machine bent on some inexorable but inscrutable task, with all of us caught in its coils, cogs meshing always with the absurd, frantic pistons pushing away at the futile."

"And yet," he added, his voice now only a murmur which seemed to be a part of the rustling of the withered bushes and the passing noises of the road, "we may also at times suggest a slight faltering in the grinding of the machine, or the brief opening of an unknown vista suggesting that the machine is not all that there is. — Mark Valentine

There were times when you could feel that the world would be a better place if Annagramma got the occasional slap around the ear. The silly unthinking insults, her huge lack of interest in anyone other than herself, the way she treated everyone as if they were slightly deaf and a bit stupid ... it could make your blood boil. But you put up with it because every once in a while you saw through it all. Inside there was this worried, frantic little face watching the world like a bunny watching a fox, and screaming at it in the hope that it would go away and not hurt her. — Terry Pratchett

Christ can be trusted to keep His Word that He will exchange our drab existence for joyous living, abundant life! And while true love, total acceptance, and complete security are rare in our frantic world, the biblical evidence that our desires in these areas will be fulfilled in Christ is abundant. — Josh McDowell

In the innermost recesses of humanism, as its very soul, there rages a frantic prisoner who, as a Fascist, turns the world into a prison. — Theodor W. Adorno

He wondered where his mind had wandered this time, what life it had lived as a trail of neurons sped through networks of possibilities particle-fast, too rapid to catch without a hadron collider, causing super quarks of weirdness and leaving him with only a vague after-image like a melting dream. He had to accept that he couldn't catch all his thoughts, all the things going on in his body, the processes which slipped by in the background just leaving a shadow, an itch, the grain of sand that probably wouldn't become a pearl, a blazing after-trace that lives a second then is gone forever. All those possibilities occurring in a second of frantic life: it never ceased to amaze him. The world was an incredible and beautifully constructed thing.
However, there wasn't really time for a wank. — Karl Drinkwater

In a rush, the world opened its mouth to her - and it was screaming.
Everywhere - the air around her, the ground beneath her, the stars above - rippled with the soul-wrenching cries of
hunger: the trees and bushes and plants all twisted and bent, their branches and stems clawing the sky in skeletal panic; the
animals and insects, flying and crawling and burrowing, each frantic in its own way, searching incessantly to end the gnawing
demand in its belly; the swarms of people, clotting the world, stuffing themselves only to beg for more, be it food or wealth or
attention - all of them, desperate, insatiable. So very hungry.
All of them, leeching on to her. Sucking her dry. — Jackie Morse Kessler

I know that my youth will triumph over everything - every disillusionment, every disgust with life. I've asked myself many times whether there is in in the world any despair that would overcome this frantic and perhaps unseemly thirst for life in me, and I've come to the conclusion that there isn't ... — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

We live in a world of media overload and data smog, where everything distracts us from everything else. Yet underlying this noisy assault, our culture offers us nothing transcendent. No deeper meaning, no abiding hope. In my crisis, every facet of the contemporary world seemed part of a diabolical mechanism carefully designed to keep people from wondering about the real purpose of their endless frantic activity. — Daniel Pinchbeck

As all of us are only too aware, the loud and frantic voices of the outer world easily drown out the small, still loving voice within. — Marianne Williamson

We have somehow twisted Jesus' pithy rebuke of the Pharisees, "The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath" (Mark 2:27) from a warning against legalism into a license for neglect. We seem to forget that in the very next breath Jesus asserts, "so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath" (v. 28), thus asserting his lordship over - not exemption from or indifference to - this very good gift from God to his image bearers. There is perhaps no single thing that could better help us recover Jesus' lordship in our frantic, power-hungry world than to allow him to be Lord of our rest as well as our work. The challenge is disarmingly simple: one day a week, not to do anything that we know to be work. — Andy Crouch

This is the world we live in,
a world of safety and happiness and order, a world without
love.
A world where children crack their heads on stone fireplaces and nearly gnaw off their
tongues and the parents are concerned. Not
heartbroken, frantic, desperate. Concerned, as they are when you fail mathematics, as
they are when they are late to pay their taxes. — Lauren Oliver

Frantic as my arousal built. The feel of Gideon's finger in that darkly sexual place, thrusting in that gentle rhythm, had me rocking backward to meet his inward drives. "You're so beautiful," he murmured, his voice infinitely gentle. "I love making you feel good. Love watching an orgasm move through your body." "Gideon." I was lost, drowning in the powerful joy of being held by him, loved by him. Four days alone had taught me how miserable I'd be if we couldn't work things out, how dull and colorless my world would be without him in it. "I need — Sylvia Day

The search for truth can be compared to a cat chasing her tail: frantic in her pursuit, her quarry nevetheless eludes her; despite the fact that all the world can see it's right there, it remains just beyond her reach. It cannot be possessed because, paradoxically, it is already part of her. — Gina Barreca

Many voices from the world in which we live tell us we should live at a frantic pace. There is always more to do and more to accomplish. Yet deep inside each of us is a need to have a place of refuge where peace and serenity prevail, a place where we can reset, regroup, and reenergize to prepare for future pressures. The ideal place for that peace is within the walls of our own homes, where we have done all we can to make the Lord Jesus Christ the centerpiece. — Richard G. Scott

With frantic Dean I was rushing through the world without a chance to see it. — Jack Kerouac

The mother of a student in Europe who was between his junior and senior years of high school called Motto in a frantic state. She had just read somewhere that college admissions offices looked for kids who had spent their summers in enriching ways, ideally doing charity work, and her son was due to be on vacation with the rest of the family in August. "Should we ditch our plans," she asked Motto, "and have him build dirt roads?" Motto reminded her that she lived in a well-paved European capital. "Where would these dirt roads be?" he said. "India?" she suggested. "Africa?" She hadn't worked it out. But if Yale might be impressed by an image of her son with a small spade, large shovel, rake or jackhammer in his chafed hands, she was poised to find a third-world setting that would produce that sweaty and ennobling tableau. — Frank Bruni

As regards any specific book, I'm trying primarily to tell a story, in the most effective way I can think of, the most moving, the most exhaustive. But I think even that is incidental to what I am trying to do, taking my output ( the course of it) as a whole. I am telling the same story over and over, which is myself and the world ... I'm trying to say it all in one sentence, between one Cap and one period. I'm still trying to put it all, if possible on one pinhead. I don't know how to do it. All I know to do is to keep on trying in a new way ... life is a phenomenon but not a novelty, the same frantic steeplechase toward nothing everywhere and man stinks the same stink no matter where in time. — William Faulkner

The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God. — Herman Melville

The ovarian world is the product of a life rhythm. The moment a child is born it becomes part of a world in which there is not only the life rhythm but the death rhythm. The frantic desire to live, to live at any cost, is not a result of the life rhythm in us, but of the death rhythm. There is not only no need to keep alive at any price, but, if life is undesirable, it is absolutely wrong. This keeping oneself alive, out of a blind urge to defeat death, is in itself a means of sowing death. Every one who has not fully accepted life, who is not incrementing life, is helping to fill the world with death. To make the simplest gesture with the hand can convey the utmost sense of life; a word spoken with the whole being can give life. Activity in itself means nothing: it is often a sign of death. — Henry Miller

That both Muslim fundamentalists and the Christian right are today focusing their attempts to regain control in a rapidly changing world on frantic efforts to maintain control over women, particularly over women's sexuality. Moreover, given their mythologies about "holy wars," it is also understandable that they should use "divinely approved" violence to do so ... — Riane Eisler

Augustine's feeling of fragmentation has its modern corollary in the way many contemporary young people are plague by a frantic fear of missing out. The world has provided them with a superabundance of neat things to do. Naturally, they hunger to size every opportunity and taste every experience. They want to grab all the goodies in front of them. They want to say yes to every product in the grocery store. They are terrified of missing out on anything that looks exciting. But by not renouncing any of them they spread themselves thin. What's worse, they turn themselves into goodie seekers, greedy for every experience and exclusively focused on self. If you live in this way, you turn into a shrewd tactician, making a series of cautious semicommitments without really surrendering to some larger purpose. You lose the ability to sau a hundred noes for the sake of one overwhelming and fulfilling yes. — David Brooks

Night was falling. Birds were singing. Birds were, it occurred to me to say, enacting a frantic celebration of day's end. They were manifesting as the earth's bright-colored nerve endings, the sun's descent urging them into activity, filling them individually with life nectar, the life nectar then being passed into the world, out of each beak, in the form of that bird's distinctive song, which was, in turn, an accident of beak shape, throat shape, breast configuration, brain chemistry: some birds blessed in voice, others cursed; some squeaking, others rapturous. — George Saunders

Once California belonged to Mexico and its land to Mexicans; and a horde of tattered feverish Americans poured in. And such was their hunger for land that they took the land, stole Sutter's land, Guerrero' s land, took the grants and broke them up and growled and quarreled over them, those frantic hungry men; and they guarded with guns the land they had stolen. They put up houses and barns, they turned the earth and planted crops. And these things were possession, and possession was ownership.
The Mexicans were weak and fed. They could not resist, because they wanted nothing in the world as frantically as the Americans wanted land. — John Steinbeck

Tengo could hardly believe it
that in this frantic, labyrinth-like world, two people's hearts
a boy's and a girl's
could be connected, unchanged, even though they hadn't seen each other for twenty years. — Haruki Murakami

I also saw a huge expansion of the Internet, with many major corporations, afraid of being left behind, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to develop World Wide Web sites in a frantic scramble to reach the vast new consumer market of Web use — Dave Barry

I remembered those frantic seconds when I'd thought all I loved and knew, all that was Sydney Sage, would be lost from this world. My battered friends and I had just had a brush with death, dancing with this evil. We'd destroyed it, but it was terrifying how touch and go it all had been. At any moment, the Strigoi could have gained the advantage and killed one or all of us. Life and death were inextricably bound together, and we wavered between them. But we'd triumphed over death tonight. We were alive, and the world was beautiful. Life was beautiful, and I refused to waste mine. — Richelle Mead

Do you know I've been sitting here thinking to myself: that if I didn't believe in life, if I lost faith in the woman I love, lost faith in the order of things, were convinced in fact that everything is a disorderly, damnable, and perhaps devil-ridden chaos, if I were struck by every horror of man's disillusionment
still I should want to live. Having once tasted of the cup, I would not turn away from it till I had drained it! At thirty though, I shall be sure to leave the cup even if I've not emptied it, and turn away
where I don't know. But till I am thirty I know that my youth will triumph over everything
every disillusionment, every disgust with life. I've asked myself many times whether there is in the world any despair that could overcome this frantic thirst for life. And I've come to the conclusion that there isn't, that is until I am thirty. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

To consume the best for yourself and give the crumbs to God is blasphemy. A heart that truly worships is a heart that gives its best to God in time and substance. A heart that truly worships God gives generously to the causes of God
causes that God cares deeply about. I have to wonder whether someday we may wake up to discover that all our incestous spending on ourselves and our frantic construction of excessively luxurious places of worship
even as we ignore, for the most part, the hurting and the deprived of the world
filled God's heart with pain. — Ravi Zacharias

Quiet is a blessed gift. In this frantic world how we must cherish every moment of it, and carve it out for ourselves every chance we get. — Anne Ortlund

It's a pretty frantic world that we live in. — Mary Chapin Carpenter

The essence of the Revolution is to abolish the attainment of unqualified power of man over man either by vote-getting, money-pressure or crude terror. The Revolution repudiates profit or terror altogether as methods of human intercourse. It turns the attention of men and women back from a frantic and futile struggle for the means of power, a struggle against our primary social instincts, to an innate urgency to make and to a beneficial competition for preeminence in social service. It recalls man to a clean and creative life from the entanglements and perversion of secondary issues into which he has fallen. It replaces property and official authority by the compelling prestige of sound achievement. Eminent service remains the only source of influence left in the world . . . — H.G.Wells

Knowing that life is a marathon and not a sprint is important. Conserve your energy. Understand that each battle is only one of many and that you can use it to make the next one easier. More important, you must keep them all in real perspective. Passing one obstacle simply says you're worthy of more. The world seems to keep throwing them at you once it knows you can take it. Which is good, because we get better with every attempt. Never rattled. Never frantic. Always hustling and acting with creativity. Never anything but deliberate. Never attempting to do the impossible - but everything up to that line. Simply flipping the obstacles that life throws at you by improving in spite of them, because of them. And therefore no longer afraid. But excited, cheerful, and eagerly anticipating the next round. — Ryan Holiday

Nothing could be further from the truth. But in a world dedicated to distraction, silence and stillness terrify us; we protect ourselves from them with noise and frantic busyness. Looking into the nature of our mind is the last thing we would dare to do. Sometimes I think we don't want to — Sogyal Rinpoche

A mockingbird has moved into our neighborhood. It perches atop a telephone pole behind our backyard. Every morning it is the first thing I hear. It is impossible to be unhappy when listening to a mockingbird. So stuffed with songs it is, it can't seem to make up it's mind which to sing first, so it sings them all, a dozen different songs at once, in a dozen different voices. On and on it sings without a pause, so peppy, even frantic, as if its voice alone is keeping the world awake. — Jerry Spinelli

You see these dictators up on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. They're afraid of words and thought ... They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words ... A state of society where men may not speak their mind - where children denounce their parents to the police - where a businessman or small shopkeeper ruins his competitor by telling tales about his private opinion. Such a state of society cannot long endure if it is continually in contact with the healthy outside world. — Winston Churchill

And then an endless instant later Arthur was kissing him back, like this was perfectly normal, like this was exactly what Arthur had been hoping for most in all the world, his large hands closing over Merlin's shoulders and sliding down over his back, strong and warm even through the fabric of his sweater, one hand pausing on his waist and the other sliding around to cup his arse and pull him in closer. Merlin made a surprised, enthusiastic sound and stopped holding back; let himself cling to Arthur and kiss him more fiercely; and then they were kissing like it was their last day on earth and they had to cram every possible moment of passion into this tiny slice of time, hands clutching at fabric, mouths pressing hungry bites onto bare skin as if they would somehow devour one another, trying to touch and taste everything at once, frantic and needy and bursting with urgent desire and the inescapable knowledge that this was finite, was stolen, was not supposed to be. — FayJay